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mark :: blog
Found myself giving a webcast about Stronghold
which brought back memories of actually coding Stronghold
back in 1995 or 1996. For the last 6 months or so I've
been trying to resist coding on Stronghold, and for the
most part I've managed it, although its tempting to dive
in - it's so much easier to measure productivity when
you're actually coding. After a couple of years in
production it will be great to see it finally released.
I'm probably off to N+I in Las Vegas in May which should
be fun.
Whilst replacing yet another set of lightbulbs that had
blown after only a week I thought I'd look at the supply
voltage into the house. My UPS logs the voltage so this was
easy. 253 volts.
The UK used to be 240 volts (+/-10%) but quite a few years
ago the nominal voltage was changed to be 230 volts (half
way between the UK 240 and the European 220). In practise I
read that this meant very little, they just continued to
supply 240v which was within the tolerance. 253 volts is
also just within the tolerance, but annoyingly causes my UPS
to alert me every few hours. I also read that in 2002 the
tolerances are going to be adjusted to +/-6%.
Armed with all this information I called the electricity
company who actually said 253 volts was an emergency
situation and someone will be with me shortly.
Played around with the Linux IBM ViaVoice SDK so my UPS can
speak. "Help, the voltage is too high, I'm frying,l arrrrgh"
Played around with the alarm system (well the 'tamper' system
works) but need some opto-isolation before I dare connect it
up to the gateway. Got the gateway to SMS me when there is
a power failure, which is semi-useful but really freaks out
guests when I switch off the master power and my phone beeps
a few seconds later. Took a few pics of the setup so far
here.
I'm trying to stay away from coding for work for a month or
two, just to see if it can be done. I've found it hard the
last few years as I moved away from doing coding on a day to
day basis; you tend to judge your week by how much code
you've achieved. This of course doesn't scale when you get
to be a manager and the temptation is to try to do a bit of
coding for work every week in order to feel you have
'achieved something'. Last week I couldn't resist and ended
up recoding some pages and scripts that were in PHP to work
with AxKit. Doh.
Moving in on Friday, finally. Not everything
is 100% finished, but I spent a couple of hours wiring in
the patch panel and a couple of hours working out which
socket was which. Note: if you ask your builders to install
CAT5 for you remember to also ask them to label the ends. I
kind of assumed they'd do that. I also made the incorred
assumption that when the spec said "aerial points in every
room" it meant I got an aerial. No, I get a whole load of
cables in the loft ready for an aerial and distribution
amplifier to be installed. I'm finding it really hard to
find everything I want for the new house; I want some X10
light switches (fairly easy to find except I need one to
control 500W and they look cheap and tacky in white
plastic), a couple of sets of motorised curtains (harder to
find, impossible if you want to do >2.5m lengths), automated
heating control (found a couple, nothing perfect)
So finally the stuff I've been working on
for the last few weeks, a security resource center for Red
Hat went live, but no rest for me as I get signed up to
write a webcast for later this month. I got quoted in a few
news articles after giving interviews about the Red Hat
wuftpd security release, not all the quotes were 100%
accurate, but in the whole it was better than any other time
I've given interviews.
Gave up trying to find an f-connector (or even
bnc) patch panel, looks like I'll have to buy a drill and
make one. Planning how to deal with various cool
home-automation stuff for the house, but now wishing that
I'd taken more time to help out and plan when they were
doing the wiring; would have saved a few of the bodges that
are going to be necessary. Hopefully in by Christmas!
Ploughed through the cvs commits and created a
plausible Announcement file for Apache 1.3.22. Held off
releasing Apache Week until the mirrors caught up, but /.
found the tarballs so released it a little early. Took some
time to write some scripts to tidy up the past 265 issues
for bad tags, all modules and directives are marked as such
CVE Worked with the Mitre guys so that the Apache
vulnerabilities in 1.3.20 get described correctly, all went
rather smoothly.
A discussion about XML status output in
Apache came up this week and so I pointed out a
mod_status_xml I wrote a month or two ago. It would be
great to
get something like this module (or a patch to mod_status)
into the core as once you can get XML status output you can
do all sorts of cool things like historic graphs, real time
graphs, and so on. Kind of like the stuff from 1995 that
graphed server status but now using SVG.
SVG: SVG is cool and it will be great when it's
supported more in browsers. When cleaning out my loft I
found all my original PhD notes including a paper I wrote in
1994 that suggested that to allow feasible remote
teleoperation of our automated telescope we'd need an
open-standards native vector display ability in browsers. I
was using the early gd library to do something similar and
even submitted patches to the project to do a vector
langauge (but never got included). 7 years on and we're
nearly there.
TiVo: My "void if removed" sticker peeled off without
falling to bits and is now safely stored away whilst I get
ready to upgrade my TiVo. I'm going to be without
cable/satellite for a week or two at least when I move so I
want to have a couple of hundred hours of TV stored up. Now
to find some cheap 80Gb drives :)
XML and PHP: My attempt to get my stylesheet to
nicely output something that PHP could then parse was foiled
as php wants to see <?php blah; ?> but thats not
valid XML; libxslt correctly outputs <?php blah; >
which PHP doesn't then like. Can't win :)
Human body: In the last year or so I've been
relatively bug-free. Now I'm working from home all day and
not come into contact with another human for nearly a week I
catch a cold. How did that happen? Doh.
Spent half a day debugging XSL stylesheets that worked fine
with libxml/libxslt but didn't work at all in Microsoft
IE. Turns out we had some errors in the XSL that libxslt
didn't care about.
The outcome is if you're using IE6 try this link:http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/01-08-31.xml
It really will load the XML for the issue, load the
stylesheets and the navigation bar, then parse them to
create the HTML output. Do "view source" if you don't
believe me!
Now that my builder has run CAT-5 through my new house
(yeah, I have wireless but I want to run secure links and s-
video over CAT-5) I wish I'd got them to run all the
lighting cables separately too so I could X10 them without
having to have the horrible UK X10 replacement
lightswitches.
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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my
thoughts and opinions on my security
work, open source, fedora, home automation,
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