SSL Not So Secure After All. From The Register, – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and KDE’s Konqueror are both guilty of not following proper procedures when using sites that employ Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections. Any site that has a valid VeriSign SSL site certificate can pretend to be an entirely different site, even going as far as impersonating another site and intercepting supposed- secure information.

Serial ATA Arrives. Article from Tom’s Hardware Guide. Anyone who has ever tried to add an IDE device will be happy about this. I will certainly demand serial ATA on my next PC. Not sure it is worth retrofitting existing boxes but I will consider.

PC Graphics Evolution. Longish article on PC Graphics Evolution. Fun to read. Will be lots of reasons to keep on buying new PCs.

It is interesting that we have these hugely capable graphics coprocessors in our PCs now. Why don’t we have similar network coprocessors? With all the demand for wirespeed packet analysis/transformation (secure vpns, personal firewalls for instance) at higher and higher wirespeeds, seems to me like we will need more compute power dedicated to network traffic. I haven’t done the math tho to convince myself of the need.

Copyrights. Good article from Dan Gillmor. We all need to get more educated and help our government engage correctly in this debate.

Permalinks Redux. Despite some misgivings I have added permalinks to my site. Convinced by email from Olivier Travers. I am very doubtful about my ability to maintain the permanency of these links over the lifetime of my blog, as I expect my blog to operate for the remainder of my natural life and I expect to change the underlying implementation many times. The blog community is young and the technology is young, I think we are all kidding ourselves about the durability of the chosen design point and syntax. Only time will tell.

Microsoft Product Keys. I get a consistent number of Google referrals of people looking for Microsoft Product Keys. The traffic seems to be growing. Hey folks I don’t post any keys here. Actually I wonder if the traffic isn’t from Microsoft or its agents looking for evidence of piracy.

UPDATE (7/3/07). Hey folks. THERE ARE NO PRODUCT KEYS HERE AND I AM NOT GOING TO HELP YOU FIND ONE. If you have a legitimate need for a key, call Microsoft.

This blog is predominately about Halloween, The Buckeyes, books I’ve read, and a variety of tech and business topics as they interest me. It is not about product keys.

Ludwigs in Grand Rapids Ohio. Hmm someone did a google search for “ludwigs grand rapids ohio” and hit my site accidentally. But hey I know something about this topic as my grandfather Cleo is from Grand Rapids and was involved in the acquisition of the Isaac Ludwig mill which is apparently now part of the Toledo Metroparks system. So if you are out there, drop me a note and we can chat.

Permalinks I am trying to decide whether to add permalinks to my site, and if so how to implement them. I have been slow to do so because I take a very long view of what the word “permanent” means. I want to implement a system that will last for 20+ years, during which time i will post a lot of content of all sorts, and i am sure that the system i use to manage content will change dramatically. I don’t want to have to recreate my entire naming scheme multiple times, that will kind of defeat the purpose.

I’ve looked at permalinks on a lot of other sites. There are some mistakes being made. For instance I have seen permalinks of the form “www.foo.com/GUID” where the GUID is 6 decimal digits. Seems like a lot but the history of software shows again and again that you need to allow way more address space than you originally imagine you will need. I’ve also seen permalinks of the form “www.foo.com/keyword/GUID”, with the author sorting their posts into several categories. I predict unhappiness here as categorization decisions and hierarchy will change over time. The right kind of permalink seems to be “www.foo.com/date/guid” which allows unbounded expansion and doesn’t embed unnecessary assumptions about categories or namespaces into the permalink.

I have a lot of resources besides just those i post in my blog that i want to be remotely accessible. like files. i wonder if the permalink convention should span them as well. the timestamp is a lot less relevant for these types of resources.

i wonder if permalinks are right at all. i wonder if a more durable interface is a search interface – ie a standard search submittal syntax for my site. this seems like it might let me futz with the underlying implementation a lot more.

Wolfram Review. Ha Ha Ha – Boing Boing

Toshiba e740. OK i bought one so i can browse the web easily in boring meetings, in my family room, and at sbux. The price quoted on Amazon for pickup from Circuit City was as good as anything online, so I did it that way.

Pretty easy to get up and running tho the documentation about how to do so is terrible, particularly setting up the PC connection and software. And the documentation on the WIFI link is really limited.

I can see all my local WIFI nets but for some reason can’t get an IP address from our public DHCP server. I wonder if we are out of addresses.

Digital IDs and Spam control. Hey I am a big fan of this idea, most recently mentioned on John Patrick’s Weblog. But I think we need to start talking a lot more about trust webs and how they will be managed, structured, discovered, trusted, etc. Digital IDs will help solve spam for about 2 weeks if we don’t create a structure to allow us to decide which digital IDs to trust and why.

Lyrics. Useful lyrics site – A-Z Lyrics Universe. I was looking for the lyrics to Foreigner’s “That Was Yesterday” which has been stuck in my head:

But that was yesterday I had the world in my hands But it’s not the end of my world Just a slight change of plans

A guilty pleasure. On a more fashionable note, the site also has the lyrics for all the White Stripes cds.

200G Drives. Now available – Western Digital Online Store - Product Information. Doesn’t look like it has an onboard cache like the 120G drives tho.

Ohio Jokes. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha – Journey Inside My Mind

The World’s View of America. This looks like an interesting read – Granta: Granta 77: What We Think of America. What I’d really love to find tho is a collection of high school history/social studies text books from around the world. I’d love to see exactly what is being taught in other countries to their kids. I know there is a lot of bias in what I was taught.