David Sirr's ...stuff

This being my first attempt at setting up a leopard webserver i was getting a tad frustrated with apache and the SSL setup for one of the websites. Everytime I dropped in the site's config the server wouldn't start, giving a bad passphrase error in the console. Not being able to find an option for this in my SSL config I was going around in circles and getting scared that this would be a show-stopper for our new server, especially after reading so many forum posts saying that SSL in leopard was a nightmare requiring custom builds of apache and openSSL etc... Salvation was found in the Server Admin tool... despite the fact that once you start manually editing the virtual host site files the lovely web config panel ceases to recognise any of your sites, there is a quite useful 'Certificates' button when you select the root node of your server. I had already copied all the related cert files from the 10.4 server to /private/etc/certificates, so it was then a simple matter of choosing the import certificate option and figuring out which files to put in what box. My files ended up being:

• certificate file (*.crt)
• private key file (*.key)
• certificate authority file (*.chcrt)
• private key passphrase (this was the thing that instantly fixed it for apache)

From here it worked like a dream! I hope this will save similar worry to some of you out there...

I've just added a new section in the pages area of the blog with detail of my open source projects that will be kept up to date. So far i've only put up CFGrowl project, but more to come!

When you're the author of second-life. I've recently had to write an application  for work to manage registrations to a private island in second-life. It worked fantastically in development and interfaced  second-life's beta registration API. The problem is that when we launched it we had reports from users that it was throwing errors for hours at a time and would come back randomly, always with the same malformed response error. This is a reasonably high profile project in the education arena with many schools from all over the world participating and second-life staff were involved in the inception phase. So when we logged a support ticket to plead for assistance their staff closed it immediately with, "this is known beta product and we do not support it". Nice response guys! Examination of their API wiki shows it's been in beta for well over 2 years!! As a developer how do they expect us to even bother looking at their platform as being viable when there is no support and no endpoint in sight. A highly disappointingly experience all round...

I've just seen the coolest keyboard ever! It's called the Optimus Maximus and each key has it's own LCD so you can assign any image or character to the keys, it'd be perfect for foreign layouts or hotkeys in applications or gaming layouts etc... Main drawback is it's hefty pricetag of about US$460, which is a bit rich for me! Even more amazing is their future concept keyboard

Amazing game. There seems to be so much hype surrounding this game that it's be seemingly impossible to live up to it... but it does! In case you've be living in a hole, the Call of Duty (CoD) series are first person shooter war games. CoD 4 is the latest installment and is based in the current era and gameplay revolves around playing either terrorists, American marines or British SAS. The single player is fast paced, engaging, diverse, and well worth the effort. But for most people the real drawcard of this game is the online multiplayer with the goal being to level up your character as high as possible, completing challenges and milestones along the way to unlock new weapons, accessories, power-ups, challenges, and game modes. Despite sometimes encountering high latency when connecting to American servers from Australia, the game is best described as digital crack! The ever enticing next level-up being only a few hundred points away draws you into endless successive games, and the game becomes that much more enjoyable as you unlock powerful weapons and scopes for easier aiming, and perks which are like super powers. It's also one of the best looking FPS games i've seen so far on PS3 and the controls are reasonably well laid out and easy to adjust to, not making gameplay like solving a rubicks cube. Overall we'll worth checking out if you into FPS or multiplayer gaming. P.S. check out this hilarious review of the game by zero punctuation