evansweb.info

How much did the MWSF Keynote cost you?

Answer: £98. I ordered iWork 05 and iLife 05 last night as soon as I’d finished watching the keynote. Which took until 2am because the rest of the world was also trying to watch it.

The 1GB iPod shuffle can also serve as a plain 1GB USB memory stick, so I’ll probably get one at some point. It would also be nice to replace the Windows box in the basement with a Mac mini. It’s pretty much only used by my kids for browsing Cbeebies.

Software patents are a terrible idea. Sign the “Thank you, Poland!” letter

I’m gutted that this book is currently out of stock.

This is so useful (to a developer) that I’m blogging it so I have a record of it when I need it in the future. You know how you can test a webserver by opening a telnet connection to port 80? Well by the magic of OpenSSL you can do the same thing on port 443.

openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -state
Then you just type away the same as if it was a normal telnet session to port 80, i.e.
GET /some/url HTTP/1.0
Host:example.com

server response here…

Sometimes you get spam which contains random words in an effort to fool spam filters. The text of these is usually quite surreal. Here’s one I received today:

fire hydrant of labyrinth pee on curse about.inside inferiority complex make love to light bulb related to judge, and beyond satellite pour freezing cold water on oil filter behind wheelbarrow.He called her Dick (or was it Dick?).cyprus mulch around sheriff bounce living with cloud formation.He called her Dick (or was it Dick?). chuff cushing stock shaft coleman yemen cartilage ames Furthermore, traffic light behind hibernates, and mastadon of boogie girl scout defined by starlet. blueback katharine neurophysiology omission polonium coral

At the weekend I returned home after spending a couple of weeks on my hols in North Wales. After unloading the car, I gave my web server a kick. A few days into the first week we had a power cut, which wouldn’t be a problem normally but the server got stuck during the BIOS check. It was complaining that the cover had been previously opened. Would it have been too much trouble to incorporate a timeout into the message so it could have booted up unattended? Cheers Dell!

I took my PowerBook with me on holiday, as I needed somewhere to upload my digital photos. That’s what I told my wife anyway. I stayed disconnected for a few days, then couldn’t stand it any more and worked out how to connect to the net via GPRS on my mobile, over BlueTooth to the powerbook. It worked well enough, but it always took two or three tries before it connected, and the connection timed out about a minute of idle time, which was quite frustrating.

Got GMail? I have! :-) Cheers Rich.

evans d0t jon at gmail d0t com. Has a nice ring to it.

Ho hum. It seems that in every sphere of life, there is scum. I’ve just spent 1/2 an hour deleting comment spam. Sorry if you read any of it and found it offensive. I’ve changed the site configuration so that you have to register before you can post. Another example of idiots making life difficult for everyone else.

The site is now (as you can plainly see) back online. I was running out of disk space so I took the opportunity to upgrade my operating system at the same time as fitting a new hard drive. I now have a 120GB hard drive with a fresh installation of Gentoo Linux occupying a small fraction of the space available.

Some more news about the connectivity problem, and also an update on the insurance claim for my bonnet…