More importantly, it can also answer pressing questions about nutrition.

Little Miss Wizard Mode Sat on a routing node She is a weblog today Along came a spider That crawled ’round inside her And referred some traffic her way

Wizard Mode is a real boy, now. Whale spit smells funny.

As with many products before, I fall somewhere in the middle.

On the plus side: It looks like a [...]]]> The Apple iPad, like many apple products before it, has polarized people. Some people love it, some people hate it. Some people will use it everywhere, some people honestly can’t imagine a single use.

As with many products before, I fall somewhere in the middle.

On the plus side: It looks like a beautiful piece of hardware; every report I have read says that using it is a dream come true to any fan of the various iTouches. Fast, integrated, smooth, and with beautiful user interface decisions; top of the line hardware and (more polish on) groundbreaking software combine to make an unbelievable platform, and one which the vast majority of people will find satisfies their needs and exceeds all their expectations.

On the minus side: Apple has made, and will continue to make, an intentionally crippled and limited device in the name of a better overall user experience. While I wholeheartedly agree with their goals – make it accessible to the common man! – it is simply not what I, as a power user who is otherwise well in the target market, need in many respects.

Any number of minor concessions would solve this problem for me – and these are the same issues I have with any “trusted computing” sort of platform. It is not my best interests that Apple is trying to protect here, either as a developer or as an individual user. It is theirs, and it is not in their best interests to allow me to, for instance, decide whose software I actually trust.

No, I’m not trying to run Linux on the thing. It runs a perfectly acceptable *NIX operating system already, and in fact has a fantastic GUI (for almost every purpose) and software installation procedure (for almost every case) already. I just want to run my instant messenger /and/ Pages. Even just the ability to background one application (with – yes, I realize this – the appropriate time and attention put in to making the experience smooth and complete) would make a huge difference in the overall usability.

I’d really like to run Processing on it. It’s just such a perfect platform for art-programming, and there’s nothing else quite like Processing for that.

But that’s all. I don’t want a pony.

Another time I’ll talk about a bunch of nonsense regarding the details of SSL and some of [...]]]> So there’s this thing called an SSL certificate. Everyone (or at least the vast majority of anyone who is ever likely to read this) knows about SSL, or HTTPS, or at the very least the browser lock symbol.

Another time I’ll talk about a bunch of nonsense regarding the details of SSL and some of the strange things that have come out of it, but for the moment, one specific thing stands out.

Part of an X509 certificate is an optional piece of metadata called a Subject Alternative Name, or SAN. If you take a peek at an SSL certificate that provides one, you’ll see something like this:

Certificate:
    Data:
        [...]
        Subject: C=US, ST=CA, L=Cupertino, O=Apple, Inc., CN=*.example.com
        [...]
        X509v3 extensions:
            [...]
            X509v3 Subject Alternative Name:
                DNS:specific.example.com, DNS:example.com, DNS:*.example.com

Normally a client connecting to https://example.com/ will get a domain mismatch certificate error, because the CN *.example.com does not either exactly or via wildcard match example.com. However, a large number of clients also examine the list of SAN DNS names to validate the domain; since example.com shows up in that list, no error will be displayed.

Every major browser – IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even the venerable Netscape Navigator have supported SANs since at least 2003. Surprisingly, Internet Explorer has supported them since Win98 (yes, that means they work in IE6, for those keeping count). Many mobile devices also recognize them – certainly the newest crop of WebKit-based and Android mobile browsers, but also things like Symbian 9.2+ and Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Furthermore, SANs can be used to cause certain mail clients to stop complaining about connecting to a mail server that services multiple domains under one IP. Since these same mail clients are often configured to recognize an internal CA, rolling up all the possible names into the SAN list on a single certificate can save a pile of headache.

Why hasn’t this been more widely advertised and well-known? Because many certificate authorities are more in the habit of selling encryption than verification, and so would very much like to charge you for every single line in the certificate and every single reissue of the same certificate with slightly different metadata (say, a different set of SAN entries, in this case) rather than charging you for their performing trusted due diligence to ensure that you are who you claim to be and that you have the rights you claim to have over the subjects (in this case, domain names) in question.

Thanks a lot, “trusted” authorities. Way to instill confidence in your services.

There are a few respectable exceptions, of course, and a few web-of-trust CAs which perform the services for free or for reasonable, nominal charges. The web-of-trust CAs tend to have less or no native browser support, which makes them less suitable for general purpose commerce, but for those in the know (or a known browser demographic) they can be a fantastic alternative.

I’m currently a fan of DigiCert for business use, and StartCom for personal use. As a side note, many domain registrars (such as Gandi) also provide a free basic 1-year SSL certificate with purchase of a domain name.

The Google Webmaster Tools confirms that it is not being spidered. It listed a historical robots.txt from before I acquired it (April ’09, roughly) that did not actually conform [...]]]> I have very recently purchased this domain name. It is not currently being spidered by Google (or anyone else, at the moment). This is suboptimal.

The Google Webmaster Tools confirms that it is not being spidered. It listed a historical robots.txt from before I acquired it (April ’09, roughly) that did not actually conform to robots.txt standards – it was a header of an HTML page, but unfortunately cut off before any actual content, so there was no way for me to see what it might have contained. (The correct one has now been picked up.)

The Internet Archive lists a previous page from June 9, ’08, but at this time gives a data retrieval failure when trying to pull it up. domaintools.com gives a (small) screenshot that suggests that it was a domain with an advertising squatter parked on it, though, so I can well understand why it might currently be blocked from various spiders. Another page links ‘here’ from nearly two years ago amongst many other random domain names with spammer-ish text in a fashion that suggests it was part of advertising spam.

The page is now my own personal blog.

Aside from posting (hopefully) interesting content in a (hopefully) consistent and (vaguely) semantic (parenthetical) fashion, I am not going to do anything to “optimize” my site. I certainly am not going to use it for spamming or ad squatting or illegal activities or advocating bellbottoms. I will be posting occasional Amazon affiliate links when appropriate (usually a book that I have personally read, enjoyed, and advocate, and only when it is apropos to the blog post in question), but that is not the primary purpose. They are clearly described as affiliate links on the About page, marked nofollow, and supplied with no incentive or enticement to click.

Perhaps one day soon this domain will be spidered again, and the sins I inherited will be forgiven.

(In the meantime, perhaps I should celebrate my privacy and anonymity?)

It’s very easy to slip into [...]]]> Neil Gaiman, who should know, had this among other things to say regarding writing: “Believe in yourself. Keep writing.” Walter Mosley, in This Year You Write Your Novel, says the same thing. In fact, every writer’s advice is about the same: Write. Write, write, write and keep writing.

It’s very easy to slip into minutia – is this a good design? Am I using the right tool? Are my chapters or characters or programs named the right names? What font should I use, and for goodness’ sake, what size should it be? But as a writer, not a designer, none of that matters one bit without the writing behind it.

I am writing in a serious and committed fashion for the first time in a long time. As part of that, writing comes ahead of page design, or in-depth reviews of software, or flashy images.

My header image came from a little Processing sketch, Lost In A Forest. It took an hour to put together, and the rest of the layout and style took another three or four. I made sure I wrote a post before I did any of that.

It gives me a measure of peace to know that someone else did that, so I don’t have to learn to write sonnets.