I may never go to the moon, but it’s nice to know that if I do my Speedmaster will still keep ticking.
I like watches. I particularly like watches that have some history or character about them. Watches that are designed for a purpose, not just to look good.
Omega have released a new version of their Seamaster PloProf. The standard Seamaster is a nice watch, good enough for James Bond, but the PloProf is like a Seamaster on steroids.
The first PloProf (the name comes from plongeurs professionnels – French for “professional divers”) was first released in 1970 and it was rated to the man-crushing depth of 600M. It also looked like no other watch. The crown was on the other side and under a protective shield to allow freer wrist movement and to protect against any accidental changes at depth.
At the 2 o’clock position is the orange bezel-release security pusher. You need to push this to move the bezel, again to prevent any accidental asphyxiation on the sea floor.
The new PloProf has all these same features as the original but doubles the depth to a giant squid-dwelling 1200M. You can also get it with a “Sharkproof” bracelet.
Nice to know that if you drop it in the bath, or get your arm bitten off by a shark it will still keep time.
Miguel found this screenshot in an old email from when we were working on permissions and preferences in OpenX:
The subject of the email was “Permissions & Settings: Learn From The Masters”
Love how there is now a UK version of Wired? Hate how it doesn’t have Scott Brown or Steven Levy?
I do.
I mean, Warren Ellis is great and all but I miss my favourite regular writers from US Wired.
Well now I’ve finally found a use for Yahoo Pipes, that cool but strangely pointless thing Yahoo built a couple of years ago.
Luckily Wired post all their magazine content online (an inferior format, unworthy of Wired’s awesome graphic design, but I’m not going to buy both editions of the magazine, especially as they share some of the feature articles) so I created a pipe to suck down the Wired RSS feed and filter it for articles by Scott Brown and Steven Levy.
Now I have the best of both worlds.
You can get an RSS version of the pipe here.
Image: Uwe Hermann
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. I’ve done a few WordPress upgrades now so it usually goes pretty smoothly but I know from experience how difficult some people find upgrading web apps which is why I thought this comment on the WordPress blog was interesting:
… this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.
This is something we’ve talked about doing with OpenX so I’ll be interested to see if it works when the next WordPress version is released.
It seems I’m not the only one who thinks the new PHP support in NetBeans is pretty cool.
Roumen’s blog points to a post on the zend forums:
My company bought 3 3-year licenses for Zend Studio earlier this and up until a few weeks ago, there was nothing else on the market that even came close to meeting our requirements. Then Netbeans released 6.5 with PHP support. Right out of the gate, their PHP and JavaScript support is on the whole, so much better and faster than Zend’s product, with so many fewer bugs, that despite the fact that we spent $1000 this year investing in Zend’s product, and I personally have spent time with Zend’s tech support and developers (good guys, very helpful), I am assisting my team in migrating over to use Netbeans for most of our development.
and a comment from Demian there really hits the nail on the head:
As a Zend license payer for many years I believe I’m entitled to share my opinion on the emergence of netbeans as an Eclipse and Zend Studio killer, at least as far as PHP support is concerned.
This is not a superficial “ide war” as suggested above, but probably more a reflection of the fact that PHP developers have had to endure low quality IDEs for years, so the relief felt now that a decent product, netbeans 6.5, has appeared on the market, is tremendous. Netbeans is far more than just decent though, it is clearly head and shoulders above Zend Studio for Eclipse, you only need to watch the videos or use it for 5 minutes to realize.
The Zend Studio product on the other hand maintained the same bugs in its product for literally years, releasing updates less than once a year, and showing an apparent total lack of interest in responding to the requests of its customers.
Then with the move to Eclipse customers were burdened with an even slower, more bloated and memory hungry app with possibly thousands of unnecessary configuration options and with an odyssey of undertaking required to get debugging working. I’m not surprised, given the context, that there is a lot of emotion being expressed now that a decent product is finally available.
For years we had to put up with Zend Studio’s bugs simply because there wasn’t anything better. Now there is.
