Self-signed Certificates

Note that this is from a previous page I had that I’m republishing here as the machine that hosted that old page is now gone. There are some things that need to be clarified, but for now it is what it is.

Why become your own CA? Sure there are a lot of instructions out there that show you how to create self-signed certificates, but if you have a number of servers you’re doing this for, you’d have to give the certs out to those who want to use them for each and every service. This way you don’t. You only have to give them the public CA certificate and all of the certs you sign with your CA key will be acceptable to them. Besides, it’s fun for everyone involved.

Mac Stuff

Well, if I have to use a Mac at work then I may as well have a little fun.

Quicksilver and iTerm Bookmark Integration

I wanted to make it easy to launch ssh’ing to hosts from quicksilver. I couldn’t find a really clean way to do it so I put together some ideas out there for myself. This is the result.

Leading People in the Tech Industry

Throughout my career so far in the tech industry I’ve had various opportunities all at varying degrees to fill leadership roles. It’s interesting how each organization I’ve been in has different ways of dividing up the leadership responsibilities. It can become overwhelming to not only carve out what those responsibilities are but also how to fulfill them effectively.

Parallels and VirtualBox

I use a Mac at work. I’ve been using Parallels since back before VMWare Fusion was available. It’s worked fine for me. That was until I tried a newer version of Ubuntu. It seems that the Parallels Tools that come with version 3 won’t work with XOrg 1.5.2, and this has been a problem for a while according to the Parallels forums. (Not to mention the first time I tried to install Ubuntu Parallels Desktop crashed in the middle of the process.) So I decided to try VirtualBox.

Learning to Crawl

As I sit here I’m watching my seven-month-old baby struggle to reach a magazine on the floor. He’s reaching as far as he possibly can, kicking his legs, rolling around, grunting, but he can’t quite reach the magazine.

She’ll be a Full Nerd Before Too Long

My wife has a blog now. http://fiddledeetee.blogspot.com. I couldn’t be prouder.

Albertsons Online Shopping Review

With my wife getting closer to her due date we were excited to try the Albertsons Online Shopping where they offer to shop for you. They’ll either deliver ($9.99) or you can pick it up ($4.99). However, our experience shows that maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Screencasts from Linux

Looking into ways to do screencasts from Linux I tried Wink, Istanbul, and Recordmydesktop. My requirements were that I could record both video and audio within the same tool. Wink 2.0 isn’t released for Linux yet and it’s the first version to support recording sounds, Istanbul tried to record but didn’t save the sound (and never really wrote the entire file out), but Recordmydesktop did it’s thing beautifully.

Getting Used to a Prototype-based Language

My current position at Move Networks affords me the opportunity to learn more about Javascript. I am quite familiar with class-based object-oriented languages. For some reason it is taking me more effort than I’d like to wrap my brain around using a prototype-based language like Javascript. I mean, I get it but I still don’t see the full usefulness of it (unless really the whole deal is to make it easier to manipulate objects directly; is that really all there is to it?).

Anyway, in my search for understanding I’ve come across a number of ways people use Javascript in class-like ways. But what bugs me about doing this is the inconsistency in how you define your objects or classes or whatever you want to do. Adding methods to an object’s prototype to make them public, switching to object-literal notation, etc. It all just looks ugly to me. So I’ve come up with the following. It’s a mix and match of various methods I’ve seen out there (which are mainly summarized in the comments on a YUIblog post (thank you Eric Miraglia and all those who replied to his post!). I certainly hope people who know more about javascript can comment on whether this looks like a good or bad practice.