Category: Technology

Things Technological

SSL Made Easy

Time for a shout-out to DreamHost, who have partnered with LetsEncrypt to make using SSL with this website very, very easy. DreamHost have always aimed to make many actions against the site push-button, with sensible defaults, and clear documentation, and generating and attaching the certificate was a walk in the park.

I was a little surprised to see the certificate expiring so soon, but LetsEncrypt’s rationale is very sound: re-rolling certificates can and should be automated, and limiting the life time of a certificate automatically limits the exposure if the certificate is subverted. It is very much in line with a core idea that they have: the default for HTTP traffic should be across SSL, or in some other way encrypted.

For me, the process was as simple as pushing the buttons on the DreamHost control panel, then do a bulk find-and-replace on my site to update any http links to be https. I will probably have to chase around the interwebs to find where I’ve published the old URL, but I’m pretty sure I’ve found and updated the important ones already.

PropertySource-1.0

Having a little time up my sleeve, and a need to be off my feet for as much as possible… wait, did I mention that? Somewhere in the last six weeks I’ve done something undefined to my feet, which are painfully sore to walk on. I think that I managed to sprain one or more of the muscles that usually wiggle my toes, and as a result walking has felt like I’ve had stones in my shoes. Since I had a few unexpected extra days off, I elected to sit on my butt as much as possible and bang away at a little project that I’ve had hanging around for ages: PropertySource, which is a simple abstraction for finding “properties”. The code and README are there in GitHub, and there’s pointers on use from the README.

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Feeling blue

It has been said somewhere… and therein lies the state of the art when writing something that sounds profound on the Internet in the first half of the 21st century. Somewhere or other I read, unattributed, or with forgotten attribution, something vaguely like what I’m about to repeat without attribution: Greater London as a city does not really exist, instead it is dozens and dozens of small villages that have expanded until they have grown into each other.

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While they waited and listened in awe…

Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.

Benighted PodPoint Gill-Hank is now standing proudly and boldly erect!

Yes indeed, workers from Berkeley were out over the last few days hauling the corpse upright and repairing the pavement to keep it that way. Not, of course, that the unit actually functions.

When quizzed by Delia, the workers told her they had been instructed by Berkeley to make it look better…

Gill-Hank Progress

After pestering as many as people as I could, publicly, via Twitter by posting links to my previous, I finally have somebody admitting ownership of the unit:

Dear Mr. Robert Hook,

Following your message on Twitter regarding the charge point located at Cadogan Road West, please be advised that we have been reporting this charge point as faulty to Pod Point.

Unfortunately, the charge point has still not been repaired as you have rightfully highlighted.

As a result, we have decided to remove this faulty charge point and install a brand new Source London unit. We are currently working with Berkeley (which you also mentioned in your message) to have the new charge point installed as soon as possible.

Should you have any further queries, please feel free to respond to this message.

Kind Regards,

—-
Thanks for using SourceLondon.
Your SourceLondon customer service

I have of course asked if the other two units will also be repaired or replaced, and asked for some indication of what “as soon as possible” means. I am getting a little tired of “As soon as possible”, as I’ve been hearing it for almost two months.

The Saga of Gill-Hank

Imagine, if you will, that you have arrived at a large and reasonably luxurious hotel, with a heavy bag in tow. The bag is not too much of a nuisance, it has wheels and so you can drag it along, but you sure wouldn’t want to have to carry it upstairs. You check in with reception, and head to the two lifts to go up to your 10th floor room.

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Phun with PHEV

Well, that escalated quickly. We went from thinking in November/December that we needed a solution for carrying more kit around than would fit in the Panda, to driving away from Portsmouth on 11th March in a brand-new Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, paid in full (mostly from some money I had sitting in Australia, hoping the $AUD would be worth something some day).

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Maven releases with Git

I’ve started to put various snippets of code up into GitHub, partly because they may be useful to other people, partly so that they are more accessible when I do not have my personal laptop with me. Yes, Virginia, I could put it all on a USB stick (and I probably will), but that poses another problem of keeping that content up to date. And I’m not keen on sticking my stick into random and unpredictably unhygienic places.

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CSS3 Oops.

Revising my resumé as part of an overall overhaul of my site, I realised that the presentation on mobile devices was not very good. Fortunately since I last did anything major, CSS3 has become widely implemented, so Media Queries are now an option for degrading onto smaller screens. To my pleasure it did (eventually) just work, but I’m embarrassed to say that I spent a good hour wondering why it was not initially working. It would have helped if I’d remembered that CSS files are read from the top down…

On a side note, I’m quite disappointed in the behaviour of the Safari ‘responsive design mode’. While it does allow quick switching of window size, as far as I can tell apart from tinkering with the user agent string it does not register as a mobile device from the point of view of CSS. I’m hoping to find a better way of designing against mobile, because it’s definitely suboptimal to push changes to a server just so that I can test them on the phone.