Ok, the response to my bit on Soap security was pretty negative. I didn't communicate what I was trying to say very well. Apologies.

Soap is probably not any worse than CGI or other Web things. But my point is that it's not any better, either. I guess it all depends on whether you think that's good enough. (I don't.)

Firewalls are pretty useless. The main security implication of going through port 80 is that it will eliminate the need to explicitly open a Soap-specific port in the firewall, in the off chance it wasn't left open anyway. So talking about Soap and firewalls isn't very enlightening. In any case, I believe Dave when he says that Soap wasn't explicitly designed to go through firewalls.

PhinisheD

This afternoon, I helped Heather print out the final paper copies of her dissertation. Tomorrow, she hands it in for binding in the library and microfilming. The entire time I've known her, this has been a goal to work towards. Now it's actually done.

For historical reasons, the thesis is in troff format. I consider myself a smart guy, but fixing things was a usability nightmare. I had to rely on a mix of man pages, "helpful" web tutorials, a book on troff, and the groff s.tmac source. Even then, I ended up hand-tweaking a bunch of stuff. Ugh.

I helped format some Chinese hanzi as illustrations. I feel absolutely terrible about the fact that I used a Japanese font even though the context was Chinese, but didn't want to spend the time to redo all the eps's. Fortunately, all of the hanzi are quite similar visually to the corresponding Japanese kanji, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone will notice, much less care. rillian accuses me of perpetuating Unicode FUD, though. I guess I'll just have to live with that on my conscience.

Kids

Alan is resisting doing homework with me, and also resisting reading I'm not sure why. He has a lot of anxiety, and these days seems to be expressing it a lot more.

Max loves cooking. Tonight he helped me make a stir-fry. He had a little difficulty stirring, and decided that he needed a "big" spatula. When I told him that it was a big spatula, he asked for "giant". I thought it was cute, anyway :)

It's fun to play the "can you say X" game with both kids. For Max, the edge is currently "peanut butter jelly belly". A week or so ago, he had trouble saying this, usually dropping one of the words. Alan has no trouble with "uvulopalatopharyngoplasty". Finding harder words is going to be challenging :)