WP Movie Review Ratings

I added a new plugin to Wordpress v2.1. It's called WP Movie Review Ratings. It enables you to place movie reviews on you Wordpress blog. At this time it's fairly empty, but I'll try to migrate my older existing movie database to this one, so it'll be filled soon (I hope). B.t.w. many thanks to the developer Paul Goscicki in assisting me in getting it to work. Seemed that I had a small misconfiguration in my PHP config.

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Windows Mobile 5..... aaaaargh

Last year, I bought a HP iPaq hx2790. Partly because I'd been without a PDA for a couple of years, but mostly because I don't want to boot up my laptop to see my mail or calendar. The hx2790 comes with Windows Mobile 5 (WM5), wireless, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, and built-in encryption. All very very nice.... Well, there is a downside to this nirvana;

• Wireless broke down after a couple of weeks (also see an old post on my old blog). The first time they fixed it... they didn't fix it at all. So it had to go back for repairs again.
• On the weirdest occasions all my synced e-mail bodies were complete gibberish or they were just empty. The only way to solve this was break the pairing with ActiveSync remove everything from the PDA, and sync it again. [SOLUTION: disable the HP Encryption Tools crap]
• 9 out of 10 times I had to reset the device when I powered it on. So most of the times it would be more time efficient to boot up my laptop. [SOLUTION: don't use the HP Encryption tools for securing your device. Just use the simple standard PIN code for logging on to the PDA]
• Applications would crash easily. Result: more resets. [SOLUTIONS: do not install third-party software]

As long as I stick to this everything works just fine. This makes me wonder why would I buy an PDA with a gazillion megabytes of free space, and lot's of SD/MMC/CF slots for adding even more bytes. Every program I add makes the device more unstable. During these periods of complete misery I also tried a PDA encryption suite of Utimaco. I just wanted some sort of encryption to protect the data on the device. Their latest software version includes support for the hx2790 fingerprint scanner, but after installing the software everything went berserk (again). Uninstalling didn't work, so the only solution to get back in control again was to reset the damn thing to factory defaults..... One more thing; why is it that EVERY older Windows Mobile version has an iPaq backup program for backing up SETTINGS, and the WM5 OS doesn't have this. Every time when I needed to reset the thing to factory defaults (about 8 to 10 times so far), I had to setup my mail accounts, etc manually. This feature isn't even available on ActiveSync for WM5. No more Windows Mobile devices for me in the future. I just hope that this crappy piece of software holds on till the end of the year when the iPhone is being released.

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FreeRADIUS

Most companies/institutions use Windows clients (Windows 2000, XP), but their backend might be different. There's the Microsoft Active Directory, [cough]Novell eDirectory (former NDS)[/cough], or a more Generic LDAP (like the SUN Directory ONE). The problem with network authentication with the use of Microsoft clients is that the authentication process uses MS-CHAPv2. This is a Microsoft mechanisme for authenticating. This means that the RADIUS server used for authenticating should also be able to authenticate using MS-CHAPv2. The Internet Authentication Service from Microsoft is pretty MS only, so not much of a help with other backends. So there's a need for a RADIUS server which talks to different backends. One option is the great RADIATOR RADIUS server. It's fully customizable, but not for free. Today, I stumbled on FreeRADIUS. This RADIUS server is free (duh), and is also fully customizable. Downside is that you need to compile the software yourself, and the documentation is not that great. Tried to compile/install it on my FreeBSD 'server', but make was missing. So I downloaded make, and installed it, but the install script kept saying that make wasn't installed.... Well I guess that's one of the reasons why Linux won't be adopted by the masses soon. Spent about an hour to fix it, but I just have to give up. Well, time to download a precompiles Win32 version from freeradius.net

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First HD-DVD now Blu-Ray 'cracked'

A couple of weeks ago was the HD-DVD protection officially circumvented. Now the Blu-Ray protection (which also uses AACS for protection) is a 'goner'. I wonder how many trillions of dollars were spent on this protection (which is being paid by the consumers who buy these discs). I just hope that the movie industry follows the music record labels (EMI n this case) in removing protection on audio CD's. B.t.w. I saw the ripped HD-DVD movie 'Serenity' on my PC, and must say that the HD quality is phenomanal. Time to become an early-adaptor on the HD format (again :-)). This means a new Full-HD TV, and an appropriate player.

