What I did on New Year's Vacation
Mon 03 January 2005 by Kevin van HaarenComputerwise I had a busy weekend.
First, it’s the turn of the year so I changed out a bunch of my passwords. Even my pgp and ssh private key passphrases changed. Actually took me a while to go to the most common web pages i use and change my passwords. Not to mention all my root and user passwords on my linux boxen.
Then I learned how to setup an Apache DAV server (no not on this server, so don’t bother trying.)
Then I figured out how to setup a wiki server, these are pretty damn cool. I replaced the articles section of this site with a wiki on my SSL pages (not sure why I put it under a secure page.) I used MediaWiki, the same software the Wikipedia uses.
My Wiki feel free to edit anything over there.
Online Music
Slashdot reports that buymusic.com is being merged with the parent site buy.com.
I’m assuming this indicates the failure of BuyMusic.com, and good riddence I say. I looked over the site when it first fired up but never bought a song from them.
IMO, the main reasons for the failures:
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Horribly variant restrictions – I guess buymusic.com decided their customer was the record labels, not the people giving them money. As such they allowed each label to set it’s own restrictions per album. Look at The Who’s Then & Now album. On BuyMusic you can only ...
Electronic Voting
As big a tech geek as I am, I’ve always distrusted electronic voting systems. Especially the current ones being sold. And internet voting is right out.
Voting has some particular requirements. Voting requires both authentication and anonymity. Authentication because you don’t want people voting that aren’t supposed to. Anonymity because you don’t want to be able to track a vote back to the person that cast it.
Openness of the process is another requirement. Voters should feel that the process of voting, moving votes to the counting location, and counting votes is reliable and trustworthy. In ...
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