SymCAImport Donators, Thank You

The Certificate Import Tool for Symbian S60 (and other) phones was created on a lousy Sunday afternoon. Mainly, because I was frustrated with the lack of documentation AND support from Nokia on the issue. Nevertheless, it seems that really lots of people are using it (approx 300 a week), and every now and then I receive a donation through PayPal (just click on the donate button).

So to all the donators (you know who you are);

thanks for showing your appreciation!

Symcaimport Safety

No matter what you do, there are always social rejects (and this is saying it nice) trying to sabotage you. I've been getting various virus alerts on my CA import tool for mobile phones. Every on of them seems to be an attempt to upload a trojan. Thankfully, the AV software intercepts them.

 Just to reassure you all; each upload is given a unique name (8 characters). If such a filename already exists, it will be overwritten. So the chance of you getting someone else's file is (almost) zero. Just make sure that you use the correct name / URL when you're trying to download the certificate on your phone.

All Comments Held For Moderation....

Ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I had to moderate every comment posted on this blog. Note that I hadn't turned this on in the Wordpress settings.

Some research showed that it might have to do something with 'older' plugins. After a trail and error period I found out that the WP Hashcash plugin was to blame. Ever since I de-activated it, the problem seems to be gone.

Wordpress v2.5 Upgrade

Today, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. The upgrade proces was easy as usual. Before the upgrade I checked all the plugins used, and upgraded those first. The new features / layout of the adminpages are great. Also the new editor works like a charm (even on Safari). Somehow it feels a bit more intuitive.

Only downside is that the Wordpress Stats on the dashboard won't work in FireFox. It works fine in Safari. Instead of showing the graph in FireFox it shows the actual dasboard page from wordpress.com.

Power Failure... Again

As you might have noticed, the server was down the last 24 hours. When I got home last night I found my server dead. The green power LED on the mainboard was still on, but apart from that... nothing. So I tried to switch the server on and off a couple of times. After a few tries, the entire room lit up for about a nanosecond followed by absolute silence, and darkness..... The power supply had short-circuited and took the entire house with it. Byebye power supply. The initial thought was; 'Well, it's gonna be a nice weekend reinstalling the server from scratch', but thankfully, it was only the power supply that had died on me. After replacing it, the server ran as before. This got me thinking about the life-expectancy of computer hardware. Frequent visitors may have read a similar post on my blog last year. So the power supply that died isn't even a year old. I still might have had some warranty on it (if I hadn't pried it open to see the internal damage :) ). If I would like to use the warranty, I'm looking at at least a couple of days downtime, and since a new power supply is relatively inexpensive, I couldn't be bothered. The life expectancy of hardware is obviously shorter than the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) given by the manufacturer. The new supply has a (theoretical) MTBF of >100.000 hours, This means >4000 days. Well, mine lasted <365 days.

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Installing Coldfusion 8

Having a day off from work meant that I had some time to clean-up my server from everything crap. This also meant trying to upgrade Coldfusion MX 7 to Coldfusion 8. The new version supports some nice new features, with which I wanted to experiment. Since none of my production websites run on Coldfusion (currently PHP), I could safely uninstall and install the new developer version. When I pressed 'remove' I had this flash from the past. When I tried to install version 7 I had humongous problems with the installer (services didn't register correctly with IIS, etc.). But this could be just a coincidence... Installing Coldfusion itself was straight-forward. The fun began when the installer wanted to launch the admin-panel to finalize the installation. No responds from the webserver. Even my blog was not working ("System cannot find the file specified"). Seemed that there were references to the old Coldfusion parser in the IIS.. After removing those instances, I had my blog back up-and-running. Next was to finalize the Coldfusion 8 installation. I had to manually add the Coldfusion parameters to IIS (allowed Web Services, document types, ... the works) After screwing around for nearly two hours, I could finish the installation. Just to make sure that it wasn't me, I installed it also in a virtual machine. And off course it worked flawlessly. Guess I need to reinstall my server in the next couple of weeks. Who knows what else is f*cking up the system. Oh, another thing; I used to use RDS for development of the websites, so I tried to configure it again.... Well you might guess it... Not working. After yet another hour searching I found that RDS uses a 'virtual file' called 'ide.cfm'. This file is located in /CFIDE/main/. The actual location (main/) doesn't exist, so IIS returns a 404 error. It seems that you need to uncheck 'Verify if file exists' in IIS for the .cfm extension for RDS to work. Or do as I did; create the directory 'main' and create an empty file called ide.cfm in that directory. Well, this was an afternoon well spent.... NOT. Next mission is to upgrade MySQL to version 5. So expect some serious downtime. UPDATE: MySQL has also been upgraded to v5.something. It went surprisingly easy.

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Wordpress v2.3 Update

Wordpress.org release version 2.3 of their blogging software. Lot's of improvements, so time to upgrade. The upgrade itself was pretty straight forward. First backup everthing. Second, upload the new files and run the upgrade script. After that it was business as usual.... Well not quite. I needed to alter my theme to allow widgets etc., and that wasn't that easy. Especially since I'm not that familiar with PHP. Finally I got most of my plugins up and running. The only thing that won't work is the Rich Editor. When I want to create a link the 'window' doesn't appear. Only a white placeholder appears.

UPDATE: Oke, I found the cause of the white placeholder after some deliberation on things I did the last hours. Apart from the upgrade on wordpress I didn't do much. I did however play with OpenID for a couple of minutes, and installed the VeriSign OpenID SeatBelt extension for FireFox. After disabling the extension everything worked just fine. I wonder if this is an extension, TinyMCE, or a FireFox problem?

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S40 Support for CA Certificate Import

Someone requested S40 support for the CA certificate Import 'Wizard'. This 'tool' is being used over 50 times a day, so I guess that it works :-). Knowing that it is being used, I added S40 support (theoretically that is, since I don't have such a device). Just select the type of device you have (S60 or S40 based). Depending on the selection the extension, and MIME type will be changed. The S40 devices expect a different MIME type (application/vnd.wap.hashed-certificate). So I added this MIME type to my webserver and associated it with .cer files. More information on this page. Note, that you need to upload a WPKI certificate instead of a normal one. I'm still figuring out what the exact difference is, so I might do a conversion.... UPDATE: import on a S40 doesn't work, so don't bother.

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Wordpress Search Engine Not Working

I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior recently, because I liked the tag clouds I saw on other blogs. Unfortunately,  the plugin seems to cripple the search capabilities on the website. If the plugin is activated, you can't find any posts with a search query. Disabling the plugin make things work again. So, I want to humbly apologize to all those people trying to find important stuff on this blog :-)

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Webserver Upgrade

100Mbps is soooooo 1993, and fully insufficient in copying lot's of Linux images :wink: over my internal network. So, today I upgraded to Gigabit. Even with the purchased el-cheapo hardware (Intel Pro NIC's, and a 3COM 10/100/1000 switch) the speed increase is noticeable (70-80Mbps versus 300-350Mbps). Too bad that my DSL connection doesn't go that fast :-(

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