Posts Tagged WTF

Mac OS and Java Me SDK 3.0

Posted by Nick in Java, Mobile, Rant, Tutorial on November 4, 2009

Sun have released not too long ago a Java ME SDK 3.0 that finally brings an official Wireless Toolkit Emulator to the Mac platform.

I have been dealing with SUN software for a while now and I was not expecting this to be a smooth ride. Those who’d dealt with the WTK on Windows/Linux platform are well aware of the limitations of these emulators. What I was not prepared for was to get so much clutter that would just not work more than a couple of times.

First impression: this wtk looks like the most polished emulator ever released by Sun.

Sadly, after using the thing for a few days I discovered that the old habits had not changed:

  • there is no menu entry to run an existing jad/jar pair. You have to right click on an emulator instance and then run it…
  • you cannot set-up a project starting from a jad/jar pair. There used to be an option to do this back in wtk 2.2…
  • after running a couple of apps the whole thing crashes an burns
  • when closing down the wtk a process is left lingering. Run this in a terminal:  ps aux | grep device-manager.app
  • switching the verbose mode when launching the emulator kills the whole thing dead!
  • they bundled ant 1.7.1 with the distro although ant is built in Mac OS
  • Permgen errors are thrown if you try to launch the app too often. LOL

Here’s what happened when I created a new project and tried to run it:

*** Error ***

Failed to connect to device 0!

Reason:

Emulator 0 terminated while waiting for it to register!

The same thing happens with Emulator 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and … you get the picture.

Googling did return lots of forum posts, but hardly any answers…

So after wasting more than 2 hours on this issue I did the unthinkable: rebooted my mac! To my surprise the miracle happened during the reboot: I was finally able to run the project again.

Needless to say I am very disappointed but not surprised by the quality of this, early access, Java ME SDK.

Cheers…

, , , ,

2 Comments

Special App Stores

Posted by Nick in Apple, iPhone on May 8, 2009

Today I was having a conversation about the Apple App Store App Review process and I realized that I don't really mind a little bit of censorship but with a twist…

Let me explain:
1. The Junk Store
Not all apps should make it to the store. I honestly think that if an app does not really do anything then it probably should not be allowed in the store. Say an app says: "I'm rich!". Is it really an app? Owning a Porsche would achieve the same result (telling people I'm rich) and it would also help the German economy… 
Now the question is what does one do with this app though? Somebody wrote it, and they want it to be available to all the people who find it useful. I vote for the creating of another App Store called "The Junk Store". Really, so many apps could go in there. Just imagine: you write an app and you immediately get access to the Junk Store: you can upload apps, updates, etc. In the Junk Store all apps are equal, they need no review process, they come with no warranty and they make no promises that they won't break your phone or eat your battery alive. Users only need to point to the Junk Store and then a jungle awaits them in there. Knock yourselves out people, download and try stuff at your own risk!
2. The Awesome People Store
Now there are some people (see these ones) who have hundreds of applications in the app store. They just clutter the gorram store! Now I vote for creating "The Awesome People Store". In this store developers "move" the apps that they consider to be the least likely to generate revenue for them. Think of it as the Archive Store… apps go to the App Store and after a while, when they fall in disgrace and people seldom download them they get moved to the Awesome People Store. Accessing this store can be done either via the main store or directly… Apps here are not guaranteed to work on the latest iPhone OS version either which a bonus.  
3. The Enterprise Store
Now this is maybe a bit too serious for this post. I believe there is a need for an Enterprise Store because there are just too many enterprise-ish applications that don't really belong in the public App Store. Say your company has 200 employees. You cannot really get an Enterprise license and you have to put your app(s) in the bloody store. There they will be public and people might end up downloading them for no reason: waste of bandwidth and time plus a bonus of frustration for some of us… Another reason for this Enterprise Store is that currently it is very hard to build a product (iPhone app) that can be sold and resold to enterprises with a little bit of specific branding on it. You either have to make some sort of activation screen or you need to issue a new app for each of your customers (this means going through approvals and such that are time wasting and annoying).
An Enterprise Store will solve this issue: you create a Product, you sell it to your first customer (enterprise) and the app goes through the usual process. After that you "notify" Apple that you've released a new app (with just a different branding, service endpoint, function configuration etc) and you just move along…
What would all these new rules achieve is a less cluttered, more value adding App Store. I am keen to hear what you people think so feel free to post your comments below…
Cheers…
p.s. what "stores" would you like to see?

