Wavy’s World

SSL Certs & Nokia mobiles... and other stuff

David Harris — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 20:34:52 +0800

Forgive me Internet for i have sinned. It's been ten and a half months since my last blogpost although I have tried to write, albeit not very hard.

There's been a lot of changes here at Wavysworld over the last year or so, so this post is going to be about the tech side of things. If you're not interested in the tech stuff, you know what to do...

My hosting provider in the UK shut down there services earlier this year, which meant a frantic casting about for a new provider. I decided I wanted a Malaysian host, partly due to cost, but mainly because I wanted a provider who would have the same working day as me. After looking at a number of options, and reading about some frankly quite scary outages from some suppliers, I settled on Shinjiru who have been, so far, excellent.

On top of a very well specced box, I'm running Domino 8.5.x including Traveler for mobile email, which is running on a new-ish Nokia E-5, which is where I come to the subject of this post's title. Because I don't like sending my user ID and password over the air, or wire, unencrypted (ever, and nor should you), I have an SSL certificate from CA Cert for both this site, and the Ironworks (which has also been badly neglected of late). CA Cert don't charge for issuing a certificate, but it will only last for six months (there's a Web of Trust programme that builds towards verification, but that's another post). Also, CA Cert isn't one of the Trusted CAs that normally have their certificates bundled with every common browser.

What happened today was that I updated the certificates for Wavysworld and the Ironworks... and Traveler promptly failed. Despite accepting the new certificate permanently every time my phone tried to update my email, I was getting consistent SSL failures. I tried opening the site itself through SSL (for non-techies who're actually reading this, that's using https:// rather than http:// ); again with the failures.

I went into the phone's security store, where it stores security exceptions, such as when a certificate is self-signed, or refers to a slightly different host), and there were the old certificates - it transpires that despite accepting the new certificates, the Nokia security software will not let them overwrite previous versions even if they've expired.

I deleted the old ones and tried the site again, and all was good, and Traveler reported a successful connection.

Just a minor Gotcha, but I'm glad to have sorted out quickly, and it's one to bear in mind if I come across a site using self-signed certs in the future.

Adam Lambert

David Harris — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:54:35 +0800

Last year, those of us who watch the endless parade of TV talent shows were at last rewarded for our patience/dumb stupidity with the emergence of a talent the likes of which only comes about once every ten years or so.

When I first saw Adam Lambert featured on Season 8 of American Idol, I realised that it hadn't all been in vain. As the weeks went on and he grew in confidence, his performances didn't just outstrip his fellow contestants, in pure vocal ability and showmanship, they also cast a shaming light on 99% of established artists performing today. Come the final, even the eventual victor, Kris Allen, looked shocked that he'd beaten Adam. During that finale, the two performed with the remnants of Queen, Brian May and Roger Taylor, May himself saying after the show that he'd love to work with Adam in future. Hardly a surprising judgement to be made about the finest and most natural rock vocalist since Freddie Mercury, even from the Queen legend's closest musical collaborator.

On Thursday, I took Lynn to her first major concert, the KL stop on Lambert's Glam Nation tour, at the Putra Indoor Stadium Bukit Jalil (think Wembley Arena, but with slightly poorer acoustics).

As usual, PAS Youth had been stirring things up, as they do every time a western artist performs (or tries to) in Malaysia, saying that his show "promotes a gay lifestyle" (what is the "gay lifestyle", anyway? A penchant for dressing up in comedy outfits, a la Village People, and growing bushy mustaches? Saddam could have fallen foul of that one), and corrupting Muslim Youth. Apparently, they were outside the venue before the show. There could only have been a handful, because we didn't see a thing, aside from noticing that we were in a tiny minority of adults.

The show: in two words, absolutely astounding. From the first number, Voodoo, you could tell that Lambert has come a long way in a year. The vocals were acrobatic, yet somehow restrained, but what impressed more was his utter showmanship. This is a choreographed show, which I usually don't go for much, but in this case the performance would have been poorer without it. Lambert's background in music theatre shows, as he absolutely owns the stage. Voodoo was the first of a medley of tracks from his debut album, plus his American Idol version of Ring of Fire, complete with the Led Zep, Kashmir feel.

Following that came a quieter segment, including a stripped down, acoustic version of Whataya Want From Me, before the darker Sleepwalker, a superbly camped-up Strut, before the final crowdpleaser and obligatory singalong (though mercifully no left vs right) of If I had You. The very short encore consisted of a souped-up Mad World, much more reminiscent of the original than his Idol rendition, and 20th Century Boy (well, it is the Glam Nation tour).

All the way through, Lambert was superb, bringing light and dark to both his vocal and theatrical performance. Yes, this is as much a piece of theatre as a rock show, but that's always been this case with this guy.

As I said above, I consider Adam Lambert to be possessed of the most outstanding rock voice I've heard in many a long year. It will be very interesting to see how he matures, and how he copes with "difficult second album" syndrome. Personally I think he'll cope with the pressure just because of his background. Now he's recognised as an artist in his own right (with writing credits for six tracks on his album, to boot), the world's his for the taking.

As I was saying...

David Harris — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:15:53 +0800

It seems time for a "Oh crap, I haven't written anything for far too long" posts.

Over the eleven months or so since the last entry I've been insanely busy, then had periods of absolutely nothing. The blogging hiatus started due to a manic period of working, mostly trying to put various bids together. One in particular came to nothing (at that point), whereas another led to a year's placement for one of the team in China, and to me making my first trip there to kick off the engagement by reviewing their Domino and SMTP architecture. Since then we've implemented Sametime instant messaging and Traveler mobile email (think stripped down Blackberry), and made a host of performance, stability and process improvements. Not bad for six months.

