Rainbow Chard

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22nd December 2014 · 9:50 am

Unless you run a busy website, Apache‘s MaxClients setting probably isn’t something you think about very often. If not, then look in your Apache 2.2 config and you’ll find a block like this¹—

    StartServers              5
    MinSpareServers          10
    MaxSpareServers          30
    MaxClients              150
    MaxRequestsPerChild   10000

This setting, along with ServerLimit, controls the number of simultaneous connections that Apache can handle. Above this limit, connections are queued until slots become free. Apache will tell you about this with a message in its error log that looks like—

[Sun Dec 21 01:35:59 2014] [error] server reached MaxClients setting, consider raising the MaxClients setting

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14th October 2014 · 10:21 am

It’s several weeks now since Google announced that they are phasing out support for certificates signed with the SHA-1 algorithm. The end result will be that, starting in Q1 2015, SHA-1 certificates with long expiry times will be treated as completely invalid by Chrome.

Unfortunately, upgrading to SHA-256 certificates will break Internet Explorer on pre-SP3 versions of XP in a horrible way. Users will get the IE Generic Page of Awfulness, making it look like your site is down.

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17th June 2014 · 1:32 pm

On 16th June 2014, the Scottish Government finally released a draft copy of the Scottish Independence Bill. The Bill contains a copy of the transitional constitution for an independent Scotland, which is full of interesting stuff. I’ll try to pick out what I think are the most important bits of the Bill and comment on each one. I’ve abbreviated some extracts where the content is technical or just not very interesting. Despite that, this is a very long post. Don’t feel like you have to read the whole thing!

For the impatient, here’s what I found most interesting:

• ‘The people are sovereign’—sounds great, but doesn’t mean much
• Parliament’s power to legislate is ‘subject to the constitution’—but it’s not clear what happens when it does something unconstitutional
• Parliament is required to try and get nuclear weapons out of Scotland
• In a fight between domestic and EU law, the EU always wins
• Scots law which isn’t compatible with the ECHR is automatically ineffective
• Most notably: there’s no indication as to how the constitution can be changed (other than by the people that are writing the permanent one)

Of course, fundamentally this document is all about votes: the referendum isn’t far away, and there are clearly clauses here that are designed to secure votes from particular people. I’ve tried to stay away from the politics as much as possible to concentrate on the law.
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2nd May 2014 · 12:24 pm

A couple of years ago I started teaching piano to an eight-year-old girl who could barely play a note.

Yesterday her mother posted this video of her playing and singing ‘Someone like you’ by Adele, which I transcribed for her a couple of weeks ago.

Watch and enjoy. This is why I love teaching piano.

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5th January 2014 · 4:13 pm

Recently I’ve noticed that, every so often, my iPhone spontaneously opens the app store page for some stupid game or other. It’s usually when I’m reading a blog with advertising on it, or looking at pictures of kittens. Sometimes it happens from Safari, and sometimes from apps serving their own content. It seems that I’m not alone in finding this annoying, and it looks like it may affect Android devices too. Worried (as others are) that this might be some novel strain of malware, I decided to do a bit of digging, which revealed that one of the embedded advertising networks is being an arsehole.
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17th December 2013 · 3:37 pm

I’ve always had a latent interest in the law. Ever since my political awakening I’ve been fascinated by the invisible tendrils of a strange and powerful system that reaches into every aspect of life. It seems bizarre that only in recent years have its layers of rules, procedures and decisions been open to easy inspection. As a layperson I was attracted by the apparent cold logic of it all: every situation gets reduced to a result that is absolutely and provably correct and consistent (of course this is wrong, but more of that later).

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3rd September 2013 · 6:03 pm

It’s been almost two years since I wrote my ranty debunk of the British ‘sovereign citizen’ / ‘freeman-on-the-land’ movement. I’m relieved to say that, in that time, the craziness has subsided a little: no more videos of ordinary citizens making twats of themselves in court; nothing in particular from ‘commonly known as Dom’ and his ilk; no exponential rise in peddlers of half-baked ‘legal’ advice; zero UK media coverage. The post itself now sees 5-10 visitors per day.

For your amusement and, well, further amusement, I present a selection of feedback I’ve received on my little diatribe. Some are extracts from published comments, while others are drawn from those that fell below my very low standards for approval (mainly where a fake or invalid email address was given). Although I can’t claim to receive hate mail that ranks high on the Dawkins scale of fuckwittery, I hope this little selection makes for a smile or two.

Please feel free to imply [sic] wherever needed.

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