Exciting Times

We live in exciting times. Myself especially. I've been working recently on a number of projects. I'd like to post a good summary of everything, but I hesitate to since I'd also like to deprecate this blog engine. So I'll write some stream-of-consciousness type babble and then move on with my life.

WordPress is on my bad side. It seems to be under active development, and they have gone full nagware on me. That is to say, that every time I log in to the admin panel, there is a banner stating there's a new version. I had to go so far as to write up an instruction guide as to how to do the upgrades since I could never remember and I needed to do them so frequently. Also, Matt Mullenweg's concept of how the GPL works and how it interacts with commerce doesn't sit well with me and therefore I don't want to inflate the usage statistics of his software. Instead I'll probably develop my own blog engine, using some BSD-licensed framework that I can develop to my own taste. Then no one needs to hear about my eccentric ideas.

My Kerberos/LDAP Auth project was a failure. Not a complete failure, but enough of a debacle that I gave up on it. It turns out that Windows 7 is broken in some way that I have not been able to remedy, specifically in how it requests/retrieves/generates Kerberos tickets for samba share access. I've set it to use only the arcfour cipher, but it still requests aes256 cipher. Then it kills its samba connection and spits out an authentication error. There are no logs or events. I plan to replace this setup with a Samba4 AD PDC, at some point when I fix my application hosting platform.

My virtualization initiatives have been a wash. The hypervisor hardware I have is all garbage and I have zero budget for new hardware. There is some progress on the Virago, in that I've taken it apart and got the original stator out. I haven't put the new one in yet. Work on the '88 Corvette Transmission overhaul has been slow going. I keep needing specialty tools that I don't have.

Owncloud has some promise but I am unhappy with the software. It is far too fragile to update without risking data. I really don't like that. It seems to stem from a lack of a decent database library and perhaps no reliable ORM layer. I don't know enough about the internals to tell. I just know that I had to brute-force the upgrade from 4.0.7 to 5.0.10.