Every once in a while I have a friend ask me about SSL certificates and which one they should buy. First let me start off with SSL is used to encrypt data and to some extent verify the authenticity of the site. There are a lot of options when it comes to SSL certificates and some come with some neat features

Extended Validation (EV)

This is a feature where the certificate athority makes the site owner jump through some hoops to validate the authenticity of the site. Sounds good right. I agree its a good thing, but these certs are generally pretty expensive. The big draw to these is that in modern browsers the URL bar has some green coloring when visiting sites that use these. I believe for most sites this is unnecessary, so unless your in the banking, finance or some other type of high security industry (or really like the color green) I would save your money. If google is not using it for gmail or checkout then you probably don't need it for your ecommerce site.

SSL Gurantee (or Warranty/Insurance)

First I will say this I have never heard of a case where anyone has ever been able to collect on that gurantee. Second if you read about what they really are saying is they will pay only if they were neglegant, just check out the exception clause. So that being said, If its free go ahead otherwise its pretty much giving money away.

2048-bit (or some crazy high bit encryption)

First, if you site uses a 128 bit cert and  your data is capture someone could given enough time break the key and steal the data. Now that being said by the time they break that key there is a pretty damn good chance the data will be out of date. Credit card will have expired, users will have changed passwords etc. If your still unsure check out distributed.net. Using a enormous cluster of pc's all over the world it too close to 5 years to break message in 56 bit encryption and each bit basically doubles the effort. They are currently working on breaking a message encrypted in 72 bit encryption. After 9 and half years they have only tested out a little over 2% of the possible keys.

Whats the difference?

So here is the deal what your really paying for is support, ease of use and browser accpetance. The 19 dollar ssl and the 149 dollar ssl do the same thing. The support from Comodo and Verisign is probably the same as DigiCert and GoDaddy. The browser acceptance is probably a non-issue these days unless its some brand new SSL vendor. I can't actually recommend a particular vendor, I've used geotrust, verisign, comodo and godaddy. These days I go with who ever is the cheapest and that includes resellers like namecheap.

One last note, during the writing of this I just now realized twitter and my favorite source code repository bitbucket use EV certs. If I just realized that do you think your customers are even going to notice?

For the past week and half I have been at a client site, where they gave me the spiffy old Lenovo T61 ThinkPad to use. They installed Windows XP on it which kinda sucks cause I have gotten use to the HP EliteBook 8540p running Win7 my employer has issued me. Anyway they give me this thing and expect me to use it (which I have but only to view emails on outlook since they gave me an exchange account on their domain). My biggest gripe on the T61 one so far is that who ever imaged this machine neglected to get a working sound driver installed in the image. The T61 showed the little yellow exclimation point in device manager next to "High Definition Audio Bus". So I figured what the hell this should be an easy fix, load up lenovo's site, download the XP driver, install and vola, right? Wrong. So I try the whole normal process, uninstall, resintall and still not working so uninstall again, reboot, install using have disk etc, try a different vendor, repeat (this went on for a while)... Nothing works still got a little yellow exclimation point laughing at me... silently (I have no sound remember).

So finnally I decide ya know what, what's better than the XP driver? The vista driver! Now I don't normally suggest this but I figured what the hell its not really my laptop anyway. So I download the vista driver from Lenovo's site, run the exe which unpacks it to "C:\DRIVERS\Vista\Audio". Then I go back to device manager and make sure the device is uninstalled and do a scan. Naturally yet again "New Device Found" to which it says "Install software automatically (Recommended)", to that I say "Nope I got it this time" and select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)". So then it asks "Search for teh best diver in these locations?" and again I say no and choose "Don't Search. I will choose the driver to install" (Its not that I don't know if that would work but my guess is XP wouldn't think the Vista driver was "the best driver to install"). So from that point it asks me what kind of driver (This seems kinda stupid its not like im gonna be loading a printer driver I am obviously doing sound which in a perfect world would at least be the default) I scroll almost all the way down and find Sound. Windows then brings up a list of available drivers or allows me to click a "Have Disk" button. I choose Have Disk point it to the location of my spiffy new vista driver C:\DRIVERS\Vista\Audio\I386\VISTA it sees the file ADIHDAUD.inf. I click open to and continue though the prompts where it complains that the driver is not signed or some jazz. Then the most amazing thing happens... I hear "Ding!" to which I already know what XP is about to tell me and that is that the driver installed successfully.