I first blogged about the PHP support in NetBeans at JavaOne this year. At that stage it was only available as an Early Access release and was a little too buggy for serious use so I always found myself having to switch back to Zend Studio. Since then the development builds have been getting better and better and now there is a NetBeans 6.5 Release Candidate available.
The improvement in the last few months has been massive and the PHP support has reached a level of maturity such that I have no problems using it as my main IDE. Last week I made heavy use of it on a project at work based on Zend Framework and not once was I forced to switch back to Zend Studio. Code completion and source navigation works great, debugging is integrated nicely with Xdebug (which is much easier to get working than the Zend debugger), plus you get all the other NetBeans goodness like great subversion support and local file history, source highlighting for loads of languages, a nice CSS editor and refactoring support. If I did much JavaScript programming I’m sure I’d be impressed with the JavaScript support, too. It also means I only need one IDE for all my PHP, Java and Grails projects and can take advantage of all the NetBeans plugins available.
According the to the roadmap, NetBeans 6.5 is due for release on November 18 but if you’re still using Zend Studio or even emacs or vi I strongly recommend downloading it and giving it a go.
We all know about The Book of Mozilla but Firefox 3, which was released today, has a cute easter egg when you type about robots into the address bar with all sorts of robot references.
The 2008 conference season is in full swing and I’m a little sad I couldn’t make it to the MySQL conference this year as I had a great time in 2007 – but not that sad because the reason is I’m going to JavaOne in May and don’t think I could have got approval for two conferences in as many months. 
Still, I can live vicariously through all the people blogging the event. Artem Russakovskii’s notes on the Scaling MySQL – Up or Out? keynote have some interesting numbers:
Question One: Number of MySQL servers
Facebook 1,800 (900m/900s)
Question Three: Number of Web Servers
Facebook 10,000
Question Four: Number of Memcached servers
Facebook 805
That is one hella memcached! This post from last year by a facebook engineer lists their number of servers at 200 giving a total of 3TB of cache. If we assume they are using the same kind of kit then they now must have a memcached size of about 12TB!
Scaling is something I’ve been investigating at work recently and we will potentially be dealing with big numbers ourselves so it’s encouraging to know open source applications like MySQL and memcached can scale so massively.
This site has some beautiful images of old computers including an amazing picture of a Cray CDC 6600 that seems to have huge glowing green eyes. This was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969 and looks like something from the set of Blake’s 7.
They also have a picture of the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer(!) from 1969. According to wikipedia:
It sold for $10,000, weighs over 100 pounds, and is used for storing recipes (but reading or entering these recipes would have been very difficult for the average cook as the only “user interface” was the binary front panel lights and switches). It had a built in cutting board and had a few recipes built in.
There is no evidence that any Honeywell Kitchen Computers were ever sold.
No shit.
Update: The images are from Mark Richards’s book Core Memory – A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers.
Tomcat has quite a good page in its documentation about getting SSL working and it does a reasonable job describing how to generate a self-signed cert. However, when it comes to what must be a fairly common use case of importing an existing key/certificate pair into a keystore it avoids the subject with phrases like: “For more advanced cases, consult the OpenSSL documententation.”
The problem is really java’s keytool. It does a good job generating self-signed certs, importing existing certificates you want to trust or importing a certificate received from a CSR generated by keytool. But when it comes to importing both the certificate and key into a keystore things get a little messier. For example, say you already have a certificate you are using on your apache web server and you now want to use it in your Tomcat server. You might think you can do something like:
keytool -import -alias tomcat -keystore <your_keystore_filename> -file <your_certificate_filename>
but that just won’t work. It turns out the only way to import an existing key/certificate pair is to do it programatically. Get the details on my wiki.
Oh, another thing to watch out for is to make sure you always use the genuine Sun Java keytool. The thing that comes with gcj and is probably first in your $PATH will only make you cry.
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I may never go to the moon, but it’s nice to know that if I do my Speedmaster will still keep ticking.
Themocracy