Occasional Thoughts

For quite a while the Ubuntu subversion package suffer from bad user certificates that do not follow the standards strictly. In case you have to authenticate with such a certificate subversion will return such an error message:

The root of this problem is that the Ubuntu packages link against libneon-gnutls, which handles certificates in a stricter way than libneon. A easy workaround in the past was to simply replace a replace the library link of libneon-gnutls to point to libneon:

sudo mv /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27.old
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libneon.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27

However once you do this in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin you will get a another error message instead:

OPTIONS of <url>': SSL handshake failed: SSL disabled due to library version mismatch (<url>)

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

When reading through ActionScript code I frequently see two ActionScript mistakes that are likely to cause runtime misbehavior and confusions. Sometimes thing do not appear at first glance what you might think at the beginning. However both ActionScript bumps can easily be driven around. 

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.