Posted by Nat Tuck
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:08:00 GMT
Mozilla Firefox 3 limits usable encrypted (SSL) web sites to those who are willing to pay money to one of their approved digital certificate vendors. This policy is bad for the web. Not only does it make users less secure overall by reducing the number of encrypted connections, it damages the basic principle of equality among web participants.
The problem is this: When a Firefox 3 user visits an encrypted web site with a self-signed certificate or a certificate signed by an unapproved (new or non-profit) provider, Firefox doesn’t show the page. Instead, it shows a scary "you are being hacked"-style warning that requires 4 clicks and an "add an exception" dialog box to bypass.
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Tags firefox, mozilla, net.neutrality, ssl, web
Posted by Nat Tuck
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:21:00 GMT
When Dell first released their Ubuntu machines, there was significant fear that they would be the same price as Windows machines in spite of Ubuntu’s lack of a licensing fee. As I showed, that turned out to be false.
http://pandion.ferrus.net/uml/dellbuntu/
Again, this is content from my personal site at UML that I don’t want to lose.
Tags dell, ubuntu, uml
Posted by Nat Tuck
Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:16:00 GMT
I did some research on nuclear (fission) power and produced this site arguing for it as a long term solution to the energy problem:
http://pandion.ferrus.net/uml/nuclear/
This was a school project, hosted on my personal web page at UML, so I figure I should move it here before I somehow lose all my data when I get upgraded to a grad student account.
Tags nuclear, sustainable, uml
Posted by Nat Tuck
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:12:00 GMT
SWIG does an excellent job wrapping C++ classes for use as a Ruby extension module. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look to be designed to handle some of the issues that I’ve run into when embedding Ruby to extend a C++ application. Specifically, how to pass C++ objects to Ruby calls in such a way that they can be passed back to SWIG generated methods requires a bit of hackery.
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Tags embed, ruby, swig
