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Showing posts from April, 2012

Giving up Facebook

Giving up Facebook was difficult. I had to face up to the fact that I was thinking about it pretty much whenever I was taking a break.  I started to realize that Facebook took up a fair amount of headspace and time.  Since I don't smoke I don't go outside.  Left with the choice of drinking yet another cup of unhealthy coffee or finding a distraction on my PC I found Facebook curiously addictive. What did I like about Facebook?   Well I analyzed this carefully and thought about the value proposition.   Ultimately I realized that Facebook offered two things - lots of  shallow electronic interactions and meaningless flash animation games.  Since I earn enough to buy a decent PC (or console) and really hot games the games on Facebook offer little.  The only game that meant anything to me was Fairyland and that only because it promised to save the rainforest.  PC games are better without Facebook.  As for meaningless social interaction ...

Three steps to create a self-signed certificate in Apache for Ubuntu 11.10

It is very simple and quick to create a self-signed certificate on your development machine. Of course you would never use this on a production server because self-signed certificates are vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.  You will need to make sure that you have the ssl-cert and libapache2-mod-gnutls packages installed. Step One : Use the ssl-cert package to create a self-signed certificate.  This will create the certificate files in /etc/ssl which is where the Ubuntu default Apache configuration expects to find them. make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil --force-overwrite Step Two : Active the SSL module and the default SSL site using the convenience wrappers: a2enmod ssl a2ensite default-ssl Step Three : Restart Apache service apache2 restart