Revisiting Port 443

Port 443 is primarily known for handling HTTPS traffic over TCP, enabling secure communication between browsers and servers.  

It can be used with UDP in specific scenarios like QUIC (for lower latency secure communications) and HTTP/3.

When diagnosing why an HTTPS connection is failing, an in depth knowledge of port 443 is needed.

Visual Studio Community July 2026 Release

See the status of GitHub Copilot from the Visual Studio IDE. Built-in .NET and Azure skills are introduced.

Agent Skills Introduced by Anthropic

Anthropic introduced agent skills which have now been embraced by other vendors too e.g. Microsoft.

Agent skills are a standardized way to extend agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows.  It consists of a folder containing a SKILL.md file.  This contains metadata and instructions for the agent to do its task.

Other stuff can be bundled with the skill as well, as follows.

agents-new-skill/ ├── SKILL.md # Required: metadata + instructions ├── scripts/ # Optional: executable code ├── references/ # Optional: documentation ├── assets/ # Optional: templates, resources └── ... # Any additional files or directories

The PEM Format

PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) is a format used for transmitting cryptographic keys, certificates and other data.  

PEM structure consists of a text file in Base64 encoded data format (a binary-to-text encoding consisting of 64 printable characters - the idea is you can push binary data into a communication channel that only supports text). Base64 is famous for its use in attachments, since SMTP in its original form was designed to support 7-bit ASCII characters only.

An alternative to PEM in Java contexts is DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) used for X.509 certificates and private keys.

Busting Certificate Issues in Ubuntu

Suppose you are running a data pipeline on Linux/Ubuntu that consumes data from the web. You get a RuntimeError: "SSL certificate verification failed".  What do you investigate?

Verifying the ca-certificates package and updating /etc/ssl/certs

 sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates

installs the ca-certificates package (the -y means "say yes to all prompts").

This software processes certificates in PEM format.

With this installed, new certificates can be added to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates.  

The trust store can then be updated with:

sudo update-ca-certificates

You can then check if the certificate has been added.

ls /etc/ssl/certs | grep local-ca

Programming as Play

Shade Zahrai has noted that "play changes your brain". 

Stress drops (cortisol down, dopamine up) when something feels low-stakes and playful.

Daily light-hearted play can train your brain to get comfortable with taking risks, exploring and trying new stuff. It builds a sense of agency, a belief that action can make a difference.  

This concept is also explored in the context of programming specifically in an article on "Hunting the Wiley Hacker" which covers the joy of Linux.

A Scorecard for the AI Age

Is a very nice article by Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, on measuring value from AI.  But how to measure "AI", or do we create measures across every AI vendor/model pair to work out value per segment?