Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
Centralising authentication on OpenLDAP does not remove the credential problem: it moves it from the local password to the channel and the directory's configuration. A technical note on slapd, syncrepl, SASL/TLS and the places where security is actually decided.
Read moreTechnical notes on what keeps a high-traffic music portal standing in 2004: server farm, load balancing, the CMS, and the community services (chat, forum, webmail) that produce most of the requests.
Read moreSubversion 1.0 (23 February 2004) treats a commit as a transaction and versions directories. Technical notes on the Berkeley DB backend, the mod_dav_svn transport over WebDAV/DeltaV, and branches built as copies.
Read moreWhat it takes to connect a Python application to a card payment gateway that ships SDKs only for ASP, PHP and Java: a server-side encrypted handshake, a shared secret, HTTP GET transport, and the card number that never touches the shop.
Read moreThe state of WEKA in mid-2003: the ARFF format, the bundled classifiers (J48, NaiveBayes, SMO), and why in quantitative clinical research the validation protocol weighs more than the individual algorithm.
Read moreTechnical notes on a master-slave architecture for a learned society's membership data: an authoritative LDAP directory on site, encrypted replication to a web front-end in hosting, an open-source stack.
Read moreFreeBSD ships kernel, userland and documentation in one source tree under the BSD licence. A technical note on the practical consequences of that model versus assembling a Linux distribution, as of the 4.8 release.
Read moreNotes after a day spent discussing open source in public administration: the problem is not how much a licence costs, but who holds the data formats, the code, and the continuity of the service.
Read moreThe Open Source Definition sets ten criteria a licence must satisfy for OSI certification. The approved licences sit along one axis: strong copyleft, weak copyleft, permissive.
Read moreAn application server with an object database and a content management framework keep content, presentation and workflow separate. Technical notes on Zope and the CMF, and on why the Open Source approach holds up against enterprise products.
Read moreTechnical notes on the Insight Toolkit, the C++ library funded by the National Library of Medicine under the Visible Human Project: template architecture, dataflow pipeline, CMake build and BSD licence.
Read moreWhy a content management platform should treat multi-channel publishing as a chain of XML transformations, and what it actually takes to get there in 2002.
Read moreThe dual-licence model of MySQL, Qt and Berkeley DB rests on the GPL's reciprocity. A technical anatomy of a 2002 mechanism.
Read moreThe questions put to the Pisa panel already have a measurable answer in 2002: filed licences, foundation governance and third-party market share, not opinion.
Read moreTechnical notes on using Linux, Apache and GPL licensing inside a technology park near Pisa, in the spring of 2002.
Read moreBash 2.05a is a free rewrite of the Bourne shell that extends POSIX.2. Writing portable scripts means choosing when to lean on the extensions and when to stop at the standard.
Read moreWithin a few years R has become a practical tool for analysing high-dimensional gene-expression data. Technical notes on why a free statistical language fits microarrays, and on what the Bioconductor project is trying to standardise.
Read moreJabber routes messages and presence between independent servers via dialback, and bridges the closed networks with transports. Technical notes on a streaming-XML protocol in 2001.
Read moreAn editorial archive with several editors needs explicit publication states and per-transition permissions. DCWorkflow, in Zope CMF, models this as a state machine, kept out of the content type code.
Read moreWhat it takes to serve a high-traffic editorial site on a fully open-source stack: object database, acquisition, page templates and scaling with ZEO.
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