Category Archives: Tech

01/6/06

Don’t hit F5

Because apparently this prosecutor in Canton, OH thinks hitting F5 on your keyboard to reload a web page repeatedly is a *felony*. You know, the same sorta thing like rape and murder.

Ok, so maybe conspiring with your friends on the internet to “crash the webserver” of your high school by overloading it with requests is something we shouldn’t encourage in our youth. But come on, you can’t tell me we all haven’t done worse things in high school. You’d think that in a world where kids are bringing guns to schools, gangs are rampant and children are experimenting with alcolhol, drugs and sex at younger and younger ages school administrators and law enforcement would have better things to do then making an example of an 18yr old with a bad sense of humor. But I guess Canton, OH is such a utopia that even the slightest mistake requires a heavy hand.

*Sigh*

12/26/05

Moved to WordPress

Well I finally got sick of writing custom code/templates (I’ve used static files using templates/Makefiles as well as dynamic pages using Perl/HTML::Mason). While I’m quite proficent with Class::DBI and PostgreSQL, it just wasn’t worth the effort of writing all the administrator forms for managing content.

I had a few major requirements:

  1. Secure and actively maintained
  2. Themeable so I can make it look like I want to without too much work
  3. Decent admin forms for managing posts and comments
  4. Can be hosted on my personal server on synfin.net

Hence, I tried Blogger. But wtf? They support sftp (secure ftp over ssh) but their website doesn’t support SSL. So while they can login securely to my server, I have to send my username/password in clear text to them? You would think that now that Google has bought them, with all their PhD’s they could figure out how to purchase a SSL certificate and load it on their webserver…

Anyways, so then I started looking at code I could maintain myself. After much research, I ended up with WordPress. I’m not thrilled it’s written in PHP and uses MySQL; both of which I personally think suck from a developer perspective, but that doesn’t prevent people from writing decent apps it seems.

06/29/05

More news is good news

Two things of note recently… tcpreplay 3.0.beta6 was released which continues to fix bugs reported by all the beta testers out there. Many thanks to them for keeping me honest. On a more political note, SCOTUS recently ruled that eminent domain extends to allow the government to take your private property and give it to another PRIVATE entity such as
a company wanting to build a hotel. Now, a private developer has decided to try to build a hotel on Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s home. I have to admit, “Just Deserts Cafe” is rather appropriate.