Benedict Evans · April 18, 2019
With the caveat that Benedict Evans is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which funds AI based businesses, take this with a grain of salt. I think his first two sections on “What is ‘AI Bias’” and “AI bias scenarios” are worth reading, the third on “AI bias management” reads a bit more like “by be scared about AI?” and didn’t appeal to me.
But go for it, read the first two sections. I’d encourage it.
Michael E. Kirkpatrick · April 21, 2019
This is one of those things I thought I’d figured out years ago — turns out I had another thing or two to learn.
The root of my quandary was this, I wanted all the permutations of my domain mekstudios.com to be redirected to https://mekstudios.com. My test cases (what I typed into a browser window) were as follows:
What I found was that some of my test cases weren’t redirecting appropriately. So, notes for future me on how to properly configure things.
My first mistake was not to include www.mekstudios.com as a ServerAlias. When properly configured, my VirtualHost file (/etc/apache2/sites-available/mekstudios.com.conf) should include the following:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mekstudios.com
ServerAlias www.mekstudios.com
</VirtualHost>
Be sure your VirtualHost file includes both the ServerName and the www version as the ServerAlias.
I use Certbot to create SSL certificates — sure beats the days of buying SSL certificates from various places online and configuring them.
You can have Certbot add “Redirect” code to your VirtualHosts file which I recommend. Then, go back and check your mekstudios.com.conf file and make sure it looks like this. Remember I want all traffic to redirect to the non www version of the website.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =mekstudios.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www.mekstudios.com
RewriteRule ^ https://mekstudios.com%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
In the default RewriteRule that Certbot inserts, the last line is: RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVERNAME}%{REQUESTURI} [END,NE,R=permanent], that’s what I’ve changed.
As mentioned above, Certbot is a wonderful tool. If you’re like me and you’ve neglected to add the correct ServerAlias, you can run this handy command — thank you Certbot Command documentation — to get yourself sorted out:
certbot certonly --cert-name mekstudios.com -d mekstudios.com,www.mekstudios.com
Last thing to do from a configuration standpoint is to redirect everything in the htaccess file. Something tells me I could be doing something smarter in the VirtualHost file — tell me if you know what that would be. But I know this works:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mekstudios\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://mekstudios.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]
Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"
My hypothesis is that adding the last three to the VirtualHost file would do the trick, but I’m not going to mess with it any further this evening.
Your work isn’t done until you’ve checked everything. So run through your test cases again:
Each should now point to https://mekstudios.com. If not, go check your work.
Lastly, run your domains through the Qualys SSL Labs checker:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=mekstudios.com
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.mekstudios.com
You should get an “A+” on the mekstudios.com and an “A” on the www.mekstudios.com domain. Something tells me the “A” for www.mekstudios.com is because I’m not doing Strict-Transport-Security for that subdomain. And the plan is to leave it as is for the moment.
Why did I write this, and why is it so informal? I was reminded recently that writing is good, and writing can be helpful. So why not write? And perhaps future posts will be less first-person and more instructional, but this is what I have for now.
Want to give me some input or have some feedback? Shoot me an email.
Note: Thanks to the author of this Website for Students page — it was helpful in troubleshooting my issue and realizing some of my errors and misconfigurations.
John Gruber · Daring Fireball · April 24, 2019
It’s hard to believe that the President of the United States seems to be exempt from accountability. The only accountability seems to be whether or not he gets re-elected. Why is that? Government has other checks and balances, and has certainly stymied some of his goals and objectives. But my question is this, do we allow the behavior and actions we’ve seen from President Trump to go without consequences? Do we allow anyone who becomes President of the United States to act as he has acted in the future? I hope not.
I resonated with this quote from Tom Nichols that Gruber pulled from Twitter:
But there’s an argument, internal to us, that Trump should be impeached as a lesson in civics, as a reminder that trashing the rule of law and discarding your oath is not cost-free. That’s a political question. Until now, I’ve said it’s probably a bad idea for the Dems.
But political expediency is a bad idea too. At some point, not impeaching means that nothing matters in our constitutional life, and that nothing ever will matter. Impeachment, if it follows a careful rollout and debate, can negate that legacy.
And maybe, years from now, what we need is an asterisk in the history books that says: “There was a penalty for violating the oath of office, and engaging in these high crimes. And President Trump survived due only to the corruption of a single party.”
Randall Munroe · xkcd · April 24, 2019
Michael E. Kirkpatrick · April 24, 2019
There used to be a great resource out on the Internet located at www.convert-unix-time.com. It allowed you to see the current Unix time, convert a Unix timestamp to a human readable date, or convert a date string to Unix time. That resource has since disappeared, so I decided to recreate a new version of the site.