Mark J Cox

mark :: blog

22 Aug 2001: XML Week

Spent a very very large number of hours converting the old Apache Week site to completely use XML throughout. This meant going through 257 back issues that had been written with poor HTML (missing closing tags, no paragraph opens and closes). Fortunately the w3c HTML-tidy and some perl did 90% of the work, leaving just 12 hours of manual labour. If you visit the site you can get the XML and XSLT source if try hard enough :)

07 Aug 2001: printf("debug:...

Another week, mostly spent trying to find somewhere to live in Glasgow. I've found my ideal house, it looks rather like the Stronghold castle logo which is slightly worrying. More fun creating various XSLT files to convert Apache Week bits and bobs into the right formats; the current issue is all XML built now, as anyone who received the text version full of &#A0; codes instead of spaces will attest.

Larry Wall last week was commenting on debuggers and said "I don't use them; I'm more of an insert-print- statements guy". Now I have an excuse :)

30 Jul 2001: OSCON

Back from OSCON to a jetlag and a heatwave. Looks like I could have got my sunburn/tan here instead of flying 11 hours with a broken seat-back TV and a pounding headache. Anyway I put up a few photos of interest from the conference.

Read what we thought of the tutorials until the end of this week when we've finished writing up what we thought of the main sessions.

joe and I combined a talk on XSLT and a talk on Extreme Programming and spent a few hours in the hotel converting the Apache Week markup langauge (which was rather like Ventura Publisher markup) to XML, pair programming, XP-style. It was either that or watch ABC and play the internet enhanced-TV version of "Who wants to be a millionaire?"

26 Jul 2001: 0915 PST

I'm sitting at the very back of a packed hall, typing this live as Craig Mundie from Microsoft talks about his thoughts on open source. He started by saying that Microsoft's problems and comments are around the free software movement rather than the open source movement. "Open source isn't the issue".

It must be strange for him up on stage looking out over a sea of people wearing plastic red hats. Yes, it's a bit of a publicity stunt, but we must have got about a third of all the attendees wearing the fedoras. I had great fun handing them out on the way in, getting trampled in the rush, but the attitude of everyone was great. Apart from the guy who worked for SuSe who didn't want one. Not even to burn, apparantly.

25 Jul 2001: CA

It's exactly a year ago that I got to visit Monterery California to report on the 4th O'Reilly Open Source software convention (Apache Week issue #208) When I managed to get invited back to San Diego for this week I thought I'd been given the ideal assignment; getting to fly to California in July, avoiding the British rain, and spending a week right on the West Coast with nearly 2000 other open source advocates. So with only one direct flight a day from England I was unsuprised to find a large number of delegates on the plane; wearing Penguin badges and snapping pictures of the clear views over Greenland with a variety of digital cameras.

San Diego has great weather, and it's easy to forget that coming from England, so I managed to get sunburnt. If you're at the conference this week look out for the pasty english guys with sunburn. Wireless lans are great; I'm currently typing this listening to Brian Behlendorf talking about Apache to a group of people including Larry Wall, sitting just in front of me.

19 Jul 2001: San Diego

Off to San Diego tommorrow for TPC/OSCON. I've not flown with British Airways since 1995 when after two flights with dismal customer service I vowed never to fly with them again. However, London to San Diego was cheapest with BA and I didn't fancy paying the price difference. Also they might be better now, they've got the seat back TV screens. I now know two BA pilots too, but neither is flying the outward or return flights :(

Well I can't leave until I pack, and I can't pack until I've finished work, and that means writing Apache Week. People have been asking about the OpenSSL exploit, so I need to write that up, together with a company that is giving out free server certificates.

My entire trust model for SSL is based on that fact that anyone who can issue a server certificate "does the right thing". That means they check who I am and that I have the right to use the name I've asked them to certify. Otherwise someone else could register my name, or something similar to it, and theres no point having SSL do authentication anymore. How can a company giving out free certificates afford to do any checking? But then I've heard of Verisign and Thawte making serious mistakes issuing certificates, so I probably had a false sense of security anyway.

16 Jun 2001: Not so smart now

Hmmmmmm SmartTags. Someone posted a link to a site that said in order to stop SmartTags parsing your documents you add this to each one:

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

Well, with Apache it should be even easier. I wonder if adding this to httpd.conf would be enough?

Header add MSSmartTagsPreventParsing "TRUE"

Depends how MS implemented their checks, I've not bothered looking if IE is available that supports this yet.

30 May 2001: OFX

Spent most of yesterday in Guildford, where Kiat noticed that someone had scraped my car. Wonderful

Decided on the way back that I'd finish writing my OFX gateway. The idea is that the OFX gateway would be able to automatically log in and extract your statement details from the variety of online sites that I use that don't let you export your details (or have a convoluted way of doing it). So you'd just hit "update" and MSMoney would talk to the OFX server which would contact each of the sites it knows about, screen-scrape the details, and present them back to Money in OFX format.

After an hour of hacking late last night I have a module that can log into the LLoyds TSB site and download your statement. Next is getting into OFX (I already have written something to do that). The biggest headache is making money contact your OFX server; it works, but it's just not very user friendly yet.

I should really switch everything to GNUCash and spend my hacking efforts on that. The only thing holding me up is downloading the whole 60Mb+ of gnome experience over a 45k link.

26 May 2001: History

History is fun, I just finished off screenshots and the history of ModPlay. Yes, I really did share a house with Bryce in 1991!

14 May 2001: Bop Ad

So I keep finding web logs mentioning Douglas Adams who died at the weekend aged only 49. I'll add my story:

I'm a huge fan of Douglas Adams (was in the fanclub ZZ9-plural-Z-alpha as a teenager) and at ApacheCon in London last October got into line to get my book signed by him (photo). The second time around when things had become more quiet I approached him again to get a book signed for Apache Week to give away. Instead of idle chit-chat I asked him about the film. This peaked his interest and he launched into telling me all about it and the problems and was really animated. He seemed pleased that someone was interested in it and was happy to talk to me for a few minutes until I thought I'd held up the line long enough. Or maybe he'd realised that the more he talked to me the less books he had to sign.

The signature in the two books were far from identical, but it read "Bop Ad" just like I expected.

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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