Cox Crow

"But I am finding that the Constitution is irrelevant to people of this Administration."
— Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), as quoted in The Nation

2:19:52 PM #
categories: Politics

Minor Optimizations

Two minor optimations can be made to Radio Userland, that should improve the end-user's experience of a Radio site's performance: 1) stop using an image for the permalink, and 2) stop loading images from another host. [more]

1:25:29 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online, System Administration

NAT v. IPv6

Speaking of IPv6: Revitalizing the Internet Revolution, Brett Morgan says

I some how doubt we will ever see people dispense with NAT firewalls. They are too widely used as an easy way to secure a set of insecure operating systems published by a certain Redmond company. Sadly, this will make true p2p apps a pita to build. Which is why p2p apps should work by publishing xml on a pub-sub model instead of a synchronously connected model. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]

I concur with Brett, unless someone can convince me otherwise. NAT fills another need besides addressing the problem of a limited address space: it permits private, non-routable IP networks to connect to the Internet, while ensuring that systems on the Internet can't initiate connections to the private networks. Do you really want your accounting systems to be full peers on the network?

Or, to look at this from a perverted perspective, why assign a routable address to a device if you then place so many barriers between it and other devices that you might as well have not assigned an address to it at all?

NAT doesn't so much break the end-to-end security model as it moves security negotiations to a different layer of the network model.

12:02:22 PM # Google It!
categories: Security, System Administration

Anchoring Days

Yesterday I made a minor change to my Radio Userland #itemTemplate.txt to change where Radio places the anchor for items. Today I made a similar change to the #dayTemplate.txt file, and a related change in my CSS stylesheet.

This is pretty straightforward: add an id attribute to the initial element in #dayTemplate.txt, like so:

<div class="date" id="<%shortDate%>"><%archiveLink%> <%longDate%></div>

I used the %shortDate% macro to create unique ids, but that generates invalid HTML: the ID datatype must begin with a letter (for W3 knows what reason), and may not contain slashes (/).

You can now link to day within the index pages by using a fragment identifier, like so http://www.coxesroost.net/journal/index.html#9/26/2002.

10:38:07 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online