Graeme Lawton » technology

Northwest PM Meet – Manchester

Graeme — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:13:30 +0000

I completely forgot to blog about the Northwest PM meet last week. Perhaps the Perl scene in Manchester isn’t as lacking as we initially thought. Although there were only a few of us actually from Manchester.

Three interesting talks were given:

Object oriented database design in PostgreSQL (Matt S Trout)
Converting 16k user mailboxes from MBOX to MDIR++ (Ian Norton)
Functional Pe(a)rls v3 (Osfameron)

All the talks were fairly good and I’d recommend any other Perl devs (or even potential ones) show their faces. We’re friendlier than we look… honest

The next meet is a social, again in Manchester.

P3P Policies are a joke

Graeme — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:38:22 +0000

Initially I thought P3P policies might be quite useful. A nice way to see how a site promises to use my data and I could even configure my browser to treat my privacy settings accordingly.

It was a nice thought at least. Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different. The only browser that seems to even support P3P privacy policies is Internet Explorer. When I say “support”, what I actually mean is, make a complete hash of.

It appears that if you want to use cookies on a third party domain, in an iframe or a image tag for instance, in IE you need to have a P3P policy defined.

Okay, no problem we’ll set ours up. Unfortunately the site I was working on has terms and conditions that state that they can use users data for pretty much anything. Initially IE didn’t appear to have a problem with the policy stating this. The third party cookies worked a treat, but for some insane reason Microsoft in their wisdom decided to turn all first party cookies into session cookies. Which meant the whole system wouldn’t function.

This ain’t news‘ lead developer Mark discovered that Facebook are using a very strange P3P policy, that only contained “CP=HONK”. As we could find no reference to this anywhere we discovered through trial and error that you can put any gibberish in, and IE lets all first party and third party cookies work fine!

So in essence, the only browser that supports P3P policies is IE, and to get round them just put in some Lorem Ipsum. Now that’s a security model.

Which distro?

Graeme — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:38:39 +0000

After deciding I’d do what I thought would be a nice and straight forward Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny, I managed to completely hose my server.

Eventually I discovered that the amd64 version of Xen simply doesn’t work. Anyway, I have no need for Xen on the server any more, and since the nice people at Citrix seem to have completely hidden the open source versions, I’m going to get rid.

So now the question is what do I whack on the server in its place? My distro of choice recently, for my personal boxes, has been Gentoo. However I just can’t convince my self that it’ll be stable enough. Or more that if it’s not, tracking down any problems could be a nightmare.

I suppose, another option could have been Redhat, but I’ve just never managed to “gel” with it. Debian would be an obvious choice to stick with, but with them ripping out xen so abruptly, I’m just not feeling the love. I’m sure I’ll be forced to make a descision soon enough.

NSLU2 – Slug box

Graeme — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:08:54 +0000

Bought a new LinkSys NSLU2 or Slug Box as it’s also known by. This is a lovely little box that allows you to connect your USB drives, pen drives or external hard drives to your network. It’s a tiny little thing that runs it’s proprietary firmware that makes the drives accessible on your network.

I soon despensed of that and whacked Debian on it. As soon as I did this, it opened up a whole host of possibilities. Now it’s running a lightweight torrent client, a samba server, a nfs server and a load of backup scripts. From a device that cost me Â£64 this is truly delightful. Just need to see if I can get an NFS server running and then I’ll be turning my home server off some of the time. Ooooh think of the electricity bill savings.

g-phone all it’s cracked up to be?

Graeme — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:11:46 +0000

I’ve just been watching this video about the the new T-Mobile G1 and I don’t see it.

I have an iPhone and I can’t see anything that I’d actually use that the “g-phone” provides. I mean it’s a reasonable phone, but the UI looks clunky to me. The fact it’s AndroidÂ is pretty cool as it should mean it’s really extensible, but currently I’m still not convinced and I’d been quite looking forward to the first Android phones, but frankly I think I was expecting something more.

I might be completely wrong, in fact I actually hope I am but from the videos I’m just not convinced.