As an experimental work project, my team is evaluating the yubikey as a 2 factor authentication device for login.ubuntu.com. The user interface suggested by Yubico leaves me wishing for something better. Here is an idea I have, please let me know your thoughts.

PHP is a programming language for web applications but Django is a full-fledged framework that provides database abstraction, caching, authentication and a host of other services. Comparing the performance of the two is not a fair, apples to apples comparison. However I want to do it in order to better decide what I should use for an application.

I created a light-weight HTML page, a “hello world” php app (no db or sessions) and a light weight “hello world” django app using mostly default values (sessions are enabled). I then ran the apache benchmark (ab) on the three using a small VPS w/ 512 MB of RAM from localhost (so no latency is involved giving ideal conditions).

I found a great article on using mod_rewrite to send mobile browsers to a special page or site. I modified it to do the inverse as well. You can use the rules demonstrated in there to send mobile browsers to your mobile site and you can use the rules below as an inverse to send desktop browsers from your mobile site to your normal site.

This week two exciting things happened in the open source world. Drupal 7 beta was released for testing and Ubuntu 10.10 was delivered. It just so happens that the timing couldn’t have been better, because Canonical debuted a new feature that lets you test Ubuntu Server Edition in the cloud free for one hour.

I’m excited to share that I’m changing jobs at Canonical. I’ve been working as the Ubuntu.com webmaster for four years. I’ll be changing to a web developer on a different team. More specifically, I’ll be kind of a front-end web developer working on theming and the likes.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

Every release day is exciting in one way or another. Lucid’s was no disappointment. April 29th, 2010 was my 8th Ubuntu release as the ubuntu.com webmaster. Counting testing releases, betas and RCs I’ve participated in about 50 releases.

There are many aspects related to a release. I can only talk about my own perspective, as it pertains to managing the website. Usually, a week or so before release we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the website will look like and people are viewing it on a testing server. Invariably there are last minute changes, and I do mean up to the last minute.

In short, you’re paying for the trust, not the actual encryption. Anyone with the appropriate software, which is widely available for free, can create their own certificate that provides encryption. However, using such a certificate will generate a browser warning when a user tries to create a secure connection. The warning will say something to the effect that “the connection is not trusted.” If you want to avoid the warning it costs something between $50 and $500. But there’s a justification.

Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?

Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:

body {
font-family: sans-serif;
line-height: 130%;
font-size: 91%;
}