Yahoo buys del.icio.us

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Coming into work this evening I find an email from Tom the Architect pointing me to this entry on the del.icio.us blog. Apparently Yahoo! has bought del.icio.us.

I rubbed my eyes a bit and did some looking around. Yep, Wired has an article, as does Reuters India, Techdirt, and a slew of other sites.

Its nice to know de.icio.us and Flickr will be around for a while. It will be very interesting over the next few months to see what other aquisitions are going to occur. According to EFYTimes, Google has its eye on Riya, the photosharing site that can uses face recognition technology to recognize people in yoiur pictures and tag them for you.

Anyway, congratulations to the del.icio.us folks. Well deserved.

Current Reading Queue

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I’ve not been very motivated to read lately for some reason, but I have still been buying books – a very dangerous thing when I’m not motivated to actually read them. So far, I’ve accrued the following books, which I hope to read in the order presented here:

  1. Unite the Tribes: Ending Turf Wars for Career and Business Success by Christopher Duncan
  2. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
  3. God’s Debris : A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams

I’m in a huge reading slump. I’ve read so much this year that it is no longer a relaxing thing. Hopefully that will change soon.

Creating a self signed SSL Certificate – A Brain Dead Script

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I have an SSL instance running in the house so that I can access my home Subversion installation remotely. The certificate I generated for this site expired a few months ago and I have procrastinated regenerating it because I seemed to remember it was complicated and I didn’t want to spend the time.

Well, it winds up its not that bad. I found a great summary of the commands necessary in order to do it, and threw together a very quick script to string them all together in order to create SSL certificates for a general host name and figured I’d throw it up here.

I generalized it thinking that I could have two certificates for the virtual hosts I have running on my home server. Unless I’m looking at old information, however, it doesn’t seem that you can have different SSL certificates for virtual hosts running on the same IP address under Apache 2. If you can, and someone knows how to configure Apache to do so, please let me know.

Here’s the script I used to generate the self signed SSL certificates for the house. Super simple. Now I just have to remember to source the script ;).

#!/bin/bash
# Cert4Host.sh - Generate SSL Certificates for a host name.

HOSTNAME="$1";

if [ -z "${HOSTNAME}" ]; then
echo "Usage : Cert4Host.sh HOSTNAME";
exit;
fi

if [ ! -e pass.key ]; then
openssl genrsa -des3 -out pass.key 1024
else
echo "Key already exists ... skipping ..."
fi

openssl rsa -in pass.key -out $HOSTNAME.key
openssl req -new -key $HOSTNAME.key -x509 -out $HOSTNAME.crt -days 999

sudo cp $HOSTNAME.key /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.key
sudo cp $HOSTNAME.crt /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.crt

Don’t forget to change your Apache SSL configuration to point to the new certificate and key (<hostname>.crt and <hostname>.key, respectively) and restart Apache.

MySpace Screw Up

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Ever have one of those days where you are messing around and accidentally hit the wrong button and email everyone in your contact list an invitation that you didn’t mean to send?

I’ve had a MySpace account for a while on which I had two friends both of which are my kids. This morning I decided to look around to see the kinds of things one could do on MySpace and found that it integrated with Google Mail to import contact lists. I wanted to see what kind of integration there was, so I started looking around (I didn’t know that Gmail offered API’s and I was curious). It asks me for my GMail login information, and I type it in. A couple of random clicks later, and I find that I invited everyone in my contact list to Myspace! Yes, everyone, including mailiing lists that I read and contribute to periodically.

This is what you get for not paying attention to what you are doing while you are clicking around. I want everyone who received this message in their inbox to know that this was a complete accident and was not meant to fill your inbox with even more unwanted messages.

I have also deleted the account so that I do not wind up with a ton of contacts on it. The sole purpose of the account was to participate in conversations with my kids, not to invite everyone in the world to MySpace.

This was a completely stupid mistake that was made because I was not paying attention. Moral of the story: Be careful when investigating functionality on sites like this, especially where email integration is concerned. Social networking applications like MySpace are really cool, but one mistake can have some pretty widespread ramifications if you are not paying attention.

I want to apologize to all who received this invitation and my lack of attention that caused you to get this message. It won’t happen again.

2005 Highlights – The Year in Review

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With December starting and knowing its just going to fly by before I know it, I’ve started going through the photo album and picking the pictures that I think are the highlights for me for 2005. Its been a really great year, with the following events being the definite high points:

These are just a few of the highlights. 2005 has been a great year. I’m looking forward to what 2006 has in store for us.