diary at Telent Netowrks

I've not been writing much lately, because I haven't had much (a) to#

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 13:11:42 +0000

I've not been writing much lately, because I haven't had much (a) to write about, (b) time to write it in. More (b) than (a), in fact.

Oracle error messages, n in a series of most-positive-fixnum: 

:; owm      
Exiting
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at oracle.ewt.lwAWT.BufferedApplet.<init>(Compiled Code)
        at oracle.sysman.emSDK.client.appContainer.WebApplication.<init>(Compiled Code)
        at oracle.security.admin.wltmgr.owma.OwmaApp.<init>(Compiled Code)
        at oracle.sysman.emSDK.client.appContainer.WebApplication.main(Compiled Code)
Done.

The error message actually means "cannot connect to X server". Isn't it obvious? It also means "we don't accept any of the standard toolkit options", of course.

It turns out that we actually want to be using the Oracle Enterprise Login Assistant for this instead anyway. It has basically the same deficiency but doesn't insist on displaying a splash screen, so can actually map its window and get on with answering requests without user input.

Some notes about importing existing SSL certificates into Oracle#

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 17:08:07 +0000

Some notes about importing existing SSL certificates into Oracle Wallet Manager:

So in our particular case,
  1. Download the Thawte CA cert from http://www.thawte.com/serverbasic.crt
  2. Convert to PEM: openssl x509 -inform der -in ~/serverbasic.crt -outform pem -out thawte.crt.pem
  3. Make a wallet: openssl pkcs12 -noiter -nodes -export -certfile ~/serverbasic.crt -inkey ../ssl.key/www.foo.com.key -in ../ssl.crt/www.foo.com.crt -name 'friendly name' -nodes -noiter -out /tmp/e1/ewallet.p12

Most of the time spent finding this out was actually in translating the "incorrect password" error message into "I can't load this wallet because it doesn't include the CA cert". Obvious in retrospect. Sure

Time passed#

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 14:34:48 +0000

Time passed ...

Paid projects calming down a little, so today was housekeeping day for#

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 01:35:00 +0000

Paid projects calming down a little, so today was housekeeping day for some more of the free stuff.

Immediate priorities for, say, tomorrow, are to understand what entomotomy does or doesn't do, and hopefully to get it into a state where it does something useful.

I'd write something amusing here, but the truth is I'm tired and would rather get some sleep. I briefly also considered writing something bitter and cynical about the darker parts of ANSI CL, or this afternoon's fight with cvs error messages, or even Oracle (a rich seam of source material which I don't think will ever really run out), but the truth is I'm just too happy (for, it must be admitted, substantially unrelated reasons) to summon the necessary bile. So, nyer.

Some day I will learn how to release new versions of stuff into#

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 15:54:40 +0000

Some day I will learn how to release new versions of stuff into vn-cclan. Today's trick (repeatedly) has been to forget to do the cvs commit before making the tar file. And to upload the wrong tar file at least once, I suspect. Not sure how that happened

Still, today's db-sockets 0.57 fixes a bug in yesterday's 0.55 (and all previous versions, in fact) when used with SBCL 0.7.7 or any other compiler that actually checks the syntax of defgeneric forms

Went to the Consume meeting#

Sun, 15 Sep 2002 21:47:45 +0000

Went to the Consume meeting. Consume is the not-entirely-local local community 802.11b wireless group (it's in London; even line-of-sight I doubt I could get a 50 mile point-to-point link).

Consume Live is a lot like you'd expect it to be from the flavour of the mailing list discusions: that is, it's a loose coalition with almost as many reasons to participate in a wireless network as there are people who want to, and it meanders gracefully towards nothing in particular, occasionally falling into the tar pits of legal arguments or needless techy fugues. Blood fugues, almost.

But we got in a couple of discussions about the aspects I find genuinely interesting: (a) it has a Wiki which needs some fairly active love and attention (I have a thing for Wikis, as regular readers know) and (b) service discovery.

It appears that I wrote half of and then forgot about a September 15th#

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 17:14:47 +0000

It appears that I wrote half of and then forgot about a September 15th entry, which subsequently posted itself when I rsynced the htdocs directory for some other reason. Oh well. I'll fix it up at some point

I guess from context that "The Bourne Identity" is a film. Given that every time I read the title my first instinct is to assume it's an sh function that returns its argument, there is probably no hope for me. Um.

At last I have wireless at home (and in the back yard, and in the street behind that about as far back as the corner of the block). The PLX thing that I'd wasted

so much time

trying to get working on and off over the past year is now in the bin, after I happened into PC World yesterday and saw they were selling real PCI-PCMCIA adaptors for £25 (compares with £21.74 mailorder from dabs.com, so not an unreasonable instant-gratification-tax)

(All indications are that the PLX stuff does work for other people; the most likely explanation for why mine doesn't is that the hardware itself was b0rked)

Stuff happening lately:

I got email from a friend asking about book recommendations for Knowledge-Based Systems. It's not exactly my area of expertise (OK, so I'm a Lisp programmer. That doesn't have to mean I know anything much about AI) so I spent a few minutes with Google and found (among other, more relevant things) this interview with Ask Jeeves

⟪Aug 2002 Oct 2002⟫