This has been a busy month and, what pleases me, very productive. Apple’s recent announcement managed to surprise in many ways, which is delightful as well; if you’re still on Mountain Lion consider upgrading, Mavericks got it right in so many places, that it’s even difficult to tell which changes are most compelling.

I’ve lagged on links, however, so catching up:

Technology

• Short and to-the-point document on SSL/TLS deployment best practices
• SSL self-signed certificate creation one-liner:

openssl req -nodes -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem \
   -out cert.pem -days 356

• Don’t loose variables defined in a loop within a pipeline — possible ways
• base64 implementations in awk + od, bash augmented awk and pure bash
• Capistrano 3 — what’s new
• Modern Perl — Interesting on-line book on perl
• What exactly does nohup and what it takes to become a daemon? Daemonizing summary:

1. fork (first time) -- so we aren't a group leader, and let 
   the parent exit.
2. call setsid() -- to become leader of a new session. 
   This call only works if we are not a group leader. 
   This new session has no controlling terminal.
3. fork (second time) -- so we aren't a session leader 
   (and thus can't regain a controlling terminal), and let 
   the parent exit.
4. cd to root directory -- so we don't prevent other directories 
   from being umount-ed.
5. set umask to desired value (optional) -- because we could've 
   inherited a mask we didn't want.
6. close stdin, stdout, stderr (or just reopen them to point elsewhere)

• What nohup does:

- If stdout and stderr are connected to a terminal, 
  redirects them to nohup.out
- ignores SIGHUP

• Query against over 1500 global DNS servers

English

• The Russia Left Behind. A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin. — absolutely marvellous graphics representation of the article in New York Times.
• 6 quests to fix English’s messed-up spelling Some succeeded. Some failed. Some made things worse.
• Style: Johnson: When is a rule not a rule?
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer — way too long, chewing over and over different aspects of impulsive and stupid act of overly naive and extremely self-confident young man in a futile attempt to idealise and glorify him. Read better To Build the Fire by Jack London: concise, well-balanced, thrilling novel that conveys incomparably more sense and wisdom.
• Harvard Business Review’s: Can you invent something new if your words are old? We’d better not reject new words.

Other

• I’ve finally found where the phrase “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine” comes from! Appears it’s from RFC1925:

(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.


But references to flying pigs appear even in Lewis Carrol’s Alice:

"Thinking again?" the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly...." — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9.


• Keeping fingers crossed for The Economists view to be true: Russian intransigence has helped Ukraine’s integration into Europe
• Excellent post in Russian on evolution in life and as religion sees it
• Very cool Honda’s ad: