my so-called blog (redux)

I set up my own certificate authority a few days ago. This is not something most people have a need to do, but it’s pretty handy if you end up setting up lots of development sites on new IPs and whatnot, or if you’re deploying services that aren’t going to be used by the general public but still need SSL authentication. Having your own CA means you can properly set up SSL for these kinds of resources without having to pay your CA of choice for a real certificate. If you find yourself creating a lot of self-signed certificates, having a CA also means it’s easier to get your client base to trust your certificates: typically, depending on which Google hit you click on, your average self-signed certificate is signed in a sort of one-time-use way. If you have your own CA, then all your self-issued certificates are signed by the CA - so you can install the CA’s root certificate into your OS’s or app’s certificate repository and be done with it.

For this, I mostly used the instructions from G-Loaded verbatim - I changed some paths to work with my environment. The scripts below are new, though.

(This is a pretty long post.) (more…)

I actually remembered to take the VT home this weekend. I opened it up and spent some time trying to figure out what to do with the innards; one of the things about CRTs is that the picture tube itself actually holds quite a bit of charge in it - this being a 12″ screen, we’re talking about 13kV, or thereabouts. Normally, you go about discharging the tube itself and take the thing apart. This is the normal route but I didn’t have anyone at the time to assist in this maneuver - it’s nice to have someone to call for help if you screw up - and I got impatient.

The VT320 is actually put together in a somewhat interesting fashion, given that this is expensive electronics from about 21 years ago. Most everything snaps into place. There’s really only about six screws in the thing total that matter - two remove the case and four more hold the CRT in place. I managed to find the service guide for the unit, and set off taking the PSU out. I removed the CRT and the main logic board as one piece. The case itself is three parts - the front bezel, the bottom tray and the back, and the bottom tray is held to the bezel by snaps (the back comes off), so I could just unsnap the bottom tray for leverage and undo the few snaps that attached the logic board to the tray. Then, four screws and some careful lifting and I had the thing in pieces.

Next, I went ahead and roughed-in the screen. I ran into two problems here - the bottom of the case has a nice foot that allows you to adjust the tilt of the screen. It’s got a pretty powerful spring in it to accomplish this, and, needless to say, iBook innards are much lighter than a full-out CRT and all the associated circuitry that comes with. I’m going to have to figure out a way to get the unit weighted down in the back.

The other problem I had was with the screen. While the LCD itself fit pretty well in there, the CRT screw mounts got in the way, so I ended up totally disassembling the screen. I got it down to pretty much just the panel, and took off the frame that includes the AirPort antennas, a reed switch (so it knows when you close the lid), the inverter and the microphone. With all of that stuff removed, the screen fit in fine. It’s in right now with packing tape.

So, once I got the screen in, I started working on the logic board. For now, I pretty much just dropped it in the bottom of the case. I ran the power switch out the side and taped the speakers down to the grilles in the bottom of the case. I ran a spare iMate into the old contrast wheely thing and into a USB port - with it all assembled, I really don’t have much room for USB devices and whatnot in there.

With all that done, I went ahead and hooked it into power and hit the switch for the first time. Lo and behold, nothing happened. Such a pain in the ass. I tore into it a bit and realized I had loosened one of the cables on the inverter board; a reseat and it was on its way.

So, now I’ve got this thing mostly mounted. I put the back of the case back on, and, apart from the fact that you really can’t see inside to see otherwise, it’s pretty much done. There’s still some to do - I’m waiting on the new battery for the system, I still need to get the new HDD and RAM, the combo drive needs to go back in, and I’d like to mount things a bit more nicely - but it works, and I’m actually using it to type this entry up.

Speaking of remounting things, right now I have the motherboard installed without the magnesium frame it sits in. This is kinda problematic for some things - the hard drive isn’t latched down (ah, the magic of tape!) and the CPU heatsink isn’t really attached to anything. I think I might experiment with the Dremel to see if I can make the frame work and have the board mounted back to the back of the screen. I can use the rest of the case for weights, and maybe a power strip and a couple of nice hubs. It’d also be nice if I could get some of the ports worked out differently, so that they sit more-or-less where the former serial ports and whatnot sit. And, a real power switch. It’s absurdly hard to find a beige or grey momentary on/off switch - I’m going to end up building a circuit to deal with that.

All in all, I think I’m at about 50%. A little hot glue and it’ll be done!

So I figured, new year, nice introspective blog post about the past year. But then, I thought, let’s cut up a bunch of computers instead! So much more fun.