So if you come across this issue and your PC is using something like what this T61 is (SoundMAX) you might want to give the Vista audio driver a shot, hey it worked for this laptop. ;P

Note: After a reboot SMAX4PNP complained about the wrong version or something so I went to windows search (the link at the bottom of the "Desktop Search" if you have desktop search installed") and found smax4pnp.exe was installed at C:\Program Files\Analog Devices\Core I then replaced the SMAX4PNP.exe in that folder with the older XP version located at C:\DRIVERS\WIN\Audio\SMAXWDM\W2K_XP then rebooted and no more error popup ;)

Searched around for this error and found nothing. Assuming I find a new home for my blog that wont happen in the future.

Anyway I am being told this error message occurs when a level 0 member is dynamically calculated. In my case that is odd because the member in question has a formula. That's all for now, I will update if I find the solution.

For those of you who didn't know my place was broken into back in July. The burglars got away with some stuff and although the police think they got the guys that did it I am not convinced. Anyway in the process they ripped out part of the alarm system which has sense been repaired, or so I thought.

This morning I accidentally set off the alarm when taking the trash out and a few minutes later got a call from the alarm company. Unfortunately I was unaware the alarm was going off as the audible alarm did not sound. I called the repair department to have someone come out and fix it, at which time they told me that damage due to a break-in is not covered under the extended warranty?! Seem kind of odd that a warranty for an alarm system does not cover damage due to a break in. They told me that if a technician had to come out I would most likely be charged for the repair. I then asked them to put the alarm in test mode to see if it was something simple I could fix, about 10 min later I found that when the alarm was last repaired (by a general contractor) that the audible alarm had been wired incorrectly. I was kind of dumbfounded as the problem was that the guy that wired it hooked up the leads backward. The red wire (power i imagine) was hooked to the black (ground) on the speaker and black to red. Simple fix red to red, black to black done. Tested everything works fine now.

Kinda scary to think for the past 3 months that the thing hasn't been functioning properly, guess it pays to have some basic electrical knowledge. ;)

For what ever reason there seem to be hundreds of calendar tools for web form entry and only a hand full of ones for time. Most of time ones are either confusing, not helpful or more work than typing it in your self. So i went searching since jQuery is my new favorite tool and I found this is a pretty cool jquery time picker (widget/gadget what ever you call it) http://www.radoslavdimov.com/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-timepicker/#Examples. Its quite functional but I quickly found it has some missing features. First if your using 12 hour (most people understand it better so pretty much a required feature) there is no way to pick AM/PM. Second drop downs are nice but I like text boxes better. Anyway below is my take on adding these features.

jquery.jtimepicker.debug.js (10.39 kb)
jquery.timepicker.css (1.47 kb)

To use the textbox type you will need tie it to a textbox instead of a div and set:
 selectType: false

Remote switched PDU (Power Distribution Unit) outlets are a awesome thing to have in your data center environment especially if you have your equipment located off site. I first started using them around 2002 or 2003 and quickly made a case that almost all devices except the primary switches and routers should be on them. We were on a single homed internet connection so if the primary switch or router was down you couldn't get to the PDU anyway. In reality you should have redundant routers, switches and secondary uplink so that even those devices could be placed on remote reboot-able outlets.

Anyway since the beginning I have always used APC and never even thought about trying another vendor because well the APC's work, they work well and why fix something that's not broke. A few months back though I was in a bind and needed to get some remote reboot outlets fast. I couldn't find a local vendor that had APC in stock. One of the vendors (Altex) had some Tripp Lite units that are supposed compete with APC and they were quite a bit cheaper. I probably should have looked a bit more because when I origionally called the vendor they had no idea what a Remote Switched PDU outlet was. In fact the first model number they showed me was for a metered PDU (Metered PDU's generally have a LED display indicating the number of AMP's currently being pulled) which had no remote capabilities at all. In any case I figured Tripp Lite makes some decent stuff a lot of it kinda seems cheap compared to some other vendors but it should do the trick.

A few months have passed and I have had to use the remote reboot units a few times and while I have to say the Tripp Lite's do work as advertised, coming from using APC I have been vary disappointed. First off the web interface is sluggish, not very friendly. In additon to that last APC web interface looks better and was more functional that the current Tripp Lite interface. Next the Tripp lite box is 3+ times the depth of the APC which leads me to believe that its running some kind of semi embedded interface with a processor and CF (Compact Flash) card compared to the APC unit which uses a small little card (ive had to replace one before its amazing they fit all that functionality on that little embedded device.) For some reason that APC card is much faster though. Last on to the actual turning on and off of outlets, with the APC I have been on the phone with my friend Dave and had him reboot a box for me it the APC is able to cycle multiple outlets simultaneously while leaving others on and have it all happen in a second or less. The Tripp Lite's on the other hand are less friendly, you can either reboot all outlets on a PDU (in my option a worthless option) or you can do one at a time, which is a pain in the butt when you have servers with more than one power supply and don't have them on a Y power cord. To make matters worse the lag time from asking the Tripp Lite to turn off/on/cycle an outlet is more than a minute and so far it seems to only be able to take one action at a time; meaning you turn off outlet 1 wait for it to show off (minute and a half) then you can cycle outlet 2 to reboot the box (another minute and a half), wait for the box to show its running again and then turn outlet 1 back on. All in all when your dealing with stuff in Data center's those few extra minutes can be the difference between getting your but chewed out and being the savior.

