Sun, 30 Oct 2005
Rosamond High School Class of 1994 Reunion
My 10-year high school reunion is in two weeks. Yes, 1994 was actually 11 years ago, but I guess it's close enough. I haven't kept in touch with many of my friends from high school, so I'm hoping there's a good turnout.
If you happen to have gone to school with me, please send me your contact info, and I hope to see you at the reunion.
I was a big supporter of the hair gel and optical glass industries in 1994.
Fri, 28 Oct 2005
Checking References
Company X submits a proposal to Organization Y to do some work. Company X, having been in business for quite a while, has a rather extensive list of past clients listed on its web site. Organization Y decides to contact some of the listed clients to ask about their experiences with Company X rather than asking Company X for a list of references.
Some of the organizations contacted aren't very happy to be contacted out of the blue by Organization Y and complain to Company X.
Did Organization Y act inappropriately? I'm not sure, but I tend to think not. Assuming Organization Y can find people in the past-client organizations who were involved in the work done by Company X, doing so seems like prudent research before completing a deal for thousands of dollars.
Thu, 27 Oct 2005
Using a Verisign SSL Certificate with mod-ssl
I received a Verisign-signed SSL certificate today. When trying to install it under Apache/mod-ssl, I got the following errors:
[Thu Oct 27 12:18:26 2005] [error] mod_ssl: Init: Unable to read server certificate from file /www/.../www.example.com.crt (OpenSSL library error follows)
[Thu Oct 27 12:18:26 2005] [error] OpenSSL: error:0D0680A8:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_CHECK_TLEN:wrong tag
[Thu Oct 27 12:18:26 2005] [error] OpenSSL: error:0D07803A:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_ITEM_EX_D2I:nested asn1 error
I got a similar error when trying to inspect the certificate using openssl directly:
$ openssl x509 -in www.example.com.crt -noout -text
unable to load certificate
32741:error:0D0680A8:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_CHECK_TLEN:wrong tag:tasn_dec.c:946:
32741:error:0D07803A:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_ITEM_EX_D2I:nested asn1 error:tasn_dec.c:304:Type=X509_CINF
32741:error:0D08303A:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_TEMPLATE_D2I:nested asn1 error:tasn_dec.c:566:Field=cert_info, Type=X509
32741:error:0906700D:PEM routines:PEM_ASN1_read_bio:ASN1 lib:pem_oth.c:82:
Thanks to Dr.
Henson on the OpenSSL mailing list, I discovered the the certificate was
packed in the PKCS#7 format.
So, after converting the certificate using the following command, openssl was
able to read the certificate:
openssl pkcs7 -in www.example.com.crt -print_certs -out www.example.com.crt.new
Sat, 08 Oct 2005
Oracle Buys Innobase
Oracle announced yesterday that they've purchased Innobase. There aren't too many details yet.
Innobase is the Finnish company which developed the InnoDB engine for MySQL. InnoDB brought MySQL many of the features necessary for deployment in non-trivial installations, including support for transactions, row-level locking, and foreign key constraints. These are some of the features that would allow MySQL to be used in place of a commercial database such as Oracle. With the imminent release of MySQL 5.0, which includes support for stored procedures, triggers, and views, even more applications could be built on MySQL.
One of the main features in which Oracle beats out MySQL is in clustering. MySQL's clustering, the NDB engine is stil rather immature, and from what I understand, not having ever used Oracle, it has some nifty clustering. I'm sure that it has some other cool features that I've heard of. So, are we likely to see some Oracle technology make it's way into MySQL? Or more pressure to purchase licenses where they aren't needed?
Thu, 06 Oct 2005
Blackberry 7290
The BlackBerry service frequently logs into my IMAP server and delivers new messages to the handheld (RIM lingo for their phone/PDA devices). Deleting a message on the handheld can optionally delete it on the IMAP server. So far, I've had one incident in which the BlackBerry pulled in a few old messages as new. I'm not sure how it decided to pull in these three or four messages from my inbox of 8900 messages (yeah, I'm do for a cleaning). The BlackBerry mail software is not a full-fledged IMAP client. It's not possible to retrieve mail from folders other than the INBOX, nor even get to old messages already in the INBOX. I may look for a better third-party IMAP client.
Getting an SSH client to work on the BlackBerry was much more frustrating. It supports MIDP, which allows small Java applications to be installed. So immediately after getting the device, I installed midpssh, an open source SSH client. It was unable to connect to any ssh servers, though. Digging through the BlackBerry forums, I tried changing my APN settings, using different gateways and experimenting with entering my username and password vs leaving it blank. Nothing worked. I spent about five hours over the course of four days on the phone with T-Mobile support. I tried using Idokorro SSH, a commercial SSH client, with the same results. I was pretty sure that either something was wrong with my handheld or that my account hadn't been provisioned properly.
T-Mobile won't provide support for third-party applications, even ones provided on their co-branded Handango site, but the third or fourth BlackBerry support guy I talked to suggested that I could set up my BlackBerry as a modem to verify that it is working properly, and that they would be able to help troubleshoot if it wasn't.
So I set up the device as a modem in Windows within VMWare since there's absolutely no support for BlackBerrys under Linux, and I had the same problems. I was able to authenticate and bring up a PPP connection, but any type of network connections other than DNS queries failed. After another hour or so on the phone with T-Mobile, I was told someone would call me back on the next business day. Waiting for the call back, I tried once again to use the device as a modem, and what do you know, it worked. I started up midpssh, and it worked too. I'm sure my account just hadn't been set up properly despite having asked T-Mobile repeatedly to verify that it had been.
It's definitely not speedy to work in an interactive session over GPRS, but it'll do in a pinch.
The BlackBerry comes with a well-featured web browser. It's a full HTML browser which supports JavaScript and CSS. It even supports flash and svg, though I have those disabled.
Another great third-party application is Google's Local for mobile, which provides access to Google Maps (aka Google Local) from a custom J2ME application. I went to visit a friend in Santa Barbara last weekend and I didn't have to print out a Google Map like I usually do. You just step through each turn on the handheld. I used to use Google SMS from my old phone to find a nearby book store or the phone number of a restaurant, but this is much more useful.
I was actually planning on getting the 7105t, which has a normal phone form factor, but having tried to type on the 7105t's 20-key keypad, I'm glad I went for the full keyboard.
Data URL's
You learn something new every day. Jeremy's linkblog include a link to a data: URL image encoder. I'd never even heard of the data scheme.
The data: scheme allows data to be embedded within an HTML page (or other
document that supports URLs).
For example, take a look at the source of this image:
Neat, huh?
It's not very efficient since the embedded data can't be cached separately from the page, but it's still kind of cool.
Sun, 02 Oct 2005
The Economist Subscription Discount
The Economist is offering its subscribers discounts on gift subscriptions. The first gift (or personal renewel) is $98, and additional subscriptions are only $69. Unlike most magazines, it's pretty much impossible to find discounts on subscriptions to The Economist. Amazon sells subscriptions at the normal rate of $129.
The Economist is the only magazine I read now. I cancelled my subscription to Time after I started reading The Economist. It's great for keeping up on what's going on in the world without having to read a broadsheet, the format of which I hate.
If you're interested in a subscription, let me know, and we can split the difference between the gift price and my renewel, making each $83.50. The subscription would start at the end of December with the double issue.
