Gerbrand on ICT » Various

Diginotar

gerbrand — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:58:35 +0000

I just updated my (virtual) server, on which this weblog is running too. The update log was rather interesting this time:

Setting up tzdata-java (2011j-0ubuntu0.11.04) ...
Setting up ca-certificates (20090814+nmu2ubuntu0.1) ...
Updating certificates in /etc/ssl/certs... WARNING: Skipping duplicate certificate brasil.gov.br.pem
0 added, 1 removed; done.
Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d....
updating keystore /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts...
  does not exist: /etc/ssl/certs/DigiNotar_Root_CA.pem
done.

For those living outside the Netherlands: DigiNotar was a issuer of ssl and pki certificates, similor to Verisign. Their main customer was the Dutch government. Turned out DigiNotar was hacked by Iranian hackers, but not only that, the hack happened a few months ago but they decided not to inform their clients. In the mean time, Dutch governmental communication wasn’t as secure as you might hope.
Of course the Dutch government did perform audits on DigiNotar – sort of, they outsourced the audit to the great company PwC, who verified that all of their procedures were correctly written down in Word documents with proper headings and jargon that pleases business consultants (quote from the DigiNotar website: ‘Certificering ETSI door PricewaterhouseCoopers (november 2010 – november 2013) ‘) Of course they didn’t look at the actual software and IT security – why would anyone care about such technical details?

For more information, I found the following timeline.

Google buys Instantiations

gerbrand — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:51:12 +0000

A while a go I used to do Swing development, and I sometimes used the tool of Instantiations to develop my GUI. I quite liked the tool.
Before that I used Visual Basic and Visual Studio frequently. I never fully understood why people would fiddle so much with pixels, stylesheets, colors etc when you could just design your GUI visually.
Well, Instantiations has GWT design tool as well. I recently tried it out very shortly. The tool looked very nice.
I just recently Google bought Instantiations. Will this mean developer productivity in frontend development is cool again?

McDonalds running Linux

gerbrand — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:21:24 +0000

A unix like OS on their video-screens outside, in shopping center Hoog Caterijne, Utrecht. At least something else then those Windows 95/98/NT screens I often see running at terminals, when they’ve crashed.

Apple: 32 bit or 64 bit

gerbrand — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:26:29 +0000

I am about to download the latest version of Eclipse IDE, Helios. Naturally there are packages for various types of platforms. I know I have a Mac, however I also had to choose between 32 bit version and 64 bit version. There was a time I exactly knew these kind of things, but then I also used to build my computer myself.
Fortunately, there’s a Apple support page which exactly tells me exactly that: How to tell if your Intel-based Mac has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor

Springsource and electric cars

gerbrand — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:18:56 +0000

Just read an article on electric cars in of the Saturday’s edition of the NRC – a Dutch newspaper, which can be found online at the authors blog (in Dutch). Some entrepreneur in electric cars is mentioned by the name of Alef Arendsen. The name did not immediately rang a bell, but when it was mentioned got his wealth after the sale of a opensource software company he co-founded I recalled. Alef Arendsen was part of SpringSource, early on and made Spring big in the Netherlands (hm, I think I’ve read about the framework in about 2004 on javaworld, found it pretty cool – too bad I didn’t do anything anything with it by then). He quit SpringSource about a year ago because he wanted to do something else.
He has now started a company in electric cars: The New Motion, which he mentions in his blog: Challenges when introducing new technologies to the market. Quite a surprising move, but then again, you could say Electric cars are to traditional Petrol cars as Spring is to EJB2/J2EE.

German electric car, 1904, with the chauffeur on top

(Above picture from Wikipedia – of course electric cars aren’t actually new, just as the idea dependency injection or reversion of control existed long before spring)

Very old accounts

gerbrand — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:47:30 +0000

I’ve been on the Internet since 1997. I was also on Fidonet since 1995, until I got high speed internet (2Mbit shared) in 2000.

I keep all my passwords in a text document on a (hopefully) secure place and I just went to a few very old accounts to see if they’re still active. Not surprisingly, of many of them even the domain-name doesn’t work anymore:

I browsed to the first page of my saved passwords. Here are a few services for which I had an account, but that no longer work:

Ten – as a vaguely recall, a online gaming service. Ten.com no points to some porn site, so that’s certainly not right.
Zone – also a gaming site. Could be that site has become MSN Gaming zone, but there I can just login using my hotmail account.
Boo – some startup, no idea what they did.
mijn.wereld.nl – some sort of hyves, facebook, etc. in the early zero’s. I knew one of the developers, I think he also worked for WorldOnline. Domain now points to something completely different.
Big Brother – a show that got quite popular.
filelibrary.com – Probably a site to download drivers. No longer active.
Napster – hopefully book publishers don’t make the same mistake as the music industry did.
www.workspot.net – some sort of primitive Google Docs/ Dropbox as I recall.
nytimes.com – of course that site still exist, but my login isn’t recognized anymore. Probably pointing to my university mail account.

Well these were some accounts a browsed to, fun enough. Fortunately, not all accounts registered in that time were idle: my slashdot account is still active and Slashdot is of course very much alive. Same for Yahoo. ICQ also still works, but I don’t use that anymore. Actually, Slashdot I don’t read regularly anymore either.

Gen Xers, Gen Y’s and the Millennium generation

gerbrand — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:46:24 +0000

From the newsletter of TheServerSide.com I received a whitepaper of Instantiations, a GUI building tool. While I haven’t read the entire paper yet, the introduction was quite intriguing;

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have evolved from command-line interfaces as user needs have changed. Today’s computer users require sophistication in an easy-to-use interface; most users have gotten very comfortable in a menu and mouse-driven world. Gen Xers, Gen Y’s and the Millennium generation who haven’t known a world without computers demand the total package—lightning-fast, feature-rich software with an intuitive, easy-to-use, visually attractive wrapper.

I am intrigued by the terms: Gen Xers, Gen Y’s and the Millennium generation. Apparently, these terms are now main-stream, even in the software sales industry.

Presentations

gerbrand — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:16:24 +0000

I am subscribed to several technology related newsletters, including those of InfoQ. Very often these newsletters feature very interesting content. Unfortunately, a increasingly large portion of those newsletters now includes broadcasts of presentations. With the emerge of Youtube, broadband and Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, the trend is that information on the Internet should be in movies or sound.
That’s quite unfortunate for me. I often prefer to read something, rather then listening and watching something, at least to get information. Also, all too often I’m reading those newsletters in the occasion I can’t bother other people with sound. Well, could use a headphone – but I don’t have any .

I wonder if other people have that problem too?

JFall on Google Guice

gerbrand — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:47:55 +0000

Yesterday I’ve submitted a paper to NLJUG, the Dutch Java User Group for the JFall 2009 conference. Together with colleagues we worked on a proposal for a very nice presentation on the Google Guice. Like many programmers we were quite skeptical on yet-another Dependency Injection/IC framework. We all know Spring, and dependency injection is now also part of the J2EE 1.5 / EJB3 standard. What makes Guice worth looking at?
In our talk we’ll explain (of course) what Google Guice is, and how Guice compares to Spring and EJB3. Hope to see you on JFall!

Architect

gerbrand — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:09:19 +0000

Do you call yourself architect, while you’re developing software or telling other people how to program? At least in the Netherlands, calling yourself Architect is illegal when you’re not a officially registered architect:

Tip: ‘professor’ is not protected title. Call yourself professor while creating technical designs and choosing frameworks and you’re fine.