Older blog entries for mjcox (starting at number 57)

closure: ebuyer.com said they'd refund my postage and my money, so I'm happy with them again. Telewest have agreed to install cable internet to my new house, it might take them a couple of months, but better than the 31200 baud I'm currently getting. My girlfriend is fine after 3 nights in the hospital. And finally I moved up to Scotland yesterday, after being quite impressed with the removal firm (If you want a good removal firm in Berkshire mail me for details)

Red Hat Linux 7.2: Had some issues with openssh-gnome-askpass (theres about five places you could get it to run ssh-agent, but only one is the right location), but generally been impressed. It even detected my obscure cheap Memorex USB smartmedia reader!

CVE: The experiment with the Mitre CVE vulnerability dictionary went well, but it's going to be difficult to get it working for every security errata. Need to think about that some more.

perspective: My girlfriend spent the night in hospital; it looks like she'll be okay, but i'm not going to get stressed about stupid computer hardware companies this week.

ebuyer.com. Well their Terms and Conditions state that if the item is broken you have to pay the costs to send it back to them, say what? But their Terms and Conditions also list their registered office as a PO Box, something thats actually not allowed under the Companies House rules :) Since they're not replying to my email anymore the next step will be to contact American Express. Thank goodness for consumer credit acts!

ebuyer.com: Too much hassle. When my last hard drive failed the company arranged to have one shipped the very same day and collected the broken drive at the same time. When a drive bought through ebuyer.com broke I had to wait 6 days (and then 25 minutes on hold) before they issued a returns number, I have to ship the drive back to them myself at my expense, and then they'll ship a replacement 3-5 working days after that. So that adds up to about 3 weeks. It's a shame that in an effort to cut costs these online retailers reduce the things that are essential to their repeat business; good customer service. Do any companies give good customer service anymore? It's easier to blame poor sales on the current economy, but I bet half these companies are failing because they're not giving people what they want.

apache Ploughed through the cvs commits and created a plausible Announcement file for Apache 1.3.22. Held off releasing Apache Week until the mirrors caught up, but /. found the tarballs so released it a little early. Took some time to write some scripts to tidy up the past 265 issues for bad tags, all modules and directives are marked as such

CVE Worked with the Mitre guys so that the Apache vulnerabilities in 1.3.20 get described correctly, all went rather smoothly.

Security Found a couple of security information leaks on a site and a cross-site scripting (css) issue in a product mostly by accident. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write a robot that scans for css vulnerabilities across a site

telewest So according to my builder Telewest ran cable right past my new house last year. But they still refuse to connect me, saying that they've run out of construction budget for this year. I wrote to them in the hope that I can convince them to connect me, it's my last chance at getting anything other than a modem or dodgy ISDN connection. My whole new house is networked, all going through a 56k modem, sad. Unfortunately Telewest and Blueyonder are 30% owned by Microsoft and they use Zeus not Apache, so no chance of getting any favours.

competitions: I've run out of ideas for competition questions for Apache Week. It has to be topical, humerous, slightly satirical (in www.ntk.net style), multichoice, not too difficult, and not be biased to any one country. Any ideas? Mail me suggestions in the next 10 hours :)

The last one we ran was: "Which of the following is not an Apache XML project: Xerces, Xalan, Xena", but it doesn't *have* to be Apache related. I've already rejected "Which of these is a patent-free standards body" :)

apache: A discussion about XML status output in Apache came up this week and so I pointed out a mod_status_xml I wrote a month or two ago. It would be great to get something like this module (or a patch to mod_status) into the core as once you can get XML status output you can do all sorts of cool things like historic graphs, real time graphs, and so on. Kind of like the stuff from 1995 that graphed server status but now using SVG.

moving: the builders ran CAT5 and coax to some remaining places (making cunning use of the coving to hide the wires as it was too late to run them under the floors). The only problem now is dates, I'm meant to be moving out in just over a week, but even that isn't signed and definate yet.

xslt: A few people wondered why I wanted <xsl:entity-ref>; it was really for the conversion from the XML status output to SVG; there were a lot of repeated sections in the SVG that would have benefited from some space saving using entitys. In the end it made sense to solve it a different way, and gzip the output making any size savings due to repeated blocks irrelevant.

xslt: I was looking for a way to output an entity header from some xslt. Google found me the answer, <xsl:entity-ref>, something that Microsoft have added to their xslt implementations, but that isn't in the standard. Wonderful. Its no suprise when I meet MSFT programmers who don't like open source; they'll try to port over their xsl and find it doesn't work on anything other than Microsoft platforms and think open source platforms are to blame. "Embrace and Extend"... Clever Microsoft :)

Hard disk: How difficult is it to get a new hard drive for my laptop next day? Ordered a 30Gb model that was in stock from Dabs.com on Monday, but on Tuesday morning they emailed to say they were not sure when they could deliver it. So cancelled the order and at 2pm on Tuesday went to insight.com who promised next day delivery. It's Wednesday, and insight.com now say it will probably be with me tommorrow (when I'm not at home to accept it). I wasn't going to trust ebuyer.com after the way they packaged my last set of disks, and buy.com didn't have any stock.

Apache: Minor hacking on mime.types to add .xsl mapping and bring the list up to date before 1.3.21 is released this week.

Tivo: that was far too easy. A two drive backup and upgrade fully working in under a couple of hours. ebuyer.com supplied the drives in a cardboard box with loose padding allowing them to 'rattle around'. I sent ebuyer a digital pic but in the end the drives checked out okay. My TiVo now says it can record 200 hours. Now it has the much harder task of finding 200 hours of interesting content to record.

Moving: my new house now has CAT5 and coax to all the rooms, except they missed one out, the living room. The one place where I really needed it :( Another 8 hour drive back down the M6 on a Sunday, I'll be glad when I don't have those anymore. I get withdrawl symptoms for 8 hours without email.

SVG: SVG is cool and it will be great when it's supported more in browsers. When cleaning out my loft I found all my original PhD notes including a paper I wrote in 1994 that suggested that to allow feasible remote teleoperation of our automated telescope we'd need an open-standards native vector display ability in browsers. I was using the early gd library to do something similar and even submitted patches to the project to do a vector langauge (but never got included). 7 years on and we're nearly there.

TiVo: My "void if removed" sticker peeled off without falling to bits and is now safely stored away whilst I get ready to upgrade my TiVo. I'm going to be without cable/satellite for a week or two at least when I move so I want to have a couple of hundred hours of TV stored up. Now to find some cheap 80Gb drives :)

XML and PHP: My attempt to get my stylesheet to nicely output something that PHP could then parse was foiled as php wants to see <?php blah; ?> but thats not valid XML; libxslt correctly outputs <?php blah; > which PHP doesn't then like. Can't win :)

Human body: In the last year or so I've been relatively bug-free. Now I'm working from home all day and not come into contact with another human for nearly a week I catch a cold. How did that happen? Doh.