HR Geeks

The local Hampton Roads Ruby/Cocoa Users Groups / Ken Collins is throwing an event friends, and it looks like it’s going to be good!

“On November 5th, 2009 Hampton Roads’ premier learning and network event for software developers, interactive agencies, and technology entrepreneurs will be held at Grow Interactive, Norfolk.”

Speakers:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
by Andy Hunt
Author & Co-Founder Pragmatic Bookshelf

The Joy of Ruby
Clinton R. Nixon
Development Director at Viget Labs

iPhone Development: Touching Cocoa
Jamie Pinkham
Software Engineer at Mobelux

Sounds like a great event. It’s free, seating limited to 50. RSVP today!!

More information at www.757studio.org

Nice, chill, meeting this week. Lots of great talk and there was really little contention for talking. In attendance was Mark G, Paul, a brieeeefff appearance by Paul’s wife, the Spawn of Jody, Jody, Sunpuke, Remad, and myself. Some interesting discussions came up, such as music, queuing theory and its relation to real life, and table-to-chair-hight ratios. Short summary, however that factor should not be a testament to the meeting and its content. We stayed ’till kicked out. Ok, so “kicking-out” is a tad rough, we were nicely advised that the mall was closed.

-Matt (enferex)

A camera truck taking street level imagry was spotted in downtown Norfolk on Thursday. The truck carried the Windows Live Local logo on the back, and FaceT logo on the door. This is most likely a Google street-view competitor. Interesting means they have for mounting the cameras! Not only was there the panoramic “stove pipe” looking part, there was also a number of other sensors mounted on the luggage rack.

Original images are on my Flickr Account.)

FaceT/Windows Live Local camera truck in Freemason area of Norfolk

FaceT / Windows Live Local truck in Norfolk

Setting up a new workstation with Ubuntu and Firefox to use a DoD CAC is suprisingly easy.

These instructions work for Ubuntu 8.10 on my hardware.  My card reader is built into a USB Dell Keyboard.  It takes only a couple of steps to enable it for use in Firefox.

1. Install libccid (which requires pcscd as a dependency)
2. Install coolkey
3. Tell Firefox to use coolkey’s pkcs11 library
4. Profit!

To cover these steps in more detail:
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After the recent Apple update, which included ‘security fixes’ for Safari, Little Snitch popped up a warning message when I attempted to visit my banks website.  A process called ocspd wanted to visit “EVSecure-ocsp.verisign.com”.  Needless to say, I was instantly curious as to what in the world ocspd was, and why it was trying to talk to Verisign when I was visiting my banks webpage.

It turns out, ocspd is part of Apples new ‘safe surfing’ update to Safari.  Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is the functional replacement for the old school PKI Certificate Revocation List (CRL).  It allows the Certificate Authority (CA) (in this case, Verisign) who signed the websites certificate, to authenticate the presented certificate in real time.  This is a much more ‘elegant’ solution than the old, crummy CRL, which had to be manually updated (or pushed down with OS patches, etc) and did not allow certificates to be rejected in anywhere near realtime if they were deemed fradulent.

Despite being a more elegant solution, it also creates a number of new problems.  

First, it places a big new load CAs, who went from being trusted certificate issuers to being real time certificate verifiers.

Secondly (and more importantly), it seriously breaches the privacy of every user using the service.

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So due to some really bad coding on our part, googlebot managed to wipe out a bunch of web content on one of our webpages today. The webpage is setup so that the individual pages all include a small piece of php code that pulls it’s content out of an SQL database and spits it out. We set this up for particular pages so that the user can make changes to the content with an HTML editor in a /admin sort of setup. It’s not the fanciest, but it’s simple, efficient and reliable.

Well the customer calls me this morning and tells me that all their content is missing, which I quickly confirm to be fairly accurate. I fire back an e-mail saying that the pages must have been deleted through the admin interface because the missing pages have been removed from the database. I then go off to read logfiles with the intent of finding evidence that this customer blew up their own webpage and that it’s not my problem, because that’s how I think. Here’s what I find in my logs:

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:13:48:47 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=25 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4642 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:13:52:39 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=26 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4760 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:14:10:44 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=42 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4642 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

I recently was linked to Flash Earth. This site allows you to switch between satellite map views with a click of the mouse. Compare Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft VE (Virtual Earth), Ask.com, OpenLayers, and NASA Terra.

Images are presented via an all Flash interface and the speed you can switch between services and at which the overlays are changed is quite amazing.

I thought Google had really good images of Norfolk till I switched over to Microsoft VE. Here is an example of the Norfolk Southern coal yard and train depot. (Left: Microsoft VE,Right: Google)

Thanks Erin.