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Upgraded to Wordpress v2.1

The highly anticipated version Wordpress v2.1 has been released today. This meant upgrading my older version (v2.05). The upgrading itself was quite easy (if you follow the upgrade instructions to the letter). I also upgraded my hacked TinyMCE Wordpress Editor with an 'official' upgrade.... Let the posting begin Update: 'unhacked' it again because of erratic behaviour of the editor, and manipulated the original included TinyMCE editor (see the end of my earlier post regarding this).

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Creating Certificate Signing Requests

OK, the title might sound a little weird, but trust me..... I work on a daily basis with digital certificates (end-user, and SSL certificates). These things get more, and more common these days. More and more webservices are being 'secured' by SSL certificates. The only problem is that the technicians who run the services don't know shit (well, most of them do) about SSL and/or PKI. I don't blame them, because it tends to be a little complex. SSL certificates can be generated as selfsigned certificates, or you might wanna get a commercial SSL certificate from Certificate Authorities like VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. Anyway, in every case, you need to generate a certificate signing request (CSR), and submit it to the Certificate Authority. The problem is that there are some applications that stay in a pending mode if you generate a CSR, and wait for the resulting certificate to come back from the CA. This might take a couple of days. It would be a lot nicer if you can request the certificate on another platform, and import it in the application when you get the thing. There are several ways to generate a CSR on the different platforms;

• OpenSSL - equivalent to rocket science for most people, since it's a commandline tool
• Via webserver tooling (IIS, JAVA Keytool, etc.)
• XCA - Not very user friendly if you're requesting just one or two certificates a year.
• And probably some other 'obscure' ways

But what if your application needs a SSL certificate, or your webserver is located on the other side of the world (and you have no way of accessing it directly)? How the hell do you generate a CSR? The Windows platform itself doesn't have any tools for creating certificates (only if you use IIS or have a CA running on the platform). I hope to solve this by creating an application (cross platform off course) which creates these CSR's, and create pkcs12 (or .pfx) files when you import the resulting certificate in the tool. This pkcs12 file can be installed on the server as needed. Finally, a challenge for me to start programming again.

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New Honda Civic (lease)

Within the next couple of weeks, I need to pick a new lease car. It's probably gonna be the new Honda Civic 1.8 Executive (black). I just hope that they have some sort of iPod integration for this car. Anyone any info on that? It's got to be integrated or something, because the audio system is integrated into the dashboard, so it's not possible to place a 'stand-alone' car stereo in the car with iPod support (e.g. the Alpine car hifi components :-P).

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HD-DVD or Blu-ray HD?

Blu-ray HD is falling behind on HD-DVD. Why? Well, it seems that Sony (the 'owner' of Blu-ray HD technology) doesn't allow porn on Blu-ray discs. The first porn titles are being released on HD-DVD, and we all know what that means.... (remember VHS versus the superior Video2000 or Betamax), and as a matter of fact, the Internet got its boost from the online porn business.

Byebye Blu-ray, and hello HD-DVD

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Apple versus Cisco

in December 2006, Cisco (Linksys) launched a new product called the 'Iphone'. This week, Apple launched the much anticipated 'iPhone'. This resulted in speculations on the Internet. Is Apple allowed to use the word 'iPhone' for the new gadget? Lawyers say that Apple might be heading for a huge lawsuite over the term 'iphone'... Why? Because it seems that Cisco canceled the patent on the word 'iphone'. Just another way of generating lots of free publicity if you ask me. Just search for 'iphone', and see for yourself.

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Apple iPhone

Well, Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPhone at MacWorld 2007. The new phone features:

• Phone (duh)
• Internet
• 4GB or 8GB iPod with all the usual iPod features (and widescreen!!!)
• POP3 and IMAP mail support (free push-IMAP with premium Yahoo accounts)
• All touchscreen, no 'normal' keyboard or stylus.
• Runs on OSX
• Available in Europe 4th quarter 2007, and will probably cost around 500 euros

Well, I know what I want for X-mas this year :-D UPDATE: I just saw the actual keynote, and I must say that the iPhone is really impressive. Can't wait till x-mas...... must have.... NOW!!!!

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