Bob's self signed SSL cert expired yesterday (oops), so that was last nights task. It's not an exciting blog entry, but it's what I did, it's my life and it's my blog

Another exciting evenings task

One of Kev's projects seems to be gaining popularity, and with his new family he's taking advantage of people offering to help. To enable this, he needed to give them subversion access.

Upuntil now, svn access was restricted to ssh tunnels or anonymous, read only access via apache. So my task was to figure out how to pursuade apache to do a number of things.

1) All traffic should be https, so anyone logging in doesn't hand out their password unknowingly.
2) If they try via http, it redirects them to https, wether they like it or not

Well, I finally did it. After putting it off for far too long, I've upgraded bob from RHEL3 to RHEL4. RHEL was the only non MS option when we got the server so thats what we went with, unlike debian, upgrades (non security related updates) are not forthcoming, RHEL does major releases that contain the upgrades, but you can't just chose to install postgresql 8 or a 2.6 kernel, you have to upgrade your installation. Redhat recommend you wipe your drive and start again. This isn't really an option when the device is several thousand miles away and your backups have to travel over a home ADSL line.

Everyone else is doing it, so here's my take on vista

Windows Vista seems to be getting a large amount of negative press recently. The BBC news website over the last few weeks has had articles on there that are not complimentary. Things ranging from licensing issues (people who have paid that have been given duff licenses), security warnings, there was a review I read that said something along the lines of 'It's nothing new, just a fancy GUI that draws large amounts of power to do the same job XP does'. Mac users will know that OSX has had similar features for quite some time, with much lower system requirements.

Rant alert.

Well, we had a power cut last night. Not that unusual around here. However, for some reason this time, our burgular alarm decided it was going to trigger, at 4:30am (ish). After a while it stopped, then it started again. Being the man of the house it was up to me to sort it out, obviously my gender means I am an alarm expert. I poke, prod and swear for a bit, go out, look at the ringer unit, and it stops. Great, just looking at it stops it. Unfortunatly, it didn't work when it started going off again at 5am. Anyway, I eventually managed to disable it for the night .

It was now around 5:30, the power had been out for at least 90 minutes, so it was time to shut the servers down before the UPSs died (yes, we have more than one). As I get my laptop upstairs to plug a wire in (the wireless being one of the first things to be shut down) the UPS gives up and kerchunk, the power is off, no graceful shutdown.

Finally got around to posting this

I was driving down to my parental units just before new year, and it suddenly dawned. Kev said he was going to be at his parents in Cheltenham, only a few miles from my parents. For those that don't know, he's been in the US for around a year. So I tried to contact him to see if we could meet up. After some phone tag we eventually managed to speak . I managed not to get lost getting there. It was great to see Kev, Cath and little Meg. As a bonus another mate from Uni days was there, John. He's been out of the country even longer. Was great to see them all and catch up a little. I could only stay for a short time though.

Well it's finally happening apparently. Went to have my mop chopped (and it was in desperate need, looked like a lego man), I pointed out that the freshly mown fringe didn't look right on one side, so it was pointed out that thats because it wasn't there any more

It's lasted longer than some of my friends though *caugh*Jasper*caugh*

Watching the hogfather on Sky, and one of the characters comments he can do the square root of 27.4 in his head. I can't, but had to know.

And now I do.

5.234500931320960229369475350577895787234583886340839621239782517

Today I did a 480 mile round trip to say farewell to a good friend Pete Trinder. He was friendly to everyone, and wouldn't think twice about giving someone a hand when they needed it. He was always funny, always had a joke, a quip, or a tale.

Pete liked folk music, and after the ceremony there was a send off. I wish I could have stayed and joined in. Played some tunes on the fiddle, but I had a long journey back so had to miss out.

I wish to extend my condolenses to family, particularly his wife and boys.

Gone, but very fondly remembered.

I'll play a tune for you my friend.

I've known for quite some time that you can get some quite nice images from a CCD attached to a hobby telescope. I wondered about using a webcam to do it. Apparently, I'm not the first.

I took some still shots with my ancient webcam. It had been so long since I even used it, that I forgot the res isn't high by default. So my first attempt was 2 very low res stills. I alligned the scope on 'a star' and took the two stills. Then I stacked them up by hand in setting alpha values for the layers, and combined the image in to this png

This was the result of my very first attempt