What the… ?
Why has iSync got its fingers in Safari’s bookmarks? Don’t see any evidence of them on my iDisk, iPod, or in iCal. Theories?
Music: Edith Piaf :: Toujours aimer
Ports and Paranoia
I run an intranet and a staging server on non-standard ports (8000 and 8080). This works great for our internal purposes, but every now and then a student will want to show a work-in-progress to an external organization. And every now and then, that organization lives behind one of those Stalinist corporate firewalls that blocks everything but port 80, which means they can’t access the content, which means the student comes to me baffled, I explain the situation, and no one understands what I’m talking about. Somehow it always comes off as if I’m the one blocking the traffic. Ports are hard to explain to non-tech people. If I ask them to ask their sysadmins to back off a bit and open up traffic on these ports, I always get the same “we don’t do that for security reasons.” Well, duh.
Does it really make security sense for organizations to blindly block everything but port 80? The internet runs on ports. It’s all about ports. There’s got to be a more sensible way to accomplish your security goals than to slam the door in the face of other services. Are they being paranoid or am I expecting too much?
Music: Bright Eyes :: Bowl Of Oranges
Safari beta 2
New Safari beta out yesterday… maybe this will quiet all the tab freaks. I started using Safari as default browser with the first beta, so I’m not in the “is this good enough to switch for?” camp. Of course it is. One complaint about the tabs implementation though: Having trouble getting used to the fact that Cmd-click opens the link in a new tab but doesn’t bring the new tab to the front — Cmd-Shift-click does that. Cmd-click has always opened a link in a new window in IE, Chimera, Safari… so this seems like a departure, an unwelcome extra step. Is there a UI reason for this? Anyone else have trouble with it?
Update: Aha — in the prefs, turn on “Select new tabs as they are created.” Enabling this option changes both the behavior and the hotkey mapping, so all stays copacetic. Bril.
Music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins :: Just Don’t Care
Blackhole Success
After a week of using sbl.spamhaus.org and bl.spamcop.net as realtime blackholes via CommuniGate, prevented around 50 msgs/day from getting through to user accounts without a single false positive. Had been worried about false positives, but feel good about this. Still letting 10-20% of spam through though, so still want to set up SpamAssassin when time allows.
Music: Delroy Wilson :: Better Must Come
Subdomains
Two tricks to setting up subdomains with Apache:
1) Make a wildcard *.domain entry in your DNS server’s A record.
2) In httpd.conf, define your subdomains before your main site in the list of vhosts. This way the definition for your *.domain becomes the fall-through / catch-all for any request that does not prepend foo.domain. If you define the main site first with *.domain, it will catch all requests, and the subdomains will never be handled.
Music: Black Sabbath :: Electric Funeral
Tiny Breaker
Argh – in the middle of deadline crunch, get a call from landwater yesterday – the G4 server is down and won’t power on. Was pretty sure it was a fried motherboard or power supply. Went in late last night, brought it home, called AppleCare this morning. Turns out there’s a tiny circuit breaker built into the motherboard … I never knew. Open case, tap the tiny switch, power it on, all is well. Got a high-quality surge protector for each machine on the way back in this a.m.
Music: James Blood Ulmer :: Momentarily
Real-Time Blacklists, QuickTime Bug, Code Mode
Just after hitting Post in Kung-Log on that last entry, remembered that Movable Type is all perl. But wait – I’m building the latest perl in CPAN in the background right now. Amazing — it worked fine — you can apparently use the perl interpreter even while building it. Or you can if you’re lucky. It would probably be as easy to jack yourself up bad if not careful.
Didn’t set out to upgrade perl – just installing SpamAssassin, it found a bunch of dependencies it needed, and before I knew it perl 5.8 was on its way in. Not sure I need SpamAssasin anyway – set up CommuniGate to work with some real-time blacklists earlier today and am impressed – spam dropped by around 75% immediately.
