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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.

    Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.


  • Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

    • A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
    • Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
    • Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
    • Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
    • Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
    • If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.


  • Port 22 is the default SSH port and it receives a TON of malicious traffic any time it’s open to the whole internet. 20 years ago I saw a newly installed server with a weak root password get infected by an IP address in China less than an hour after being connected to the open internet.

    With all the bots out there these days it would probably take a lot less time if we ran the same experiment again.











  • Well there’s extreme weather and there’s extreme weather. There have been reports that the yacht was struck by a waterspout, which is basically a tornado but over the water. I’m not sure if the strength of it has been reported or not, but given tornadoes have been known to throw trucks and train cars it doesn’t surprise me that it was likely powerful enough to capsize the yacht.

    Unlike trucks & trains, a sailboat is designed to roll side-to-side. One current theory I’ve read is that the waterspout damaged the mast, causing it to unbalance the yacht (and possibly damaging the hull). The combination of being unbalanced and being slammed by the waterspout likely rolled the hull enough to flood it within seconds. Even if the mast wasn’t damaged, a tornado striking the yacht broadside would have likely been catastrophic depending on the strength of the storm. And waterspouts that powerful are still rather rare so I wouldn’t blame the captain for not anticipating it.

    There are now some reports as well that the yacht sank in roughly one minute. If that’s the case then it means the yacht indeed rolled very quickly and took on a huge volume of water in very little time, so much that it was unable to right itself or that its bilge pumps could contend with it. Again, not something that could have really been anticipated.