Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

This year, I didn't leave it to the last minute. It's CCC again in Berlin at the end of December. I've got my train tickets (curiously cheaper in first class than in cattle) and I'm about to book my hotel.

Who else is coming? :-)

Sometimes, I want to listen to music which is very difficult to find on CD. Case in point: Nobody's Jig. I am very much aware that my musical taste can be confusing and bewildering to people. Deal with it.

Amazingly, fnac.be seems to know about the CD. Even more amazingly, they offer me to download it as mp3. I'm not a great fan of MP3, but I didn't want to wait for the "unspecified" delivery time, so I decided to try this MP3 download functionality.

Of course, the fnac.be website is a "web 2.0" contraption. The userfriendly police has been at it, making it totally impossible to use. While it was happy to accept Mozilla Firefox. It also wanted me to enable JavaScript and accept cookies. After I did that, it decided it didn't like "Unix" (I use FreeBSD, which is a Unixish operating system). Grrr.

After some help on IRC, I found a Mozilla Firefox extension (User Agent Switcher) to make it believe it was running on Microsoft Windows. That seems to have worked. Amazing!

Like the rest of the website, the download interface is impossible to use.

The only redeeming feature (if you're patient enough to jump through all the hoops), is that it lets you download tracks as FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. It confusingly labels them as "FLA" (sic) and "OGG" (sic) though. While it was immediately clear that the "OGG" was "Ogg Vorbis", it didn't imediately register to me that "FLA" was "FLAC". Consequently, I had to "encode" the tracks twice. And there is no "cancel" button to stop it creating Oggs. sigh

Lots of clicking and cursing later however, I got my FLACs.

Interestingly, while the least of my problems, parts of the interface were in French and others in Dutch and they changed around a bit from click to click. I wonder how linguistic supremacists and racists like those of N-VA and VB feel about this? Fnac should be more careful. :-)

At €0.5 per track, I think the FLACs are pretty much worth it. The fact it took me more than an hour before I could start to download them will make me think twice about looking for music on fnac.be again.

Can we go back to web 0.9 again please?

Despite getting home at a civilized hour Sunday night, thanks to a ride from a colleague, I couldn't find my voice yesterday morning and spent most of the day in bed. BSD conferences are very bad for one's sleep-wake cycle.

I had a very good EuroBSDCon, as usual. My (Warner's) talk was a bit more hand-wavy than I had intended it. I discovered that I had run through almost half my slides in ten minutes talking at a rate of about 0.7 rwatson. Slowing down a bit I managed to finish the talk in about 45 minutes.

Some very interesting questions from the audience. Looks like people are getting interested in embedding BSD. People are starting to realize how dangerous GNU really is.

I'm looking forward to MeetBSD in California next month. I expect the weather to be a bit warmer there than in Strasbourg. :-)

I spent a significant part of yesterday on the train to Strasbourg. It was not a TGV so there were only two power outlets. I had to fight with a besuited gentleman over the one nearest to me.

Slept briefly last night after spending some time at the "Académie de la Bière". I had some excellent French beers most of whose names I've predictably forgotten.

The devsummit is well underway. We're all talking together on IRC. :-)

There is coffee.

Waiting for other (useful) stuff to compile today, I spent some time setting up my own Jabber server. I've had jabberd compiled on a machine for a long time, I just hadn't gotten around to setting it up yet.

This was surprisingly simple, except for the SSL bits. I spent a good half hour wondering why BitlBee refused to connect with a very strange message:

jabber - Couldn't log in: Stream error: host-unknown: service requested for unknown domain

Turns out that the example <id... parameter in c2s.xml was formatted in such a way to make it non-obvious that I also had to change an example.net on the last line:

<id realm='example.net'
    pemfile='/usr/local/etc/jabberd/server.pem'
    mumble-mumble
>example.net</id>

Silly of me. Even sillier of me to have hacked XMPP STARTTLS support into OpenSSL s_client to try to debug it... As soon as I saw the example.net, a simple grep found the config bug immediately. Difficult works too. :-)

If anyone is interested, the patch is here: openssl_xmpp.diff.

I'll try to con Ben into including that upstream. :-)

Anyway - please replace philip@jabber.belnet.be with philip@paeps.cx on your Jabber roster.

Firefox 3 made self-signed certificates completely unusable for no good reason. Following the web tradition of making things difficult, they need users to jump through a million hoops of adding 'exceptions' and such. I can't imagine why they can't just pop up a simple box asking the user to verify a couple of fingerprints out of band. OpenSSH has been doing that for ages without any complaints.

Since people who believe in root certificates tend to add CACert roots to their browsers, I started looking into that. Turns out I need to be "assured" by a number of people before they'll sign any certificates for a relevant length of time.

Yet another web of trust. Surely someone clever could find a way to bring OpenPGP to the web? But then the userfriendly police would probably find a way to make that completely impossible to use too. Bah.

To make a long story short: if you are a CACert "assurer" and there is a reasonable chance of bumping into me on public transport somewhere in Belgium, please shout. I'll also be in Strasbourg (EuroBSDCon) next week and in Mountain View (MeetBSD) and Boston next month.

Thanks!

I've been quiet. Mmhmm.

Currently, I'm rewriting an application for a customer which is presenting me with at least a couple of WTFs every day. Most recently, I've been puzzling over the original author's creativity in decoding a binary protocol without using bitwise shift operators.

Everywhere you would expect "shift left by n bits", there is a "multiply by 2^n". This makes understanding the protocol a bit tricky because the brain wants to be in "it's a number" mode rather than "it's a stream of bits" mode.

Of course, the original application is rife with sign-bugs too. :-)

In other news, it appears that I'll be giving a talk at EuroBSDcon. Warner won't be able to make it to France next week, so I will give his "Embedding FreeBSD" talk. I spent a good part of the weekend working on that.

Busy busy.