Loser-X

Just spent a couple hours wrestling with this, sigh…

So apparently Versign certs do not work with mod_ssl because they are packed in the PKCS#7 format.

For my own future reference:

openssl pkcs7 -in www.example.com.crt -print_certs -out www.example.com.crt.new

from Using a Verisign SSL Certificate with mod-ssl.

Or: Hello Trooper.

From BBC’s In Pictures, via digg.

Found in the special and limited editions. Well worth the extra cost, especially for this one line:

"Dear Penis, give my butt a sign"

- Simone Simons

Clever girl...

Just pulled an all night, and then in the morning I threw on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, and somehow additional dimensions in the music which I have never noticed before just leapt out of the speakers and blasted right through my consciousness.

Its an album I listen to a lot, and so I thought I knew it, but apparently I don't know it at all. Perhaps I should try some Jimi next time.

Nothing quite like trying to sell stuff by reminding people of an awful, awful movie.

What were they thinking?

The first quarter of 2008 isn't over yet and already two men who shaped my world have passed on.

To use what is by now a cliché, Gary Gygax failed his last saving throw on the 4th of March. Thanks Gary, for all the hours of imagination, joy and friendship your creation brought me and countless other geeks across the multiverse. I will never forget the days of "Traps? Pfft! I boot the door down.". The Order of the Stick put it more eloquently then I ever could, so the strip shall have to speak for me.

Jeff Healey was a giant of music, and it is criminal that he is not held in higher regard by the general public. Few knew that his real love was for old American jazz or that he played the trumpet and clarinet expertly. Here he is at his incendiary best absolutely ripping it up on the title track from his debut album "See The Light" with a little help from Dr. John, Marcus Miller and Omar Hakim.

Trent Reznor has done it: a double album of new instrumental music available as a high quality, DRM-free download, very reasonably priced 2 CD set (US$10) or either one of a pair of luxurious deluxe packages. I'll be grabbing the 2 CD set myself (yes I'm cheap).

In the mean time you can check out Ghost I, which is available for free (TPB torrent link, as the NIN server seem to be having problems dealing with the digg hordes).

Or perhaps it was actually NHibernate at fault. I was trying to set up a many-to-many relationship with attributes on the association table and the ActiveRecord CreateSchema call just kept complaining that my assocation table already exists and cannot be created again.

After an hour or so of head-scatching, turns out the error only occurs when I use GUIDs as the primary key in the association table. Switching to good old "int" solved everything. I wonder if that has been fixed in the trunk, I should go code spelunking.

Found this in a shop, obviously a collection of songs from before he got help with hitting the high notes.

Came across an article about how the newer versions of software may not be better than previous versions, most of it caused by increasing feature sets and thus bloat. I am pretty particular about what goes on my PC as I need all the CPU power and RAM I can get for my weighty development tools. Rather than sticking to the "last good version", I try to look for alternatives based on the following criteria:

• Free is good, open source is better.
• Small footprint, but not at the expense of usability.

Instant Messaging Programs

Miranda IM is the best IM client on Windows. It is very light weight (the new version 0.7 features a new memory management model which makes it more memory efficient compared to the previous versions) and is very extensible, as it supports plugins. It does take some effort to set up so it works exactly the way you want it to, but I do not see that as a bad thing.

Media Players

I use two different applications for audio and video. QMP by Quinnware is my audio player of choice. It is currently in beta, but according to the creator Paul Quinn, it is very close to release now. The memory usage might be a little on the high side (compared to svelte players like foobar2000 and XMPlay but in my opinion its usability trumps that.

I use Media Player Classic for video playback. It looks like the old Windows Media Player 6.4 but that's the point. I do not need my video player to have some incredibly slick interface. Just make it simple and sensible, and then stay the hell out of the way when a video is playing. I usually install the Combined Community Codec Pack (still the best codec pack) which features MPC as out of the installation options.

Image and Video Software

No idea about video editing software unfortunately, not one of my interests. For image editing, Paint.NET is the tool for quick and simple jobs. I find it to be very light weight and very functional.

For image viewing and management, XnView seems the best I have tried. Very quick, and the interface is a clone of early ACDSee. Only minus is that it has no Unicode support, but I can live with that... usually.

I also have CDisplayEx installed. It is an open source clone of CDisplay which is sadly very outdated. These are really niche applications for viewing scanned comics, but are capable and very fast image viewers.

And Two More Previous Favorites

For PDF viewers, Foxit Reader is very, very fast. There's a bit of feature creep in the latest version 2.2, but its still fast. No way am I going back to Adobe Reader without some major re-architecturing efforts on Adobe's end.

As for email, I have used Mozilla Thunderbird for years now. It is not light weight by any stretch of the imagination but I cannot do without the extensions nowadays. Lightning needs to mature before I can consider recommending it for most of my clients though.

