Categories
Tech In My Life

Trying to blog again

It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything here. Thinking about putting some posts up. Mostly just common questions people ask me or things I feel may be of some use. If you didn’t see it take a look at my first post in a long time. It’s a guest post over at SEJ called: “Look Ma, no pager!” Scaling a WordPress Media Network Without Losing Your Sanity

Categories
Apple EVDO

UPDATE: Macbook PRO EVDO v640 card problems

Ever since I’ve been on Verizon’s EVDO with my MacBook PRO my Mac won’t sleep as quickly. Sometimes it won’t sleep at all and lets the battery drain completely. What’s worse is when it does sleep it needs a reboot to reconnect to EVDO after waking from sleep. I’ve been looking for a solution for sometime.

I’ve now removed the VZAccess software from Verizon and am running with the native EVDO drivers that ship with OSX 10.4.7+. Found a few pointers that recommend this. There is a good summary page here.

What you will miss by Uninstalling

* Logging of each connection, connected time, data transfered
* Graph of current usage along with fastest upload and download speeds
* Manual Activation

You’ll now get a nice signal meter and connected time in the top title bar (see image below).

picture-3.png

Categories
Apple EVDO

EVDO – Speedtest – Bellagio – Las Vegas, NV

Took a couple tests from our room in the Bellagio.

(reports expired) it was a good speed though 😉

Categories
Adsense Google

Google Video Ads appearing

Google has been testing Video ads for some time. Tonight for the first time I saw them appear on a few blog posts here. They are ads for Pontiac’s new car. Will be interesting to see how the CTR and eCPM compare to the traditional ads.

Google Video Ad

Categories
Apple EVDO

Macbook PRO EVDO v640 card problems

EVDO on my Macbook PRO works just fine… Well the first time after a clean boot. If the computer goes to sleep the EVDO connection/card fails to reconnect. No amount of ejecting or restarting the Verizon app will make it work. You have to actually REBOOT. Searched the web for some solutions but came up blank. There has to be some process or command that will trick the card into working after coming back from sleep.

Ideas?

Categories
AJAX Firefox Plugins JavaScript Venkman Web Browser

Firebug 1.0 Beta

I’ve been playing with the Firebug 1.0 private beta for the last few days and it’s quite a tool. v0.4 the last release of Firebug had already combined the most popular features Venkman, Console2, and the DOM inspector. 1.0 adds a entire new set of features. JS profiling and Net request tracing similar to Tamper Data are IMHO the most powerful. Joe has been hard at work and been fising issues as quick as we find them. Firebug now has enough functionality that it could implement and examine all the tips included in my entire presentation at OSCON.

The new website Get Firebug gives you a glimpse of what is coming shortly:

Categories
Uncategorized

Upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4…

I thought it’d have been easier. Ok it was pretty simple. Just FTP the new release over the current one. I made a backup first. I had hacked up the default theme a good bit to I had to restore my hacks. Maybe it would be easier if each new version of wordpress shipped with a versioned default theme. So default-2.0.2 or default-2.0.4, etc. This way any upgrade is as simple as copy over your files.

Categories
Uncategorized

Bad user experience… – ASK Blog Search

Went to search for some OSCON related blog posts and what do I get

ASK blog search error message fun

Why don’t they put this on the search bar itself BEFORE I search? Bad user experience.

Categories
Apple

MacOS X 10.4.6 – wget

Well my MacBook Pro arrived. Couldn’t find a binary version of wget for MacOSX 10.4.6 so decided to build it for myself. wget makes easy work of downloading HTTP/FTP items. I needed this to grab some of the certs when trying to get Gmail’s POP over SSL to work on my Nokia E61.

Here’s the copy of wget I built on Mac OS X 10.4.6

Categories
Gadgets

Gmail POP SSL certs for Symbian / Nokia phones

Connecting to Gmail’s POP (POPS) server always caused a certificate warning on my Nokia E61 Symbian based phone. The solution is to add Google’s Gmail root SSL certificate to the phone. First check the SSL cert that gmail is advertising.


host1:~ kevin$ openssl s_client -connect pop.gmail.com:995 -showcerts
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc./CN=pop.gmail.com
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc./CN=pop.gmail.com
verify error:num=27:certificate not trusted
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc./CN=pop.gmail.com
verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
0 s:/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc./CN=pop.gmail.com
i:/C=US/O=Equifax/OU=Equifax Secure Certificate Authority
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
---
Server certificate
subject=/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc./CN=pop.gmail.com
issuer=/C=US/O=Equifax/OU=Equifax Secure Certificate Authority
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 891 bytes and written 332 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is DES-CBC3-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
SSL-Session:
Protocol : TLSv1
Cipher : DES-CBC3-SHA
Session-ID: 19B1FF1A50B6ABCDBB1FEDA198E5C69BC6EA76D1786ECEA5CB845DC2D9BBD6EC
Session-ID-ctx:
Master-Key: B1AF3801F0742D2EDB52B010EA2497B3D2AA7D38D65313D57CA0BCD67C59C902938E9F274B09BE95026441F313688179
Key-Arg : None
Start Time: 1150697367
Timeout : 300 (sec)
Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate)
---

From this we see the root certificate is from Equifax. This certificate can be found in common root cert bundles but is not shipped by default on Nokia/Synbian phones. For reference here’s the Equifax root certificate.


-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----

The next step is to convert the Equifax certs to a format Symbian will accet. Start with putting it in a .pem file.

equifax.pem

Using openssl it can be converted to der format.


openssl x509 -outform DER -in equifax.pem -out equifax.der

equifax.der

The final step is to transfer these certificates to your phone. USB, IR, or Bluetooth will all work for this purpose. You’ll be prompted to add the certificate to your phone. Accepting this will permantly save the cert on your phone for future. Try connecting to gmail to ensure the certificate prompt/warning is no longer displayed.

ref ref2