andrelop's blog

I’m widely know (by my peers, not globaly know, as you may guess) for being a well controlated person when it comes to spending my sacred and beloved money. Actually, I’m so well controlated that I’m sometimes seen as someone who hates to spend money.

Sometimes I’m almost convinced that people thinking that way about me are right, but then I get back to my conscious mind and realize that they think like this because people tend not to agree with what they don’t practice and, generally speaking, society has been continuosly teaching them to become as consumists as possible.

Obviously, I’m not completely protected against consumism, as I’m human and have as much desires as anyone else, but I think I’m doing well on keeping myself from being taken to the path which lead us to bit the bullet and spend our money on something.

What contributes to this control also demonstrates how we’re used to learn better only from mistakes, as I already spent too much money on things which I initially thought I desperately needed, but which after I realized weren’t actually all that much needed after all.

I have been trying to avoid wasting money on an e-book reader for months. At the beggining it was a piece of cake, as there wasn’t a real option (mind you that I live in Brazil, not in the USA or some other so called first world country). However, in the last few months, the scenario has been changing and it seems that these days there are actually some options available.

I have been researching privately about options for months and have become well aware of all the advantages and disavantages of all the options available today. Sorry, I won’t be pointing the right option to you, as your best option probably will be different from mine and recommending things isn’t the point of this post.

Technically speaking, the options available today seems to provide me with what I need. There are no doubts that almost any of them would be good (but not all of them would be “the right”) choices and actually would represent a real improvement over the current situation.

So, one might ask, why not go ahead and just buy the damn thing ? For most of the people out there, it would seem to be the right thing to do, as I would be doing conscious and well researched purchase after all. Well, I would be doing something good for myself for sure, but the government actually would need to show me some respect and prove me they have some respect for me as well.

Amazon, for example, is shipping the Kindle for other countries and Brazil is one of them. I would surely just go ahead and buy it the day the shipment was announced and that was almost what I did. What prevented me from doing so was the insane/absurd takes government is applying on anything one wants to import from another country.

Even after converting the price from dollars to the local currency (reais), the price is something like three to four times higher that the original price in the origin country. It’s insanely prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens and one could wonder why this is so when this is a device used basically for reading. Mind you that the government has big tax reductions for importing books, for example, which are seen as culture related items and so get to win some advantages over other non-culture related items.

To summarize it all, if you want to convince yourself how not to spend money on something, even when you really want to, just do the math regarding the amount of the taxes you would need to pay and I assure you there will be no regrets when latter you think why you did not bought it.

Recently I’ve been dealing with requests for LDAP directories configs which clearly demonstrates how little people understand about directories and what they are capable of doing. A significant amount of people I know seems to really get it wrong when it comes to what they want from a directory.

Actually, they somehow think that a LDAP directory will do whatever is needed for their application to store, retrieve, validate, authenticate and even take decisions based on no data provided at all. These people think that one should just deploy a directory using the minimum effort approach and suddenly everything will just work.

They don’t seem to realize that for their application to make use of a directory it should be prepared to do so. They can’t accept it when they are told that the directory won’t just work and by some unknow enchantment get their systems data stored, validated, authenticated and, shockingly for them, that it won’t make their credentials consolidated so lots of different services will out of the box just start working using the same username/password pair.

Also, some people don’t understand the difference between a LDAP directory and a single sign-on (SSO) system. They don’t realize that a directory won’t, by itself (i.e. without additional software and some respectable amount of tweaking), provide them the ability to authenticate against it only a single time and have their credentials shared among all their systems.

That’s it. Said. Don’t get me wrong. All that was metioned above is possible, but it isn’t done by LDAP alone. LDAP is just a bunch of protocols and a directory is only one nice place to store information. What will be done with this information, how it wll be treated and how it could be used to produce meaningful results are almost always up to the application and/or to some “middleware” or added plugin/overlay/connector/whatever.

Next time someone ask you to “install LDAP so I can get rid of all my different username/passwords and use only one instead”, be afraid. Be very afraid and present him/her some theorical knowledgment regarding the topic. Or, better said, insert some clue into his/her brain.

I wanted to let my readers know that I migrated from my previous hosting to a new one. There was nothing wrong with the previous one, but I wanted to go out shopping for something cheaper and still as reliable.

Lots of friends gave me good recommendations for Linode and the price was tempting so I thought : “Why not ?”.  The most noticeable advantage, apart from the price reduction, was the speed improvement, as I got myself a more powerful VPS and then now I have more room for new experiments.

Later I also noticed some little but very welcome improvements. These are just minor details, but together they account for a great experience. So, I’m here to let you guys now that if you want a good, reliable, speedy, and still cheap hosting provider for your VPS, just give Linode a try.

I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.