Hacker's ramblings

Today, I'm combining to previous post into a new one. I've written earlier about going fully Let's Encrypt and the problems I have with them. Now that I'm using them, and those certs have ridiculously short life-span, I need to keep automating all possible updates. That would include the IPMI 2.0 interface on my Supermicro SuperServer.

Since Aten, the manufacturer of the IPMI-chip chose not to make the upload of a new certificate automateable (is that a word?), I had to improvise something. I chose to emulate web browser in a simple Python-script doing first the user login via HTTP-interface, and then upload the new X.509 certificate and the appropriate private key for it. Finally the IPMI BMC will be rebooted. Now its automated!

So, the resulting script is at https://gist.github.com/HQJaTu/963db9af49d789d074ab63f52061a951. Go get it!

A perfectly valid sitemap.xml can be split into multiple files. For that see, the specs at https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html. This is likely to happen in any content management system. For example WordPress loves to split your sitemaps into multiple dynamically generated parts to reduce the size of single XML-download.

It should be an easy task to slurp in the entire sitemap containing all the child-maps, right? I wouldn't be blogging about it, if it would be that easy.

Best solution I bumped into was by Viktor Petersson and his Python gist. I had to fix his sub-sitemap parsing algorithm first to get a desired result. What he didn't account was the fact, that a sub-sitemap address can have URL-parameters in it. Those dynamically generated ones do sometimes have that.

Go get my version from https://gist.github.com/HQJaTu/cd66cf659b8ee633685b43c5e7e92f05

My thanks go to Mr. Petersson and Mr. Addyman for creating the initial versions.

Two Zoltáns, Gócza and Kollin are maintaining a superbly good webiste about UX-myths, uxmyths.com.

Given the excellent quality of the site, they list common mis-beliefs people have regarding websites and they thoroughly debunk them with references to actual measured information.

Just by reading their list we learn, that

• People don't read the text you post (myth #1)
• Navigation isn't about 3 clicks, it's about usability of the navigation (myth #2)
• People do scroll, on all devices (myth #3)
• Accessibility doesn't make your website look bad and is not difficult (myths #5 and #6)
• Having graphics, photos and icons won't help (myths #7, #8 and #13)
• IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT THE DETAILS! (myth #10)
• More choices make users confused (myths #12 and #23)
• You're nothing like your users and never will be! (myths #14, #24, #29 and #30)
• User experience is about how user feels your site (myth #27)
• Simple is not minimal is not clarity, they are three different things! (myths #25 and #34)
• ... aaaand many more

Go see all the studies, research and details in their site.

And thank you for your work Mr. Gócza and Mr. Kollin. Thanks for sharing with all of us.