Sorry for the hiatus in posting to this blog. More on that later. If you are running OSX, stop what you are doing and run Software Update from the Apple menu. Apple has finally released an update that revoked trust for an SSL CA (DigiNotar) that was issuing fraudulent certificates for *.google.com among others. This is a major security issue.

Details of the update are limited. Go do the update, even though it requires a reboot. Go do it now.

The problem I have with podcasts is both a personal problem with the format as well as a more general observation. That problem is: Time.

I’m not the kind of person who can pay serious attention to a lot of things at once. I can’t sit and listen to a proper discussion while trying to hack together some code at work and make any progress. This morning I found myself either listening to The Talk Show and not working, or missing huge sections of the conversation. Incidentally, I’ve had the same problem all my life – when I’m reading a good book, the rest of the world goes away. People can walk up to me and start talking, and I honestly don’t hear them until they say my name REALLY loud or get in my field of view. If a TV is on, and I can see the screen, I lose track of conversations around me – even ones I’m in the middle of. It’s really kind of irritating in a way.

It also limits my podcast consumption to about 90 minutes a day, on average, which is the round-trip time I’m on the bus to and from work. I find that I can’t even think of squeezing in all the things I’d want to listen to in the iTunes Podcast listings. Between the daily financial shows, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and How Stuff Works’s CarStuff, I don’t have any time left in the week’s commute to consume new stuff, and every addition to the list means that something else drops out.

I’m seriously tempted to just give up and read books on the bus instead.

I’m finally caught up on processing the pictures I took at my brother in law’s wedding in Ariel, Washington, and they are posted to flickr!

Marc Hoyois is my new hero.

Safari 5.1 has a different plugin model than previous versions, and has totally broken the one thing I install on my systems that could be considered a Haxie: Click2Flash. Click2Flash gets in-between the browser and the Flash plugin, and prevents it from loading until the user clicks on the Flash object embedded in the web page. This keeps a lot of irritating stuff from auto-starting (hello talking ads!), and keeps my browser performance from sucking too badly.

Marc has released a Safari Extension that does much the same thing as the old plugin, and he has appropriately named it Click2Plugin. Marc, you rock my world. Thank you.

This site has been pretty much unusable for the last three days. This is why:

When I asked customer support what was going on, the answer I got was this:

We do apologize for the inconvenience that you experience right now. However, we have some issue in our server right now and our admins are currently working about the issue.

No follow ups later, no responses past that. Days of problems, no serious acknowledgment of the issue.

From my outsider perspective, 1and1’s shared databases seemed to be having issues, and any request to my site with a DB backend drove another load spike. Other sites hosted on my 1and1 account (Carolina Greenworks, for example) never went down or had any kind of speed issues. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long, but over this weekend, I’m going to do my best to shift everything over to my ASO hosting account – where I get real answers from real tech support staff.

I need to find a working VT terminal. I’ve got the the USB->Serial adapter from a previous project, and this would just be cool.

As a Trained IT Professional, I’ve been fighting a battle for years against my eyes. I’m one of the very few people I’ve ever worked with that doesn’t need glasses or contacts in my daily life, even though I spend hours and hours staring at the computer screen. I’m happy that I’ve been blessed with good eyesight, and I try my hardest not to abuse it, or do things that will hurt my eyes over the long term. One of the worst things you can do for your eyesight is to have the screen you are looking at significantly brighter or darker than the rest of the environment – and OSHA agrees with me.

What I’ve always done is to kill the overhead lights entirely when I can, and supplement with several low-wattage incandescent lights around my workspace. This works, and once you put everything where you like, you’re golden.

The sad thing is while I do this at work, everywhere I work, I hadn’t gotten my workstation at home setup properly in terms of light. Reading late at night either required the overhead lights, or darkness, and the overhead keeps burning out. (I think something is wrong with the light fixture, but I digress.) So, yesterday I’d finally had enough. I went to Home Depot and picked up a cheap work light, removed the plastic guard, zip-tied the light to the back of my monitor, and stuck a CFL in it. Works like a champ, and provides nice, even illumination for my daily computing needs.