Stuff Missed Out

The PC World editors missed one application, the Nero suite. Versions 7 and 8 clock in at a ridiculously massive 170+ megs. I just want to burn some CDs and some DVDs... There are free alternatives: InfraRecorder (open source) and CDBurnerXP (free as in beer). Both of these are very easy to use and will be more than adequate for normal burning tasks.

Nice post by Joseph Guadagno about database drivers not provided by Microsoft. He missed a few though, so here they are:

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL needs no introductions. Probably my favourite open source DBMS. Npgsql is de facto the ADO.NET provider. Performance and stability seems alright.

PostgreSQLDirect .NET is a commercial provider, and its supposed to out-perform Npgsql while providing more features. I have never used it so don't take my word for it.

Firebird

Firebird was forked from the open source release of Borland's InterBase. Most of you tech-oriented folk might know of it due to the name dispute with Mozilla Firefox (a.k.a. Firebird a.k.a.Phoenix) back in 2003. Its a pretty sweet product, easy to work with. I have not implemented very large projects with it, but the word is that it scales well, and has a small footprint both on disk (downloads are ~5 megs) and in memory. The only features I miss are temporary tables (coming in 2.1 which is in beta now) and materialised views.

In any case, the .NET data provider is available for download. as well as a DDEX provider.

SubSonic

Probably the MVP in my .NET development toolbox at the moment. SubSonic generates a full DAL based on an existing database, provides Rails-like scaffolds and provides other helpful controls and utilities. Supports SQL Server 2000 or 2005, MySQL, or Oracle (with SQLLite, SQLCE, and PostGres coming soon!).

ActiveRecord

An implementation of the ActiveRecord pattern by the Castle Project, built on top of NHibernate.

Trent Reznor (and Nine Inch Nails by default) is now free from any recording contract. As I have mentioned, he is one of the few, perhaps the only, major artist who gets it. Here's hoping more famous musicians follow his lead.

[via digg]

Yes, got mine in the mail. Thanks YesAsia! I highly recommend them. Free international shipping (conditions apply)!

The package design is exquisite, very classy. All transparent and white.

A shot of the front:

Of the back:

Opened up:

The styrofoam block to hold the Tachikoma USB thumb drive is a little out of place though... am I supposed to toss it out and keep the drive elsewhere? Tsk...

Only complaint:

Making the booklet white on white is just... ass backwards. It looks very cool and everything, but come on! The print is actually more legible in the photo compared to Real Life due to the camera flash.

The Tachikoma thumb drive and instructions:

Isn't it just the cutest thing?

One thing I noticed is that the music was beautifully mastered. There is a remarkable clarity to even the densest passages; I could hear each instrument distinctly. The music by the incomparable Kanno Yoko is fantastic, of course.

There have been complaints that the new O.S.T. 4 "Smooth in the Shell" is only available in this set, forcing fans who have already bought the other albums separately to shell out for the whole set if they want that. Pretty bad form by the record company, but for the few fans of Kanno Yoko who don't already own any of the previously released albums (like myself, luckily), this is a great set to own.

Its been three years since the public last release but now CDBurnerXP 4.0 is finally available. The official website features a spanking new design too. CDBurnerXP is a freeware CD and DVD burning software for Windows, in case anybody did not know that.

Most exciting new features for me, Unicode support and the ability to burn FLAC files. It is now based on .NET which could be a turn off for some users, but the setup file itself is now a stupidly small download at 1.92 megs.

Like I was saying, it is freeware, so there is no reason for anybody to not try it.

Addendum: I gave it a whirl, and while it feels and works great, it does not yet handle the burning of audio CDs from CUE files, so I guess it will not be my primary burner for a while.

I still see this bandied about as a possible factor in slow P2P speeds. It is easily misunderstood, but the half open connections limit imposed by XP SP2 and Vista does not matter for P2P speeds. It limits the rate at which connections can be made, not the total number of simultaneous connections.

Now, 10 half open connections seem a little low, but most ordinary users do not need more than this. Even heavy P2P users such as myself.

I usually run eMule and Bittorrent at the same time and I do not usually partake in very popular torrents (my usual haunts: Pleasuredome and DIME; what would I do without you guys?) but I usually have no problem maxing out the bandwidth available to my 3 Mbps connection. Sure, the clients spin up a little slower than before but how does it matter? I wasted maybe two or three minutes? The other negative side effect would be the occasional 4226 error in the Event Log, but I don't care about that.

I am not denouncing LvlLord's patch as evil as I really do not care if everybody installs it, but it won't increase your P2P speeds. It won't make your computer run better. It won't solve the global poverty problem and it definitely won't make you more popular with the gents/ladies.