SHA-256 SSL certificates

Written late in the morning in English • Tags: , , ,

The technical details of an SSL certificate are up to the issuing CA, which is understandable. I was still surprised when my SHA-256 CSR resulted in a SHA-1 certificate back in April, when reissuing it due to heartbleed. But I didn’t pursue it at the time.

Now that Google announced sunsetting SHA-1-signed certificates by the end of the year, the issue became more pressing. Fortunately instructions for reissuing GeoTrust-based certificates — such as the RapidSSLonline ones — were already available. (more…)

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WordPress 4.0 “Benny” is out!
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When I click on Preview in the WordPress editor, Fluid makes a GET request to the web server. It still uses the action address specified in the #post form (post.php), just not the POST method. But none of the form values are included, so I end up staring at a listing of all posts instead of the preview I wanted. Maybe it is getting confused by the fact that the #post-preview “button” is actually an HTML link (an a element)? There is also some JavaScript that attaches to the click event of the link (see the doPreview() function).
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Muuttivat ehtojaan mokomat, niin eihän sieltä Blogilistalta viitsinyt pysyä poissa. Hyvä niin.

Pois Blogilistalta

Kirjoitettu aamulla suomeksi • Tägit:

Blogilistan uudet käyttöehdot sisältävät vieläkin outoja rajoituksia:

  • palvelun kautta saatua sisältöä ei saa välittää edelleen
  • palvelua ei saa käyttää tekijänoikeudella suojatun aineiston levittämiseen

Tämän blogin juttuihin saa kuitenkin linkata ja niitä voi lainatakin, kunhan lähde mainitaan. Omasta puolestani sillä ei ole väliä, miten olet tämän blogin sisällön alunperin vastaanottanut.

Omistan tekijänoikeuden näihin omiin teksteihini, enkä halua siitä luopua. Rikkoisin ymmärtääkseni käyttöehtoja, jos jättäisin oman blogini yhä Blogilistalle.

Näppärä tapa seurata blogin harvoja juttuja on tilata syöte. Itse luen blogeja ja muutakin materiaalia selainpohjaisella Google Reader-ohjelmalla.

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I’ve had a number of ideas on articles for this blog, but a) I didn’t write them down and b) the ideas didn’t choose to occur at times when I’d be idling by a keyboard… I’ve started a new section in my task management software to try and keep such ideas alive for the future.

Offline blogging

Written late in the evening in English • Tags: , ,

Call me an Internet addict (it might be accurate, actually), but I’m very used to having broadband Internet access always. I consider having available on-demand (some might say “constant”) access to my Internet-connected servers the norm. I read my mail on-line (in plain text, no less). My RSS aggregator is on-line on the web. I contact my friends on-line on IRC.

Yet there are times when I’m not online. Most commonly this used to be while commuting to and from work. I’d be on the train for about an hour each way. My favorite pastime for the commute was reading. But sometimes I would have liked to write down some thoughts, either for the blog or maybe for an email reply.

I knew about offline blogging tools but I had never really looked into them. I had experimented with Windows Notepad and the Blackberry memo application. Both are fine for writing the bulk of the text, but the “cleanup” tended to be too tedious: there are a number of fields you still have to fill in before a blog entry can be published or an email sent out.

I recently went through the weblog clients listed in the WordPress Codex to see what my options were. I chose to install w.bloggar on my laptop. With just a little bit of configuration (and a couple of tweaks on my non-standard WordPress installation to accommodate language selection) I had successfully published a test entry. Quite painless so far.

With w.bloggar I can set all the common post attributes (title, tags, timestamp) without any of the tedious cut-and-paste that would be necessary without a dedicated offline blogging tool. Once I’m connected to the Internet I can easily open each saved post and publish it. (That statement will be validated by the fact of this post appearing on my site…)

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Sencer did a new round of weblog software benchmarking. It’s an interesting read even if you are not looking to switch from what you are using.

Multilingual blogging

Written in the mid-afternoon in English • Tags: ,

David Sasaki (oso) wrote on the wp-polyglots mailing list with some questions for an article he is working on about “multilingual, multicultural, and transnational blogs.” I answered him and I also wanted to post here about blogging in two languages.

As you may have seen my blog now respects the language settings of your browser. You will not see posts in languages that you have not enabled in your browser (unless your settings would rule out all posts). If you want to see all posts, just make sure your browser is configured to requests both English and Finnish content. To exclude a language, check that your browser settings include all the languages you do want to see.

As an example, if your browser is configured to only prefer content in German (de), you would currently see all posts (since I don’t have any in German). If you’d rather not see the Finnish content, you can add English (en) to the list of preferred languages. This would result in the Finnish ones to be excluded (just force a reload of the page).

Read on for the questions and answers… (more…)

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I’ve learned that many people don’t look at the time of a post. Well, I do — and it disturbed me that the times on my posts didn’t match the time of day that I was writing them. So I’ve adjusted the blog part to use US Eastern time again, until I’ve actually moved to another time zone. Outside the blog you will continue to see Finnish (a.k.a. East European) time.