PixBlog

[rolygate]

Steve, some fine stuff there in the Champagne pictures category. Am in awe of your powers of consumption and analysis. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page, below the pictures, and you’ll see the information I’m referring to.)

Oysters: tend to agree with you on the slime score. However, have you ever tried smoked oysters? To die for, dear fellow. Of course you must have, an epicure of your class - but I expect you had enjoyed a little too much Bolly at the time and couldn’t remember much the following day. No matter. Personally (mainly because decent smoked oysters are never to found when you fancy some), I tend to go for grilled oysters.

With this cunning method, you don’t even have the bother of opening them, since they usually open themselves under the grill. And, if time is short, there’s always the microwave!

Must try Cava some time; Rioja is my favourite tipple - after rum naturally - so I’ve nothing against the Spanish. As you say, shame about the lack of Bolly pix on the site; Stolly as well, of course. I don’t think LordPrice has any Russian sources, though. Did I ever tell you about my trip to Moscow? Been?

One point though: in the penultimate paragraph, you mention “…charming ladies who clearly know how to enjoy themselves and their escorts.”

I wonder if you actually meant to say that? A Freudian slip induced by too much Cava, no doubt.

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[rolygate]

I found a solution to the security certificate problem. It involved endless research, countless emails, hours online and huge expense (well, about £12 a year). The answer: a new IP. The original problem: everybody on the server is on the same IP, which is the standard arrangement in web hosting.

But, if you get yourself a unique IP, then you can have your own SSL certificate - problem solved. Actually, you then have to pay $XX per year for a certificate if you want one, but I haven’t mentioned that to Lord Price yet (or the honorary accountant, which is probably of more import). So: front up a very small amount of dosh for a new IP, and maybe a bit more for a certificate, and it’s problem solved.

The shared/unique IP question is quite interesting, so I might do a bit more on that next time round.

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[rolygate]

Struck a problem with the site certicate logos - the ‘Secured by…’ etc logos that show who audits the security at the shopping cart end of the site. The problem is this: if you are an independent operator who sets up your own store, on any old server, you can get a certificate to show that the route out to your merchant partner’s credit card processing facility is secure (assuming it is, since it will be audited first - at least by those whose certificates are actually worth having).

However, if you are located within an entire secure ecommerce facility, with grade one security starting at the door so to speak, you can’t have a certificate. Even though the building, the servers, the entire set-up are all 1000% more secure than where a site owner just has a secure connection to his card agent.

This is because the certificates are issued to the site hosts, not the individual site owners (all 500 or 1,000 of them), so they cannot display the appropriate logos.

It doesn’t matter that the entire operation is much more secure than a go-it-aloner’s. The only way around this, as far as I can see at the moment, is for individual site owners to purchase their own (additional and completely unnecessary) certificates. You can be in a postnuke bunker facility with more security than Fort Knox, have multiple top-grade certificates from Verisign etc (as we do) and still have no right to display the logo on the front page.

This is something of a dichotomy, or a dilemma, or another one of those di- thingies. If you know of answer, please tell me, because I have to find a solution. And of course Lord Price is occupied elsewhere, feeding the pheasants or something, and in any case cares not a jot for anything remotely connected to technical affairs.

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