Posted by mark.
Oct
31
Posted by mark.
This is a brilliant short talk by Tina Selig asking students “If you had $5 and 2 hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?”. Her point that capital can simply be a distraction is a view I’ve held for a long time – especially in the context of cheap-to-start-and-run consumer web startups.
Oct
29
Posted by mark.
I’m going to use the term “Cloud” in this post which I despise for it’s nebulosity. The press has bandied the term around so much that it means everything from the Net as a whole to Google Apps to virtualization. My “cloud” means a cluster of virtual machines.
I’ve been a huge fan of Mark Shuttleworth for a long time. Besides the fact that his parents have great taste in first names, he’s taken his success with Thawte and ploughed it …
Oct
27
Posted by mark.
Disclaimer: You may brick your fancy new Linksys router by following the advice in this blog entry. A large number of folks have installed this software successfully including me. But consider yourself warned in case you’re the unlucky one.
I use SSH a lot. My wife and nephew love streaming video like Hulu instead of regular cable. For the last few years there’s been a cold war simmering. I’m working late, they start streaming, and my SSH session to my server …
Oct
26
Posted by mark.
UK Police Medic
Oct
25
Posted by mark.
Ian Hickson’s latest draft of the Web Sockets Protocol (WSP) is up for your reading pleasure. It got me thinking about the tangible benefits the protocol is going to offer over the long polling that my company and others have been using for our real-time products.
The protocol works as follows:
Your browser accesses a web page and loads, lets say, a javascript application. Then the javascript application decides it needs a constant flow of data to and from it’s web server. …
Oct
24
Posted by mark.
It’s now exactly a week since I blogged about my SSL issues over our network. To summarize, when fetching documents on the web via HTTPS from my servers, the connection would just hang halfway through until it timed out. I had confirmed that it wasn’t the infamous PMTU ICMP issue that is common if you’re fetching documents via HTTPS from a misconfigured web server. It was being caused by inbound HTTPS data packets getting dropped and when the retransmit would …
Oct
24
Posted by mark.
I have this module that a great group of guys in Malaysia have put together. But their language of choice is PHP and mine is Perl. I need to modify it slightly to integrate it. For example, I need to add my own session code so that their code knows if my user is logged in or not and who they are.
I started writing PHP but quickly started duplicating code I’d already written in Perl. Fetch the session from the …
Oct
22
Posted by mark.
Oct
20
Posted by mark.
Well the title says it all. Internet routers live at Layer 3 [the Network Layer] of the OSI model which I’ve included to the left. HTTP and HTTPS live at Layer 7 (Application layer) of the OSI model, although some may argue HTTPS lives at Layer 6.
So how is it that Layer 3 devices like routers treat HTTPS traffic differently?
Because HTTPS servers set the DF or Do Not Fragment IP flag on packets and regular HTTP servers do not.
This matters …
Oct
18
Posted by mark.
As an African American, or rather, an American African (I’m white and African born), I hear a constant flow of stories about China’s increasing influence in Africa. They’ve clearly taken a long term view on Africa, perhaps motivated by their projected energy and natural resources needs. If you subscribe to the US view that free trade is good, then this is a good thing. [You can't have it both ways folks!]
Whether or not you think it’s good for the continent, …