Waiting for the Barbarians
Not so much a quote, as the whole damn poem. But when the War on Terror® gets me down I find it very apt.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine Cavafytranslation from the original Greek by Edmund Keeley
Standard Standards.
There is no excuse for not observing the rules of the road. On the Internet, the rules are standards, and on the Web the standards come from W3C. It's thanks to the W3C I have free tools to verify both my xhtml, and my CSS.
Thanks partly to my laissez faire approach getting everything to comply with the standards was mildy icky. There are still a few little insignificant things, but I've done it, I'm finally compliant.
Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. And a feeling of moral superiority, which I'm sure will give rise to riteous indignation whenever a site fails to work with konqueror, or some other !IE browser.
Annoying anyway you look at it.
SSL Certificates always annoy me. For a start ssl certificates is a virtual closed shop. Then there is the pricing. How can a 40-bit cert cost £259 for one year, and £399 for two? And how can a 128-bit cert cost £549 and £949? I mean come on, being a CA is easy... I can do it myself. I can generate certificates which support any bit lengths I desire. I can also generate certs that last until 2031. The only thing my CA key requires is that the user loads my CA Cert. Which brings us back the the closed shop issue.
But the most irritating thing is the fact that I live in a country that can never decide what it's called. Is it UK or is it GB.
But, by way of an aide-memoire, here's how to...
Generate a Key Pair for Apache using OpenSSL
Simple:
cd {apacheconfdir}
mkdir ssl.crt ssl.key
chmod 0700 ssl.key
cd ssl.key
openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
And, when prompted for the Country Name REMEMBER IT'S GB and that the Common Name (CN) is where you shove the site's name.