Hellenic Irony

I sense a deep incongruity when I consider that today Greece, the birthplace of democracy, is undergoing an economic and political meltdown that in the end, seems like it will place democracy and free-market capitalism in a kind of no-holds barred cage match.

If you consider that literally generations of Greeks are being asked to bear the burden of the real and alleged sins of the current one, I cannot imagine that there will be any rationale whatsoever left for people in Greece to participate in the economy that is being set out for them. The results of this experiment should prove interesting.

While an election is coming in the next few months in Greece, it is difficult to imagine whoever the victor is having any influence whatsoever on the inaccessible financial oracles that are currently shaping the looming Delphic austerity. To a lesser extent, it seems like the same culmination is emerging in Portugal, Spain and possibly even in Italy.

I am also amused at the seeming nearsightedness of the German body politic: While it is clear that they (along with significant parts of the rest of the EU) resent having to continually open their wallets to bail out economies like the Greek one, I cannot see any way they can avoid the consequences of the seemingly inevitable path of the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) of the EU.

If these dysfunctional continental economies are left to thrash, they will fail, default and inevitably leave the EU in order to manage their economies by being able to hold and devalue their own currencies rather than being lashed to the Euro. When this happens, the market for Teutonic products in Europe will be decimated, and Germany will lose a lot of money. If Germany continues to support these countries in the EU as they have for the past few years, they will lose a lot of money. QED: The Germans will lose a lot of money, regardless of what happens.

Rock on, green energy: Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/19/scientists-create-first-solar-cell-with-over-100-percent-quantum/

The pain of del.icio.us

When I first came across the hostname del.icio.us, I didn’t know what it was, and I wasn’t curious enough to look. When you spend as much time on the web as I do, I jumped right in and joined Delicious when I did find out what it was: A web-based bookmarking service.

Fast a number of years (centuries in Internet time), and Delicious has changed hands at least a couple of times, once to Yahoo, and now it is in the hands of Avos. The new owners seem to have different ideas about what the site should do, but suffice it to say that it does not do what it used to do well, and it doesn’t seem to do anything else well.

This is driving hoards of people to look for alternatives to the old Delicious service. The list of alternatives is long and constantly changing, but I happen do agree with this review by The Guardian: Pinboard seems to be the closest service to the original concept of Delicious, with one caveat; It is a paid service, but unlike many of its competitors, you only pay once to join it. The Guardian article has a interest inset about how this is an interesting model for a one-man tech startup, and the founder of Pinboard makes a comment that at one point, in order to continue his business, he needed some money, not a lot of money, and his payment scheme fits this need.

While what I’d really like is some form of a self-hosted, web-based bookmarking service, it seems to me that Pinboard is a good value for the less than $10 it costs to join.

Translations

Heard from some random political operative in Iowa: “Local opinion leaders”. Translation; people who tell you what to think.

The Challenges of Securing Web Applications

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get my existing Bugzilla installation up and running on the current OpenBSD server. I didn’t recall until much too late that by default OpenBSD runs a chrooted instance of the Apache web server. What this amounts to in the end is that everything that your web application depends upon, beyond the web server itself, needs to be duplicated under the root of the chroot container. In the case of Bugzilla, this ends up being quite a hassle, if it is possible at all.
This leads to discussions about what the best way to run a secure service is. The options include a chrooted instance, “jails” as implemented by FreeBSD, and full-on virtualization as done by QEMU, Xen, VMWare, etc. I was interested in some comments I came across that discussed how chroot only isolates a portion of the filesystem, but the kernel, memory, network stack etc. remain shared between the chrooted service and the rest of the system, whereas jails provide a fuller separation but at the cost of requiring many more changes to the entire system that might also result in more security holes.
Regardless, on further reflection, Bugzilla seems to be a patchwork quilt of dependencies and perhaps not worth the trouble to drag into a chroot container. Perhaps there’s a more suitable and monolithic application available to replace it.

Blog is Back…

After I switched my server from FreeBSD to OpenBSD, I discovered that I had to go from a normal, typical Apache 2.2 installation to the chrooted Apache 1.3 installation that OpenBSD uses. This delayed the migration of some of the web applications I had been hosting, especially this WordPress blog but thanks to this final helpful tip, it is back up and running under OpenBSD.

I’ve felt quite a bit of pressure to get this blog running again shortly after the migration to OpenBSD, since I was quite surprised to hear that some people actually read it

Another little step

Thanks to the lack of a current, up-to-date VM (i.e. the Cog JIT VM) for FreeBSD, I took some time to look back at GNU Smalltalk. I built it from sources, and despite it failing some simple initial tests, it does indeed run an older version of Seaside:

GNU Smalltalk serving from www.gadallah.com

Inching along

Took a few minutes to try out the RFBServer remote frame buffer/VNC package with my Pharo/Seaside image. Lo and behold: It works! I can access my Pharo image across the net. An important first step to deploying and maintaining Seaside applications.

VNC access to Pharo Smalltalk

Now I just need to find a VM that will support it on FreeBSD…

The Lay of the Land

Since part of my desire to replace my existing WordPress blog with my own involves moving the content of the existing blog into its replacement, it would be nice to know how the WordPress data is laid out. Fortunately the developers of WordPress are being quite accommodating:

Detailed descriptions can be found here.

Doing it Yourself

For many months, I’ve had the inclination but not the time to migrate this blog away from WordPress. Not that there’s anything wrong with WordPress; It is a well proven and capable piece of blogging software. My only incentive to move away from it is that I don’t feel geeky enough using it. You just install it and run it and that’s it. You don’t have to look under the hood or anything.

For most people, that’s fine, but when I combine it with my desires to:

1. a) do something meaningful using Smalltalk, and
2. b) learn something about web based application programming

it naturally leads me to systems like Swazoo, Seaside, Iliad and Aida/Web. I don’t yet know which way I’ll go, but what I’d like to have is a homebrewed (or at least a heavily customized) blog built using Smalltalk on one of the preceding frameworks.