In conclusion it would have been worth the extra money and waiting an extra day or two to get an APC shipped.

P.S. I forgot configuring the Tripp Lite's was a pain in the ass too some weird thing where if the network cable is not plugged in at boot the web interface doesn't start or some bull shit. It sucked.

If your like me you have done some unit testing but your not crazy about writing tests for everything because well you could be writing functional code. I'm not gonna argue that testing isn't necessary or that you should do it all the time. Personally I have found it extremely useful especially when testing components that are not full fledged programs but find it to be a bit unnecessary in many situations.

So you have been using NUnit to do your tests and it works great but with Visual Studio 2010 (and i think 2008) Microsoft built in a testing framework that's available to users of Team System and Professional. So you figure if I'm converting my project then why not convert my tests as well. It makes sense especially since its a pain when I work with someone on a project and they don't know about NUnit and complain that they have to install it, add the reference and all that jazz. So I am putting together a list of steps to do the conversion below.

1. Unload your test project from the solution.
2. Open up your project file(.cspro) in notepad (or your text editor of choice.)
3. Find the first section of xml containing the following tag <PropertyGroup>.
4. Inside the <PropertyGroup> tag add the following:
   <ProjectTypeGuids>{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
   1. {3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB} means test project.
   2. {FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC} means 2008 solution.
5. Reload the project.
6. Change your reference from nunit.framework to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework
7. Add the following to you test classes
   using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
8. Remove NUnit's names space from the classes (using NUnit.Framework;)
9. Make the following changes to your class and method attributes:
1. [TestFixture] becomes [TestClass]
2. [TestFixtureSetUp] becomes [ClassInitialize]
3. [TestFixtureTearDown] becomes [ClassCleanup]
4. [SetUp] becomes [TestInitialize]
5. [Test] becomes [TestMethod]
6. [TearDown] becomes [TestCleanup]
10. Close the solution and reopen it.

So far that seems to be about it. All in all a pretty easy change. If I find more I'll update. Also there is a tool that is supposed to do the conversion for you here but I prefer to know whats happening vs. using a tool blindly.

A couple of days ago I found a pretty cool jQuery plugin for doing two select boxes called picklists. I started using it but immediately noticed one feature was missing from it, when the list is loaded it doesn't load "selected" items into the second list. First I tried to hack some code to move the stuff and although I got it working I decided that wasn't really the right solution. Anyway I've add the setting "preload". When its true items that are selected at the time picklist plugin is loaded are added to the selected list so now its a pretty cool tool for .net/cf/php/etc. When the setting is false it does the same as it did before (the selected items list is blank). Anyway enjoy! ;P

 jquery.picklists.js (4.75 kb)

Today our dev team asked the question "Is there a way to join strings in SQL server from a table output?" Immediately the DBA and I said yea concatenate. Well while that may be possible this might be an easier way. At first I though that using a select @var = @var + text would not concatenate across the table but it does.

Ex.

declare @blah table (text varchar(max));
insert into @blah values ('a');
insert into @blah values ('b');
insert into @blah values ('c');
insert into @blah values ('d');

declare @join varchar(max)
set @join = ''
select @join = @join + text + ',' from @blah
select substring(@join, 0, len(@join))

Next the question arose could this be turned into a function to which our DBA promptly stated no being that table variables can not be used as function parameters. So we thought about it for a min and decided although its a cheezy work around we could use a temp table. Since a temp table exists for the function/procedure call and sub functions and procedures unlike table variables which are not available to subroutines. Unfortunately since dynamic SQL is not allowed in functions, so it would have to be a proc. Unless its possible in a CLR function.

The other day I noticed my custom made router's time was off by an hour when i ran the following command.

# date
Thu Mar  30 18:20:33 CST 2009

Immeadiately I realized I had the wrong timezone set as I generally use the Chicago timezone which displays as CDT. To fix this I copied the correct timezone into local time with the following command.

# cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

Now when I run the date command it displays the correct date time.