On the downside, RBL systems reject suspected spam outright – you never get to have a look to check for false positives. On the other hand, SpamAssassin and other filters just add a spam tag to the msg header, so you can do whatever client filtering you want. That’s great, but I’ve already got solid client-side tagging via Entourage. It may be useful for future birdhouse customers.
Getting archived QuickTime video ready for async webcasting yesterday and edited dead air from the start of a bunch of files with hint tracks (extra data tracks necessary to work with a streaming server). When accessed via rtsp://, Safari blew up – total crash. Oh, wait, so did IE/Mac. Oh, wait, so did IE/Win. Oh, wait, so did QT Player when accessing the rtsp:// stream directly. I had discovered a super-fatal bug — and the only fix was to delete hint tracks and regenerate them from scratch. For a week’s worth of video. Lovely way to spend a day. Lesson: If you edit QT files with hint tracks, don’t put them on a streaming server until you replace the hint track. Reported to Apple.
This semester I’m splitting the PHP/MySQL class with another team. I taught three weeks of PHP in code mode, they’re doing three weeks working with same in Dreamweaver. Today was the start of the Dreamweaver segment and afterwards I asked the class whether they preferred working in code mode or in Dreamweaver. Pleasantly shocked to hear them say they preferred working in code (remember these are journalism and SIMs students).
Music: King Crimson :: Easy Money
SquirrelMail
Just set up SquirrelMail on top of Communigate’s IMAP server, now birdhouse mail users have their option of POP, IMAP, or web mail. PHP-based, very fast. Even works with multiple vhost domains, no special config necessary. Communigate is an incredibly powerful mail server – the more I dig into its options the more I’m impressed. But the UI they provide for web mail is an abomination unto the senses – the squirrel fixes that.
Music: Aimee Mann :: Aimee Mann – Jimmy Hoffa Jokes
Connecting with the Wired Generation
Just how disconnected are mid-career adults from kids who grew up with the Internet in their back pocket? The UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism is hosting a full-day conference to explore issues related to the new digital childhood. As a public service, the entire event will be webcast live. Keynote Friday night, panels all day Saturday. Archives will go online sometime next week.
Note: The terrible lighting situation is unfortunately outside of our (webcasters) control.
Later… joker three seats down decided to help himself to our electricity. Pulling and tugging the power cord, accidentally disconnected our FireWire archiving drive, which disrupted the broadcast and cut off 10 viewers. Argh. My fault for situating equipment where that could happen…
Later later… “that joker” turned out to be one Justin Hall (once of “Justin’s Links from the Underground” fame).
Later… router dropped out and pulled connectivity out from under us. Back up now.
Later… conference over! Will mellow for one day, work for a couple days, then take some time off to finish the MacWorld piece. Tempted to blog notes on the conference overall, but exhausted.
xian was there today, but barely got to visit with him. Another day.
Cory’s WiFi Spiel
The multimedia training conference is in full swing and I’m just fried — 12-14 hour days every day this week (Saturday too) and schlepping, so much schlepping of equipment back and forth from room to room. Some great fringe benefits though. Hearing Rusty Foster from Kuro5hin speak the other night inspired me all over again about the true collaborative potential of the internet — I don’t think anyone has nailed the collaborative model quite as well as he has with that site.
Tonight Cory Doctorow came through, loaded down with WiFi gear and tales of open spectrum. The guy is so full of ideas, and is so fast on his feet, and just so overflowing, you think his head will pop. Who else could make tcpdump part of a demonstration to non-geek journalists without having the eyes of the audience glaze over in boredom? Kept his talking points in a Wiki and invited wireless audience members to modify and annotate them as he spoke.
Shot another pic of Cory and Rusty together tonight, but it came out overblown. Hit a new usage record on our QuickTime Streaming Server. Cory posted the conference page on boingboing just before the event and we had 30 simultaneous users tapped in at one point. Some folks held the stream for more than an hour. I’ll put the QT archives online middle of next week for those who missed it.
Quote of the night:
“Nerd determination: Our superior technology trumps your inferior laws.”
Music: Black Sabbath :: Paranoid