Neuromancer, Pluto, LDAP, CA

It’s been a while since I’ve written here: busy, again, unsurprisingly.

Neuromancer

I finally got around to reading “Neuromancer”, the famous ‘cyberpunk’ novel by William Gibson, which has the reputation of having spawned a lot of ‘net culture and the movie The Matrix. My opinion? It’s not a very good book at all. It’s certainly not very easy to read: the deliberately strange jargon is almost impossible to follow at times and the plot is too obscure and shallow to make any real sense. I thought that this was a book that I ‘ought’ to read, given its reputation, but I almost gave up about 1/3 of the way through. I persevered, but only because I don’t like leaving books unfinished. Not recommended.

Pluto

Pluto is not a planet any more. It is a dwarf planet. Or perhaps a mass-challenged planet. Anyway, it seems odd that the classical nine planets are now confined to the history books. But, given that there are many (maybe dozens or even hundreds) of Kuiper Belt objects of a similar size to Pluto, scientifically it has no special status other than the fact that it was the first one to be discovered. Pluto’s still a very interesting object, though: its primary satellite Charon is so large that the two of them orbit around a point in space which lies between the two. I think this means that technically this means they are a double (dwarf) planet system. There are also a couple of additional satellites (Nix and Hydra) which orbit the Pluto/Charon pair.

LDAP, CA

Work-wise, lately a lot of effort has been put into getting our LDAP directory into a good state to be used ‘for real’: much of this work has been done by the PFY, but it’s been interesting seeing the uses to which this setup can be put. Ultimately, we’re going to be serving up Samba for Windows XP machines with LDAP as the authentication backend. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the time when we can stop configuring LDAP, tweaking LDAP and so on, and actually just use the thing!

Something else new which I’ve been investigating is SSL service certificates and being a Certificate Authority. This was initially triggered by the LDAP development, but it has a much wider scope of course. We’ve created a departmental Certificate Authority (CA) and it is being used to sign all SSL services on the network. The CA certificate is being deployed to all systems so that they will ‘automatically’ recognise correctly-certificated services as valid, which will be helpful and give a more polished feel to the way that some services are made available.