Het Bijstere Spoor

While OS/X's WebDAV implementation is quite slow, it is mostly pretty decent. The client uses the little used Chunked transfer encoding for PUT requests, which allows it to send big files without knowing exactly how big the file is going to be. A request like this looks like this:

PUT /image.png HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
User-Agent: WebDAVFS/1.8 (01808000) Darwin/10.2.0 (i386)
Accept: */*
X-Expected-Entity-Length: 10316
If: (<opaquelocktoken:44445502-c253-02e6-7198-45b36c96e8c7>)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: Chunked

While this is a perfectly legal HTTP request, webservers choke on it. Both Nginx and Lighttpd respond with HTTP 411 Length Required. This would have been valid for HTTP/1.0 servers, but if they claim to support HTTP/1.1 they must accept these requests.

Apache + mod_php does this fine, but just recently I got a report from someone using Apache + fastcgi + php. In this case the request body never arrived in PHP which can unfortunately result in silent data loss.

So I guess that's a bit of a warning, so far OS/X WebDAV only plays nicely with Apache + mod_php servers.

About a week ago, I moved to South Korea. While trying to share some video with the homebase (check my other blog). I wanted to upload some video's to youtube, only to be presented with the following message:

After binging it (or is it bang? I prefer bang) it turns out that any site with more than 100.000 users must require users to identify themselves with their real name and an 'identification number'. Youtube has instead blocked commenting and uploading altogether for South Koreans. I can't find much information on the subject other than some ZDnet articles.

I find this a bit scary. I personally enjoy my anonymity on the net.

For the same reasons as Mr. Asa Dotzler, I'm ditching Google search for Bing.

Especially after looking at "Google Dashboard", and seeing how much of their applications I'm using already, I figured it's probably not a bad idea to at least spread my personal information among a couple evil corporate entities rather than just one.

The first things I'm noticing about Bing is that it appears to give much higher precedence to recently updated pages. It also seems to adhere to the Accept-Language header, which means I don't have to weed through Korean interfaces to switch back to english.

If you don't hear back from me, I'm either a happy user or completely forgot and unknowingly switched back to google.

I needed to kill a little bit of time, so I decided to write Conway's Game of Life in HTML.

Try it!