I managed to get ahold of an old Digital VT320 terminal. They’re pretty neat gadgets but not horribly useful nowadays - they have a screen resolution of 80×25 or 132×25 (it’s software switchable) and connect via serial to the host using three-pair cable terminated in DEC MMJ plugs. Originally, I was just going to hook it into a normal computer and use it as a separate screen for the novelty of it, but it turns out it’s very hard to find MMJ plugs nowadays.

So, a plan B was hatched. The screen on the VT320 is 12″ diagonal, which was a pretty popular size for small laptops before the whole widescreen fetish began. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to grab a machine about that size and mount it into the terminal, making a sort-of miniature iMac sort of machine. And, since I evidently have nothing better to do with my time ever, I went ahead and sourced a 12″ iBook G4 to use.

The iBook G4 I have is a 12″ model running at 1.07GHz. It’s got a 30GB disk, combo drive, 512MB RAM and an AirPort Extreme card in it. I set off tonight getting the machine taken apart and kinda roughly reassembling it in a way that would make it into a desktop machine. I pretty much have an iBook G4 tablet now - for the first stab at it, I pretty much just took the machine and flipped the screen around backwards. I think this is essentially how I’m going to have it though I might ditch the frame around the motherboard and rearrange some of the cards instead - certain things like the USB/etc. ports and the DC-In board are situated so things tend to stick out of the sides too much. I also need to find a cheap USB hub to mount inside the enclosure as well, so I can have built-in BlueTooth and whatnot. I’m also thinking about mounting my spare iMate ADB-to-USB adapter in the finished product, just to keep the retro going.

I was actually considering mounting a standard 3.5″ hard drive connected to a FireWire bridge board inside the case. I’m kinda rethinking this plan now, though - it turns out the battery that came with the iBook was one of the recall ones, so I could mount the battery inside the machine somehow and end up with a battery-powered desktop. I definitely want to get a bigger hard drive for it, though, and upgrade the RAM to 1GB. I was also thinking about mounting a webcam in the system, but that’ll depend on how much clearance I end up having in there.

I would like it to be known that Chris sucks. Said “friend” introduced me to a song called Heartbeats done first by The Knife and then covered by Jose Gonzales. So yeah, that’s totally all I’ve been listening to. Over and over again.

Qcodo’s built-in Ajaxy stuff is rocking, though a bit slow. I have my tabs and an editable DataGrid element and It Works(tm). I just need to use iframes (blecch) to get everything to work properly where it needs to. Hooray automagic pagination and sorting.

So the tabbed view I wrote works. I’m gonna try to combine it with sliding doors to make it purty. Maybe I’ll even nice up the code and release it. It Fucking Works(tm) so if it’s on the Web maybe I won’t lose it.

As I said before, I’m trying to integrate more Ajaxy stuff into this project. I’m focusing on the admin console right now just because I need a good interface to edit stuff before I develop the client front-ends. It’s come to my attention that prototype.js ends up being Really Cool since I found some third-party docs for it, that authentication with this kinda stuff may not be quite as hard as I figure it might’ve been, and that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Right now I have some code that kinda works in Safari and doesn’t work at all in IE or FireFox. It’s weird, though, because it breaks in the same fashion in IE and FireFox. It’s actually kinda scaring me a bit.

I really want to write an iTunes library synchronizer tool. There’s already one - syncOtunes - but it relies on ID3 tags for matching. I’ve been kinda thinking up ways to do it by comparing the files themselves. The big problem with this is that you may have two songs that are the same song but, for example, encoded at different bitrates, or that are extended versions of the song. I had some ideas on how to chunk up and process the file to come up with a signature, and then compare them with a bit of uncertainty thrown in to make things interesting. Something to add to my list of things. Haven’t decided yet if it should be before or after learning Java/J2EE/JSF/etc.

Actually managed to wake up early this morning. Like, 7. I never wake up before 8 unless I have to and even then, 8 is usually a struggle. Ah well. Life sucks at the moment, work is scary, yadda yadda yadda. At least the team is doing well.

So I made the jump back to a regular desktop at home today. The difference in screen brightness between my actual monitor and the screen on my old TiBook was getting to me so I slapped Slackware Linux on my Athlon and set it up. I now have another computer without any music on it. I spent a good hour fucking around with sound on it so I can listen to something (at least Rhythmbox has some decent net radio stuff in it.. btw, Now It’s Overhead is good and indie). All the menu text and stuff is Too Big. Evolution doesn’t connect to my fricking Exchange server at work. But I’ll get used to it. If it keeps working tomorrow. On the plus side, XFCE is nice. Liking that better than I like Gnome or KDE. X did at least kinda figure out that I had 2 monitors (to be fair I added the 2nd after the fact - Slackware’s xf86setup is the way to go there).