In May, the UK had its first general election of the post-Blair era, bringing back the Tories, with their figleaf of a LibDem party trying to convince the populace that there wouldn't be a return to the ideological targeting of services such as we saw in the eighties and early nineties. Ed Miliband now has to work hard to establish a new narrative for the Labour party, which isn't going to be an easy trick.

The summer was dominated by the World Cup (and for me, the opportunity to burn up lot of days off in lieu of time worked out of hours watching it).

Since then, there's been more work, including steering the development of our migration strategy for customers from MS Exchange 2003 to 2010. Happily, the guy on the team I asked to run this really seems to "get it", producing work of the highest quality, just as his colleague in China has been doing on the Lotus track. Elsewhere, we're in the process of bidding for the re-tendered work alluded to above, which is a major piece of directory integration.

Currently, though, I'm enjoying a few days respite, trying to catch up on this site and the Thames Ironworks place. taking my long-suffering wife to her first concert (more later) and celebrating her birthday tomorrow.

Note: Promises to write more regularly are not to be considered binding.

For the Fallen

David Harris — Sun, 8 Nov 2009 18:14:53 +0800

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Condensation

David Harris — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:16:50 +0800

I was playing with the macro end of my 18-55 lens. I quite like this shot.

The Trees

David Harris — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:05:56 +0800

This used to be the view from our balcony:

Now, it looks like this:

I used to like looking at those trees.

Bohemian Rhapsody as never before

David Harris — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:32:29 +0800

This is quite simply amazing: Bohemian Rhapsody as produced by a heap of old tech gear

Barack to visit West Ham

David Harris — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 20:28:46 +0800

According to the Ilford Recorder, President Barack Obama is intending to take a little time out from G20 discussions to visit Upton Park

A West Ham insider told the Recorder: "We have all been told that the President is coming and some of his enormous bodyguards have been down to look around the stadium for security purposes.

"We have all been sworn to secrecy, but this sort of thing always gets out, and we are not sure exactly when he is going to arrive anyway. We've been told to keep the kettle on just in case."

The President will be shown round the stadium by US international Jonathan Spe-ctor, who, like Obama, hails from Chicago.

Unfortunately, this bit (plus the date) gives the game away a tad:

He will also be shown around the club shop, although in the current economic climate, he will apparently only be offered a 10 per cent discount on anything he wishes to purchase.

Bug in XPages?

David Harris — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:07:50 +0800

I must start this post with a warning: Technical content ahead!!! Luddites among you venture ye no further.

Right.

Over the last few weeks I've been delving into the new development feature of Lotus Domino, XPages. This, essentially, is a way to build good looking web applications in Domino on the fly, and, generally, it ROCKS! (ahem).

In addition to an IBM course run by my southern friend, Stephan, I've also been using Declan Lynch's tutorial series, which is excellent. The first step you actually take while following it is setting the sample database to use a new XPage-related tool called themes, which allows you to set the styles to be applied to the application using CSS, plus some other stuff.

Having used the one in the tutorial for about thirty odd lessons, IBM's OneUI them, I decided to use my own modified version of it. Whoops.

It broke.

Revisiting the application this afternoon, all the layout had disappeared. When I looked at the source, it was still trying to use the old theme, which was bizarre, since I'd not just changed the app to use the new one, but removed the old one from the list of themes available.

OK, I thought, maybe it's being cached, so I did what no-one should EVER do on a production server, and removed the CSS files for the old theme.

Eh-Ehhh!!! Wrong move, now there was no styling being applied at all, yet when I looked at the source, it was still trying to load the old files. OK, remove them from the development environment entirely, ie the Domino Designer client, in case there's some funny caching going on there.

No.

This was seriously annoying me now, especially since we've just submitted a bid to build an application using XPages, so I need to know how to fic this damn problem. Out came the packet sniffer, so I could see what the browser was asking for, and yes, it was asking for the old files, as one would expect, for the simple reason that it's been told by the server to ask for them.

I went over the application, local and server copies using every interface the Designer client provides that I thought I could use. Nothing.

Then I had a brainwave - back to using something that has rarely let me down in over ten years of using Lotus software either as administrator or as developer, NotesPeek.

Fired it up and opened up the Design note collection, and there, at the bottom, I saw this:

This is not good. There is only supposed to be one each of WEB-INF/face-config.xml and WEB-INF/xsp.properties, and there were two. Lo and behold, the reference to the old theme was in the copies that shouldn't have been there. I suspect that there was somehow a replication conflict between local and server replicas that wasn't handled properly, and the older version was taking precedence.

Anyway, one quick Kill agent using a bit of Lotuscript (something else that has served me very well in the past) using the NoteID, and all was right again.

All in all, it was intensely frustrating, up until the point where I found the problem and resolved it, which is satisfying in equal proportion.

Beautiful

David Harris — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:56:00 +0800

Read it and weep. With joy and hope.

Consistent with the requirements of the Federal torture statute, 18 U.S.C. 2340 2340A, section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, 42 U.S.C. 2000dd, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, and other laws regulating the treatment and interrogation of individuals detained in any armed conflict, such persons shall in all circumstances be treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment), whenever such individuals are in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States.
[....]
From this day forward, unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance, officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government may, in conducting interrogations, act in reliance upon Army Field Manual 2-22.3, but may not, in conducting interrogations, rely upon any interpretation of the law governing interrogation -- including interpretations of Federal criminal laws, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, Army Field Manual 2 22.3, and its predecessor document, Army Field Manual 34-52 -- issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

From James Wimberley at the Reality Based Community ("Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts")