Awesome SSL client cert fun

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 

Client cert authentication is oddly elusive given the practical value. I found a neat bug:

with
SSLVerifyClient optional
SSLVerifyDepth 3
SSLCADNRequestPath /usr/local/openssl/certs/clientcerts/

I get a request for identification in firefox, no problem. If I choose the right certificate to respond with I get an instant child pid 61501 exit signal Bus error (10). Every click on the “OK” button gets another seg fault. Yay. Magic.

client_cert.jpg

signal_bus_error.jpg
Posted at 00:36:09 GMT-0700

Category: FreeBSDTechnology

Isabella

Friday, May 27, 2011 

Bad video of good guitar at graduation

VID 00010-20110527-2020.3GP

Posted at 20:21:55 GMT-0700

Category: video

Radioactive Mudworms (1991)

Monday, May 23, 2011 

I animated Radioactive Mudworms in 1991 with a program called Infini-D.  The soundtrack was courtesy of David Lenat. It was first published on the QuickTime Beta CD to Apple Developers and then in 1992 re-rendered on a Mac IIfx 40mhz 68040 with a massive 16MB of RAM in this version for the FigTime commercial CD. As I remember it, this took about a week to render on that massive machine.  I’m pretty sure I ray-traced it, but I output to “thousands” of colors as required by the CODEC and so it is hard to see some of the details.

The file is so old that the “animation” CODEC (RLE) used is no longer supported.  I had to boot my old Mac 8600 to read the CD and convert the file to uncompressed, so I could re-compress it with a modern version of QuickTime.  I was greeted with an alert that my last backup was in 2003.  Time flies, but the mac still runs and that OS 9 operating system is still a nostalgic pleasure.  I used it regularly from 1987-ish to 2003-ish, and it is still the OS I’ve spent the most hours in front of.

Digital obsolescence is starting to consume my work history as the past has already eaten the DECstation streaming tapes my MIT work was “archived” on.  Of course, I can still read my preschool notebooks and I’m sure I could still read my parents notebooks.

Infini-D was my favorite 3D program of the time, though it was supplanted by StrataStudio 3D, Turbo-3D, and finally ProEngineer. It had a nice combination of modelling, rendering, and animation tools and was part of a brief “golden era” of 3D most remarkable for VPL and the existential excitement around Virtual Reality, which comes and goes every decade or so as a new generation reads Snow Crash and thinks that they, too, could be Hero Protagonist or Raven and have a chance with someone like YT if only the world truly adopted VR.

I was reminded of Radioactive Mudworms as I spent the weekend trying to teach the basics of video compression remotely to some coworkers who may not have been born when I made this.

The video was encoded at Valley Green 6, in the cube farm for the Advanced Technology Group at Apple.

A very old .mov version: https://gessel.blackrosetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Radioactive-Mudworms.mov

And because technology, here’s an AV1.webm version for the next 32 years given that VP9 may be replaced once Apple gets on board, if they do.

 

BTW, the conversion is

ffmpeg -i Radioactive-Mudworms.mov -vf scale=-1:250:flags=lanczos  -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 0 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 22 -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null && \
 ffmpeg -i Radioactive-Mudworms.mov -vf scale=-1:250:flags=lanczos -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 0 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 22 -pass 2 -c:a libopus Radioactive-Mudworms-AV1.webm

 

Posted at 04:21:18 GMT-0700

Category: CodeTechnologyVanity sitesvideo

Pleasant Post Apocalyptic Sunday

Sunday, May 22, 2011 

DSC02943.JPG

DSC02929.JPG

DSC02936.JPG
The world of the left behinds seems fairly pleasant.
Posted at 18:49:07 GMT-0700

Category: Catsphoto

Security Salve

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 

hi.jpg

feed.jpg
Posted at 14:57:07 GMT-0700

Category: MilphotoTravel

On the Road in Iraq

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 

We took a very nice tour from Baghdad to Basrah by car. The countryside is pretty amazing, from the relative lushness of the fertile crescent to the desert sands of the south to the marshes of the deep south and the distant flare gas fires on the horizon.

Flares_on_way_to_Basrah.jpg

Normal flare gas

Ut oh, blow out…

camels_herd.jpg
Camels in the desert… camels crossing the road:
Posted at 14:46:28 GMT-0700

Category: photoPlacesTravelvideo

Stupidest Dialog Box Evar

Monday, May 2, 2011 

This is the dialog you get in thunderbird if you end up with multiple operations running – such as if you “download all mail” twice without realizing that a previous iteration is still running.

moz-screenshot-34.png

I could not possibly care that a background operation failed (and should be patiently and silently waiting until the other operation finishes, then try again itself; maybe, just maybe letting me know if I’m going to quit or shut down how many operations are pending in a single dialog).

But not only could no user ever care about the information provided by this dialog, it is done so as a modal dialog that steals focus. ZOMG, that’s the sort of user-hating bad design that makes people abandon a package.

Posted at 08:14:07 GMT-0700

Category: FreeBSDTechnology