Wasted two hours today attempting to HTTP POST some content with a client certificate using curl on OSX Snow Leopard. It somehow would not show its cert to the Apache server.

In an act of desparation, I tried the exact same command with the exact same client certificate on Linux, and it worked.

So I downloaded MacPorts, built curl from there on OSX, and it works. No idea what happened, Google is of no help. I’m mostly posting this that others with my problem can find it.

They thought: why not simply requiring everybody to store logs, just in case a crime happens and the authorities would have a much easier time if they could access the logs when they needed them.

The German constitutional court disagreed and requires that all such logs be deleted as soon as possible.

Link to story (in German).

If you want to know, read through this slide presentation put together by Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It aggregates a wealth of data.

One thing that struck me particularly: it says that 45% of all people speak a language other than English at home. That is more than the third of people who were foreign-born.

Mind you, the NoSQL community still has a lot of work to do, years and years of work, InfoGrid and many other NoSQL technologies non-withstanding.

But I remember that when I first heard about what SQL is and what it does (particularly, what it can’t do), I thought: “this can’t be true. How many billions in revenue and market cap depend on that oddity?”. That was about when SQL was only about half as old as it is now… which makes this even scarier. (Try: no recursive queries. No abstract data types. No inheritance. No (meaningful) distributedness. No … <insert many other things here>. And how many thousands of lines would you like to write on object-relational mapping today? … )

So with that hat on, I’m proud to display this image as a bumper sticker, which comes from a presentation by Tim Anglade. May SQL never come near you If it does, run!

Disclaimer: I don’t build payroll systems for a living. If I did, I might think otherwise. But I think they have all been built, and the new stuff does require thinking much more along these lines.

Mike Arrington is complaining about fragmentation of his personal media:

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge…

Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services…

He says the problem is decentralization, but I think he means fragmentation, rather than decentralization. After all, if he didn’t like decentralization he could simply “just do Facebook” (or whatever single site) and there would be no problem. But like most, he doesn’t seem to be interested in picking a single centralized service.

To which Kevin Marks responds:

To solve the social conundrum we need the equivalent - agreed standards in widespread use so that we can generalize across sites. Fortunately, we have these. We have OpenID and OAuth for delegated login; we have XFN, other microformats and Portable Contacts for public and private people connections; we have Feeds and Activity Streams for translating social actions between sites.

This enabling social infrastructure means that we’ll be able to have a new generation of sites that enhance our web experience through social filtering without our connections being centralised in a single company’s database.

Amazing that everybody thinks decentralization is the right approach, and Kevin is certainly right that the continuing adoption of these standards helps de-fragment our fragmented social media universes.

When I disagree is in that I think these standards are necessary, but not at all sufficient. Example in point: OpenID. Just because two sites both implement OpenID, it does not mean that if I log into the first, I’m automatically logged into the second. It does not mean that the GUI looks the same for OpenID at both sites. It certainly does not mean that both sites even know I’m the same person, even if I used the same identity provider. Similar issues arise around all of the other “social connectivity” standards, and even more so when put together.

What Mike Arrington wants, and very reasonably so from the perspective of the user, is massive simplification. We’ve made huge strides in the past 5 or so years in building up a technology stack that begins to address some of these issues, but we are far, far, from being done to get to that simplification Mike asks for. The biggest problem is that nobody can quite articulate how it would look like, other than “simple” in some fashion. Kind of hard to build technology for that kind of specification …