In other news, at the recommendation of a friend I started checking out Ferret/Gerwin for doing entity relationship diagrams. Gerwin lets you graphically lay out the database, then make relationships. It’ll spit out a SQL script in SQL92 format or PostgreSQL-specific or MySQL-specific formats. It’s handy and gets all the FK stuff done easily and amazingly is more stable than trying to deal with phpMyAdmin (which I think is getting too “smart” with the Web features for its own good) or MySQL Administrator (which only really works right on windows). It’s a little rough around the edges - there’s no provision for setting random fields to not null, for example, and MySQL auto increment fields I have to do by hand - but even those minor niggling points are, well, minor.

Also, Qcodo’s 0.2 preview beta came out today. The new examples include a nice bit of AJAXy goodness, and you seem to get it For Free(tm) when you use the Qforms thing it comes with. Looking forward to using that more now that I’m a bit more comfortable with the framework.

Finally - good luck to Will on his move to California!

Idea I’ve been tossing around: instead of coding your class (assuming PHP here) around a framework (propel, db_table, etc. etc.) or just hard-coding data management into your methods (calling PEAR DB directly, f.e.) why not have a kinda proto-DB wrapper that uses reflection to examine which variables need to be saved, and then does such and makes proper SQL (in whatever dialect) and then passes it on appropriately? The wrapper could thusly be modified to support other storage types including XML or memcached or whatever, or just banging things out in an array. Kinda like LINQ but for PHP and without all the making of the language syntax.

In the future I shall try to be less melodramatic. My PowerBook lacks an AirPort card at all; I confirmed that it was supposed to have one so now one’s on order and I may get it soon. In the meantime I’ve been screwing around with various third-party wireless drivers. There is one called WirelessDriver (imaginative, I know) that is free as in speech and beer, and two others that are neither but support 802.11a/g cards. The pay drivers are fairly inexpensive ($15) and the one I liked actually worked out of the box on my Proxim 802.11abg combo.

The problem I have with this is that both Linux and FreeBSD support most Atheros/Intel/etc. 802.11a/g chipsets (but less so Broadcom), and darn near all 802.11b ones. There’s no real reason why my Senao Prism2.5 card should not Just Work(tm) in OS X. Or why I should have to resort to a pay driver or fairly flaky free one to get support. Granted, it’s a small market - iBooks can’t take PCMCIA cards anyway and OS X supports Airport natively - but it can’t be that hard to port an existing driver. So, that means I’m thinking about trying it. I did at one point have a bit of a replacement keyboard driver working to an extent in OS X. That was 10.1, though.

So I finally got my PowerBook back. I bought a 1GHz Titanium back in august and due to a comedy of errors it took two months for it to come back from the repair center. It’s cool and all but my Airport card doesn’t work. And I was like a day away fromg etting a new machine. Oh well. Getting it going was pretty painless, though. TinkerTool + Growl + Quicksilver rock your boxors.

A project at work is going to lead me into my first forays into AJAX development. Needless to say the fact that I need to interface my project with Campus Standard Database(tm) means that without using AJAX certain choosy elements would be horrific to use. (It’s an inventory thing, you need to choose the building/room and the list of such in the Campus Standard Diddlybobber is like 1300 entries long.) So now I’m looking into which frameworks I want to use for the thing. There are a few frontrunners at the moment. AJAX still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on the implementation level, though; that’s got more to do with my general lack of understanding of what JavaScript and the DOM can do for me.

I’ve got Google Desktop on my work PC; the Sidebar feature is really handy. Don’t much care for the rest of it (mainly because I use my Mac for most everything; the PC is just for VMs and Outlook really) but that one feature I wish was available on the Mac.

Trying to think through the data persistence thing I wrote about - not going to use PHP for the next Really Big Project(tm) I’ve got going on (probably Java, actually) but it’d be neat to get it going anyway just for the challenge. I may not use memcache like I thought though, since there’s not really any security in memcache. The code is pretty easy; I may just prototype a PHP-based solution and backport or something or whatever.

I’ve got an amex card now. Kinda interesting - like, credit without the credit. Other stuff abounds!