andyr's blog

"In God we trust. Everybody else we verify using PGP!"
-- Tim Newsome

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt, British Prime Minister, November 18, 1783

Quick guide to generating self-signed certificates for use with Apache et al.
Replace <servername> with the fully qualified name of the server you're generating the key for.

I've developed and maintain a few websites for friends over that past few years, just for completeness I decided I ought to document the fact (displaying another string to my bow - so to speak).

• Rainydayz (this site) - my personal website.
• Miniz - a sub-domain of this, which I use for testing and development.
• Rainydayz.net - my wife's website, currently underutilised, but we have plans to take advantage of her cross-stitching skills.
• Renegade Minis - the club site for the Mini club of which I'm a member.
• Anime Girls - for my daughter, a hobby site.
• Driving Laine S.O.M. - a site for a lifelong friend of my wife who runs a driving school.

As originally published in "The Independent"

1. "Ghastly."
   Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.
2. "Ghastly."
   Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.
3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf."
   Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.
4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes."
   To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.
5. "You managed not to get eaten then?"
   To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

Kjære alle sammen,

For et syn!

Jeg står nå ansikt til ansikt med folkeviljen.

Dere er folkeviljen.

Tusener på tusener av nordmenn, i Oslo og over hele landet, gjør det samme i kveld.

Erobrer gatene, torgene – det offentlige rom med samme trassige budskap:

Vi er sønderknust, men vi gir oss ikke.

Med fakler og roser gir vi verden beskjed.

Vi lar ikke frykten knekke oss.

Og vi lar ikke frykten for frykt kneble oss.-

Sandy Smith - Reproduced from The Transverse Myelitis Association Journal

Having had TM for almost 22 years, I still find it very difficult to accept what happened to me 6 months ago. I feel as though I experienced a miracle. I hope that my story will give hope to other TM sufferers.

Courtesy of Douglas Adams

A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.

I've previously documented the process "Building Enigmail for SeaMonkey in Ubuntu 8.10" and the problems which I had to solve to get a working system.

I then went on to build an AMD64 build of the Enigmail plugin as I'm using the AMD64 install of Ubuntu 8.10. And, of course, I started off by following my earlier recipe to build the i686 32-bit version.

This went well, until I installed Enigmail, where I encountered an error that indicated the enigmime modules was unavailable.

I like SeaMonkey - I've used it for years (since the days of Netscape Communicator), but I also like using GnuPG signing and encryption of my mail. There's no enigmail package for Ubuntu 8.10 so I had to go and roll my own.

Here's the procedure I followed to build my own Enigmail package for Ubuntu :

I like the Mozilla suite but missed having a working EnigMail. As I'm running Debian on an AMD64 and there's no working EnigMail for i386 I figured I had a snowball's chance in hell.

I tried working from the Debian packages for IceDove and from the packages from the previous release for Mozilla-EnigMail without success.

I then found a link to a page with info on how to achieve this, so I've reproduced it here along with downloadable configuration files and an installable .XPI for Debian Etch AMD64.