Colin Charles Agenda

Public Service Announcement: Malaysiakini’s DNS servers have been knocked off the Internet. Basically, they’re pointing to 127.0.0.1, which is localhost (your machine). Live reports of election results are still available, just access Malaysiakini via their IP address: http://122.0.17.30/.

Reason behind the DNS being unavailable is unknown, but do keep up with the Malaysiakini DNS Suspended! post.

BTW, Malaysiakini runs FreeBSD + Apache + Squid :)

There are also 6 mirrors at the time of writing… And remember, the hand that rocks the DNS, is the hand that rules the Internet (or something like that)

Technorati Tags: malaysiakini, ip address, dns

I had the opportunity to visit a school today. Not quite a school you’ll expect to roll-out a deployment of OLPCs (its a top-notch boarding school, with yearly fees that cost as much as completing a 4-year university degree), but a school in Victoria, nonetheless.

Microsoft products are entrenched in the Victorian school system. It so happens that Microsoft ISA Server 2006 is used to power mail for the students. Trying to access mail via the browser, proved to be impossible with the OLPC.

Secure Connection Failed: The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown

The error code received: sec_error_unknown_issuer. So I thought I’d try out giving an exception.

Getting an exception? You need to find advanced encryption settings

Exceptions are impossible to get, seeing that there’s no way to get to the advanced encryption settings location. After coming home, I decided to check up on this (which involves hopping on to the developers IRC channel). Turns out the ticket is #5534: Browser cannot connect to sites with non-standard Certificate Authorities.

I added to the ticket, mainly because the MS ISA Server 2006 actually had a valid certificate, signed by VeriSign. It works fine in Firefox, but just not on the OLPC. Apparently, there’s an FAQ about this too: How to ignore SSL warning about invalid security certificate? However, the idea of installing Opera, just doesn’t bode well with me - the browser itself, must work.

Time to get hacking…

Technorati Tags: olpc, olpc xo, microsoft isa server, ssl, sec_error_unknown_issuer, certificate, encryption, gecko

Malaysia’s General Elections are today. I’m not voting.

The opposition, aim higher

I did not receive my postal ballot papers. I’ll have to file a complaint soon. For fun reading, do read: How Secure is the daftarj.spr.gov.my Website?

Then, read from Malaysiakini, Programme reveals ‘twin’ postal voters. 49% repeats exist in a random selection of about 560. Shocked?

Should election commissions be trusting and running closed source software?

Update: Read Would I Vote if I Could? by Shaolin Tiger. Its great reading. Ideas like having a shadow ministry is just crucial.

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, even without the embedded probes in current versions of MySQL. For more DTrace and MySQL tips, don’t hesitate to read Joyeur, Joyent’s weblog.

DtTace, Web 2.0, Java, AJAX, PHP and the rest (notes from the talk)
by Peter Karlsson, Solaris Technology Evangelist

DTrace now has providers for a large number of languages: JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby. Perl is on the way.

MySQL 6.0 will have DTrace support; PostgreSQL already has this in Solaris currently. If building from source, there’s a flag that needs to be enabled. A lot of work was done thanks to a community member.

You need a Solaris kernel. Ported to OS X and FreeBSD. Supports “dynamic instrumentation”. D is the dynamic language, used to script instrumentation

Very common request? Find how much time is spent in a given function. The thread local variable (self->variable = expression;) - nowadays, you can be running two threads coming down in the same function call. DTrace - so this is great for multi-threaded debugging.

PHP doesn’t have DTrace integrated, so, get the Coolstack PHP.

DTrace probes have been added to Mozilla to help debug JavaScript applications. This is available in Firefox 3 (in beta now). There is also a generic DTrace framework, that isn’t just JavaScript only - the networking parts of Firefox, to look at how DNS lookups work, etc. all can be instrumented via DTrace.

Further reading? DTrace and PHP, demonstrated.

Technorati Tags: dtrace, php, javascript, mysql

Election day today. Pity I won’t be voting. My postal ballot papers never came. Will have to file a complaint, soon. Or maybe they already voted for me - rumours have it that postal ballot papers just go to the ruling coalition. In that case, I apologise - I would hate to give the extra vote to them.

Caught Meet the Spartans. It was pretty awful. Good thing it was short. Probably the most useful part was the singing towards the end at the credits - pity the cinema itself decided to put us out of our misery and stop the show abruptly.

Feeling a bit jaded. Was in Magnation for a while yesterday, and read about a 22-year old CEO, creating a Linux startup. More importantly, its pretty successful at the moment. Got me thinking, that even the bloke that came up with the blogging platform that this blog uses, is a pretty young bloke. I’m going to be 24 soon, and am wondering why my time hasn’t come, I guess. Where are my bajillions?