I was happy to read the article Digital Certificates: Do They Work? which mentioned the excellent paper by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier titled Ten Risks of PKI: What You’re not Being Told about Public Key
Infrastructure. I have always found the certicate industry to be a racket because it strongly encourages websites to pay money to give their users what amounts to an illusion of security. The solution is to support efforts like CAcert.org which generates certificates for free.

I’m happy to see that my favorite password manager has finally been packaged for Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve never found a graphical password manager that I liked as much as Password Gorilla. Plus, of all the password saving programs, it has the best name.

• http://packages.debian.org/password-gorilla
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/password-gorilla

• http://drupal.org/project/find_path
• http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
• http://drupal.org/project/page_title
• http://drupal.org/project/relatedlinks
• http://drupal.org/project/search404 (seems broken)
• http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist
• http://drupal.org/project/tagadelic
• http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_breadcrumb
• http://drupal.org/project/week

Time to update those kernels. Here are the details:

• Debian: DSA-1436-1 linux-2.6 — several vulnerabilities
• Ubuntu: USN-558-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

These are modules that I’ve installed relatively quickly into new Drupal setups. They’re not always the best or needed but more often than not add useful functionality.

• http://drupal.org/project/adsense
• http://drupal.org/project/captcha
• http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
• http://drupal.org/project/marksmarty
• http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
• http://drupal.org/project/token
• http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap (buggy but promising)

I did a lot of looking at 3 column Drupal themes and here’s what I liked:

• http://drupal.org/project/aurora
• http://drupal.org/project/bluebreeze
• http://drupal.org/project/cms-theme
• http://drupal.org/project/Pleroma
• http://drupal.org/project/relax
• http://drupal.org/project/sib
• http://drupal.org/project/ubiquity (fixed-width)

They all have issues that need tweaking but I found most of them a good place to start.

It looks like IE 7 has really poor string performance in JavaScript when benchmarked with Apple’s SunSpider benchmark. Of course Apple’s benchmark shows Safari beating Firefox 2 and IE 7. I’m not sure I have the time to investigate the fariness of the benchmark. Sure would be nice to have an independent JavaScript benchmark. I’m also curious as to how Firefox 3 would do in comparison.

• The Great Browser JavaScript Showdown

Both of these links give a nice screenshot and some useful descriptions of the themes:

• 20 Great 3-Column Drupal Themes
• 20 Great 2-Column Drupal Themes

I really like Markdown but I've grown tired of a couple of it's problems. Mostly I get annoyed with using underscores for emphasis/italics. Underscores come up in web addresses and in text describing code and computer operations all the time and with Markdown I often find myself having italics where I wouldn't want it. Now it's possible that there are some bugs in the parser but it's also possible that the syntax is correct. I think if I had to make a proposal for a better system would I would use much of Markdown but have the following syntactical additions/changes:
**bold** __underline__ ++ins++ --del-- //italics//

Both of these RFC’s attempt to solve the problem that each SSL website must have its own ip. Or, in other words, they would allow name based virtual hosting for secure (ssl or tls) connections. This question sill comes up frequently as users are surprised that no one has solved this problem in the years since SSL became used for the web. The upside is that Apache now seems to support both standards, RFC 2817 in mod_ssl (2.1 and later) and RFC 3556 in mod_gnutls (0.2.0 and later). It looks like RFC 3546 is implemented in Firefox 2, Opera 8, Konqueror 4, and Internet Explorer 7. The only browser missing is Safari. So it looks like RFC 2817 is dead and RFC 3546 is the way to go. After reading up on mod_gnutls I’m excited to try it out.

• TLS for HTTP
• mod_ssl 2.2
• mod_gnutls
• SSL-enabled Name-based Apache Virtual Hosts with mod_gnutls
• SNI penetration
• Phishing for SNI progress - tantalisingly close?

So far it’s been a real pain to own. Ok, to be fair, it must be more suited to a different set of users, those who want a cross-platform (well between Mac and Windows anyway) encrypted drive. For me I just want 1 large partition that I can setup the way I choose including encryption and filesystem choices. Unforunately there are only 2 ways to do so: 1) remove the hard disk and format it in another system which is a pain to do and voids the warranty. 2) use a windows only utility to remove the “CD” partition. I plan to do the latter. Here are some links that helped me to learn more:

• acomdata external hard drive
• Removing Acomdata HybridDrive CD PART
• AcomData E5 HybridDrive External Hard Drive

I was looking for information on some port numbers to see if any software used them and came across this link. I suspect it may come in handy in the future.

http://www.speedguide.net/ports.php

Since my current 500GB storage and back hard disk is dying (clicking sounds, other sounds, failing to read and write data) I decided to get another drive. I think 500GB drives are still the sweet-spot for price per GB. I wasn't sure if I wanted a new enclosure or to reuse an existing one. Then I came across a deal for a 500GB AcomData E5 HybridDrive for $110. I'm not sure if it will be any good, but given the unimpressive life of my last drive my expectations are not high. I will try to get one tomorrow and transfer data from the old drive to the new. Afterward I may have some thoughts on the product.

• http://www.cdrlabs.com/
• http://www.cdrinfo.com/
• http://www.cdfreaks.com/
• http://www.cdr-zone.com/

I bought a Samsung Writemaster (SHL-183) for a computer I put built over the summer. It has never burned a cd or dvd correctly. I worried at first that maybe it was an issue with using Ubuntu but after further testing it became clear that the drive was defective. I plan to return it for repair or replacement soon, though I've not heard particularly good things about Samsung's RMA process. My last DVD burner was a Benq and I'm starting to wish I had just kept it because it was the best burner I've ever owned. Benq and Lite On merged in 2006 so I think I may choose Lite On optical drives in the future.

• http://www.imaging-resource.com/
• http://www.digitalcamerareview.com/
• http://www.steves-digicams.com/
• http://dcresource.com/

Though it took some searching I finally found the form to check the warranty status for a Maxtor drive I had purchased. The bad news is that the drive is no longer under warranty. I suppose I've had the drive longer than a year though I will check to be sure. In any case it says the warranty expired in July 2007 so I wasn't even close. The drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB and I have to say I'm disappointed that it has died so soon since it is mostly a storage and backup drive and is therefore not used (powered on) very frequently. I'm not sure if there are any other usage factors that would have contributed to it's quick demise but if there are I wish I knew what they were so that they could be mitigated.

This is for someone that owns a Canon A530 (or a model close to that) who is looking for a new camera. I figured that staying with a Canon would be good because she’s already familiar with how they work. She’s also requested a longer zoom of at least 6x. So here are the 4 I am recommending. If none of these is suitable then I may make some recommendations from manufacturers other than Canon.

• Canon PowerShot A720 IS, 8.0mp, 6x zoom, $250 msrp (home, review 1, review 2, review 3, review 4)
• Canon PowerShot A650 IS, 12.1mp, 6x zoom, $400 msrp (home, review 1, review 2, review 3)
• Canon PowerShot S3 IS, 6.0mp, 12x zoom, $500 msrp (home, review 1, review 2, review 3, review 4)
• Canon PowerShot S5 IS, 8.0mp, 12x zoom, $500 msrp (home, review 1, review 2, review 3, review 4)

My intent is to keep posts short and to the point. This will mostly be tech stuff, but possibly other things I come across in an average day. I don't even have a name for this site picked out so for the short term I'm just going to write and hopefully inspiration will strike me later.