Archive for November, 2005
Eclipse has really a full featured code editor, proving many goodies: code folding, code commenting, jump-to-declaration, code complition, outline view, etc.
But, there’s one thing I really miss: editor split view. I’ve been using it for years in Vim: split horizontal, split vertical, make a quad-view; whatever. And I also discovered, having outline view or not, I’m not much less faster than splitting a window in Vim and searching for the identifier to jump to the declartion. And still see where I’m currently in my code.
November 30th, 2005
Now with the move in of the canvas element in browsers and the first prototypes of even 3D FPS games popping up, how long will it take until someone ports the classic games/engines like ScummVM to a browser near you? Will we see a new generation of web games which don’t require any browser-plugin?
Flash in terms of graphical capabilities is lightyears away from what browsers can do in certain places, but why is it still that I hate flash and would love direct support in the browser instead? Maybe it’s the infection of ads coming from flash. Or that it is a closed binary format (maybe this is not true anymore, someone correct me). Or is it that it’s development environment is not open source and you basically depend on it?
On the other hand, wouldn’t it make much more sense to use SVG for games? The canvas element is bitmapped, thus it has a fixed size in pixels which isn’t very adequat for multi-resolution clients like the users desktop. SVG would fit better because it can scale.
It’s very exciting to whatch the current evolution of browsers, not only in terms of game capability, but also Ajax and stuff. The paradigm is shifting, and it’s shifting fast.
November 28th, 2005
I want to use a self-signed CA for testing purposes. I’ve therefore created a CA certificate and a client cert. The problem I’m having is that, for some reason, the client key and cert moduli do not match.
I’m using these commands to create the CA:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024
openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
then I used these commands to create the client key/cert:
openssl genrsa -out client.key 1024
openssl req -new -key ca.key -in client.key -out client.csr
sh sign.sh client.csr
The sign.sh script is part of the libapache-mod-ssl package in Debian sarge.
At this point I end up with a client.crt.
When I now compare the modulus of the key and the crt file, they differ and I get the following error in apache:
OpenSSL: error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch
In fact I discovered that the modulus in the csr already differs.
$ openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in client.key
Modulus=BF30F9CAA7C092CE...
$ openssl req -noout -modulus -in client.csr
Modulus=BF4E6276BF5CDFC7...
I actually was using these steps a year ago in another environment and it worked.
The openssl version I’m using is OpenSSL 0.9.7e 25 Oct 2004.
Any ideas?
November 23rd, 2005
A few weeks ago I discovered that the default latin1 character set of the MySQL server does sorting by rules of the swedish character sets. This doesn’t work in my country so I choose latin1_de which handles umlauts properly.
What I didn’t expected is that this also affects the behaviour of the UNIQUE index. Before the change, the words ‘Grossschlögl’ and ‘Großschlögl’ where different. Now, after the change, the behavour due to my changed character set was, that these words where suddenly equal. And during an import I couldn’t import both words into the table because the column is a unique column. To successfully finish the import I had to temporarely use the old latin1 character set.
November 22nd, 2005
A new memo from M$ which also states to take Ajax seriously is interesting. Why is it interesting? As noted in this article, Ajax is only possible because of the browser providing the XmlHttpRequest object. Which M$ invented. In 1998. That is seven years ago.
So, again: this technology, invented by M$, seven years ago, available in a browser with a market share above 80%, did not lift off … until other browser vendors, most notable probably Mozilla but also Opera and Safari, provided it.
Conclusion? Take your own mind.
But don’t fly too high: people on one side create technologies which doesn’t lift off until the people on the other side see a practical use-case for it. Lucky that finally the time has come.
November 19th, 2005
I really think the time is right to ask this question. Now that Ajax-Applications/Frameworks are poping up around every corner, when will we see large community applications like phpMyAdmin to support Ajax?
I think there will be a small problem faced: data read from the database can be quite large. Currently, browsers (at least Firefox) can incrementially display data as it arrives over the wire. Can this problem be solved with Ajax? Maybe with splitting one large Ajax requests into smaller ones. Time will tell.
November 4th, 2005
Another site requiring cookies! Let me clarify: I don’t want to buy anything, I only want to view the content. And that for I’ve to accept cookies? Why? There only statement on the page is:
Bitte konfigurieren Sie Ihren Browser so, dass Sitzungscookies (session cookies) zugelassen werden.
No mentioning why their super-content needs this.
So, no reason to ever visit this page again.
November 3rd, 2005
Raise your voice! Don’t let your computers get DRM infected without even telling you.
Node idea what I’m talking about?
Readthis and this and this and this and this and this and ….
Quintessence: you insert a music CD in your computer you get a free/automatic/not-asked-for installation of a Root-Kit. A basic roundup of what a root-kit does is: it uses technologies to hide things on your computer from you. Or even allow remote access.
To quote from Mark’s Internet Sysblog:
Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.
fsck!
Update 3. Nov. ’05
As reported by the german news Golem, there’s an uninstaller available.
November 2nd, 2005
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