MarkMaunder dot com

Sunshine with clouds – Ubuntu's game changing release

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 […]

October 29, 2009 | Linux, Ubuntu | No comments

No-latency SSH sessions on a 5Ghz WiFi router with 250mw radio

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 […]

October 27, 2009 | Technology | 1 comment

Socialized Medicine

October 26, 2009 | Health | No comments

What the Web Sockets Protocol means for web startups

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 […]

October 25, 2009 | Innovation, Technology | 1 comment

SSL Network problem follow-up

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 […]

October 24, 2009 | networks | No comments

How to integrate PHP, Perl and other languages on Apache

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 […]

October 24, 2009 | perl, PHP | 2 comments

Efficiency

October 22, 2009 | Fun | No comments

Routers treat HTTPS and HTTP traffic differently

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 […]

October 20, 2009 | Linux, Technology | 3 comments

China's influence in Africa

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 […]

October 18, 2009 | Politics | 1 comment

The DOW 10K priced as opportunity cost

Economists love the concept of opportunity cost because it gives you a the real long-term value of an investment or purchase in relative terms – which is really the only way to calculate value. On Wednesday the DOW hit 10,000 again. The US financial press did their part to ring the bell while the banking […]

October 17, 2009 | Economics, Finance | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.