Ian Dennis Miller

I’m working on a REST interface at the moment, and there’s nothing I need more than a quick utility to test out various functions.  Curl fills this role perfectly, but I have run into a strange problem that interferes with multipart/form-data form POSTing.  Let me explain some of the evidence I’ve collected, as well as tell you a workaround I learned from an IRC conversation.  In the end, this comes down to the HTTP 1.1 100 CONTINUE response code, which plays a critical role in HTTP 1.1 POST.

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Freedom, glorious freedom.

Once upon a time, I took a class based on  a single question: “what is freedom?”  We meandered through US history, identifying several distinct stages in the evolution of the definition of “freedom.”  I was horrified to learn, during a discussion, that so many of my classmates wanted what I will call “freedom from information.” Ah yes – Professor Sandage had a way of bringing the ugliest truths to the surface, for all to witness.

On the one hand, I can understand this desire for freedom from information: telemarketing, advertising, spam, the scrolling headlines at the bottom of a newscast…  well, any unsolicited attempt at selling things you don’t care about.  On the other hand, I think we need more information instead of less, and we need effective tools to filter and manage that information so we only see what we care about.

The term “freedom” is muddied by historical contexts, but also through the process of etymological erosion.  With that said, I want to take a moment to discuss the expression, “free as in speech, not beer.”

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I just upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.5 and it’s great, but I hit one major snag along the way.  Although I thought all of the Intel Macs shipped with the new GUID partition scheme, it seems like my early-generation Macbook Pro used the old Apple partition scheme, and unless I reformatted my drive as GUID, I couldn’t install 10.5.  Fortunately, I spent the day backing up my old drive, so I just forged on, and once 10.5 was installed, I used the Migration Assistant to transfer my old home directory.

It worked…  mostly.  Partially by design, I chose to not migrate some command line tools, but now I find that every so often, I want to accomplish some task and I can’t … quite … do it, because I need to reinstall something, or perhaps reconfigure something.  I’d say 95% of the old functionality is still there, but the remaining 5% comes up often enough that it feels like something more than 5%.  The feeling is this lurking suspicion that I can’t trust my computer to do something that I know it used to be capable of, and it reminded me of a disease called Semantic Dementia. I don’t have semantic dementia in the sense of the neurological disease, but I’d like to start this off with a story about it.

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Yesterday, I  grabbed an 802.11b/g/* router from Chinatown ($32 – can’t beat that) and set out to use my laptop’s wireless network card.  I hadn’t done this before because I was (justifiably) concerned about wireless security, so I wanted to make sure that a breach of the wireless network wouldn’t turn into a breach of the wired LAN (which includes a printer and a few sensitive servers). This post collects some of my research and observations, and it concludes with my recommendations for how you can secure your own wireless network…  or at a minimum, it tells you how you could if you were willing to spend $32 on a new wireless access point.

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