, ,

No Comments

Google Apps For Your Domain. Problems after Hostname change

Posted by Nick in Google, The Wonderful Internet on April 27, 2009

I have my domain managed by Google Apps. Yesterday I created a new site using Google Sites and decided to have a nice hostname, say http://mynewsite.tmro.net

Said and done. I went to the control panel and defined the new URL. I saved it and it later started working as expected.
The problem I did not expect was that this was going to break all the other URLs I had previously defined. Basically mail.tmro, docs.tmro, calendar.tmro etc were all gone. No trace of them in my HOST RECORDS when logging into enom’s Domain Settings control panel.
Now I had two options:
1. set them up manually (last resort :P )
2. sort out Google Apps.
So I went back to my Google Apps Control Panel and switched back to default mail, docs, calendar etc and then saved the settings. After that I redefined the URLs to mail.tmro, docs.tmro etc and checked my HOST RECORDS again. This time around the settings were back!
So if you run into a similar issue, don’t panic! Just redefine the URLs. Painful but at least it works.
Cheers…
p.s. the mynewsite.tmro.net still works after redefining the other URLs so it’s all good

UPDATE: It appears that the email MX records were messed up as well! Luckily after updating the MX records I received quite a few emails that had been queued so I imagine nothing got lost…

No Comments

Apache with OpenSSL on Windows 2003

Posted by Nick in Security, The Wonderful Internet on February 25, 2009

The other day one of our SSL certificates expired. Luckily we had the replacement ready and upgrading should have been a simple, straightforward process.
Now, the part I didn't know is that Verisign had changed their intermediate certs and they were no longer signing our cert with their root cert.

Well that shouldn't be so hard to fix though since Apache (mod_ssl) has a directive for intermediate (aka chain) certificates called SSLCertificateChainFile. I just pointed it to what I thought was the correct intermediate cert, restarted Apache, pointed Firefox to the url and tada, all good. I got this intermediate cert by simply exporting from the chain of certificates you see when double clicking on your own cert and browsing to the certificate path. What a mistake this will prove to be…

But wait, when I browsed with Safari I got a nasty "this certificate was signed by an unknown authority" error message. On my iPhone same thing, the cert failed. Tried IE7, no issues. Hmm… something was wrong. So I inspected the certificate chain and I discovered that at least in Safari my ssl cert looked as if the roor cert was VeriSign Class 3 Secure Server CA rather than Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority (which is also Verisign,Inc and has the serial number 70 BA E4 1D 10 D9 29 34 B6 38 CA 7B 03 CC BA BF).

After googling I came across an article (don't click the link) that explains how to add an intermediate cert to Microsoft's list of trusted certificates using Microsoft Management Console and lots of fiddling. Turns out I didn't really need to do that. (told you not to click the link :) )

At this point it was clear that the intermediate cert was somehow now available to all the clients. So what seemed like a logical thing to do was to see what that intermediate cert reeally looks like. Luckily there is this ssl cert checker from VeriSign. To my surprise when using it the intermediate cert was not really what I exported above. So I copied the code for the new intermediate cert and replaced the one I exported and gave it a go!

Hooray! Everything now worked.

Now what have I learned?
1. Never trust a browser to test an ssl cert. Either use openssl s_server or the applet above that verisign have built
2. Avoid Windows as a host OS for web servers. (lack of openssl, confising trusted root certificate management, etc)
3. The new cert was almost double the size of the first one. Looks like the versign intermediate cert is bundled with my cert as well. Maybe someone can clarify this?
4. Let infrastructure people handle ssl cert installation

Cheers…

No Comments