I received the following email from Google yesterday. It details their timetable for dropping IE6 support:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

I’ve just started GMing the Rogue Trader game (from Fantasy Flight Games) with my regular gaming group and I realised, I needed some way of tracking ships.

Now ideally I’d love to have some Battlefleet Gothic models out on the table but apart from the expense, I do not want to freak out the newbie (and female) players in the group by plonking down some “toy” spaceships.

So I went in search of some paper markers that I could print out and use. Alas I did not find any,  so I decided to whip some up for myself…

And so I present Rabidgremlin’s Tactical Ship Markers. These markers are designed to be printed, cut out, folded and glued together. They come in 3 handy colours: red for enemy ships, blue for neutral and green for friendly.

I got a little carried away and even made them 3D (and perhaps in doing so, have risen to new levels of nerdom).

Here is a pic of an assembled marker.

And here is the PDF of the markers, that you can download and print out: Tactical-Ship-Markers-Coloured-v0.1.pdf

I used standard office 80g paper and they work ok but you might want to use something stiffer.

For those of you who are interested, I used Inkscape to create the markers. Inkscape is a fantastic, open source, vector graphics editor.

Passwords are a pain in the butt, if you use a computer or the Internet then you no doubt have a list of passwords bouncing around in your skull or worse yet a single password that you use everywhere! Here is a simple technique for creating good, easy to remember passwords.

First off here are some golden rules for passwords:

1. A password needs to be strong (see below)
2. You should only use a password for one site or account
3. You should never write a password down
4. You should never tell anyone else your password (duh)

Of course all of us break these rules…

So what is a good password? A good password is one that is “strong” from a security point of view. Typically this means a string of 8 characters made up of numbers and letters. Additionally the password should not contain any “dictionary” words (e.g. a word you find in the dictionary) nor should it contain information relating to you, such as your name or date of birth.

On top of that, your password should not be a common one. Believe it or not, people tend to think just like you and so there is a whole raft of passwords that people tend to use such as qwerty, 7777777, bond007, butthead, trustno1. This list (from Twitter’s sign-up) page contains 370 common passwords which Twitter does not allow to be used. Needless to say, if one of your passwords is on this list then you should probably not use it

Here are 10 “strong” passwords generated using the excellent from pctools.com password generator.

ne3hebr4 fe5ec7ur
th55ucep 2rayaves
24astete 8hacruth
fathu4e7 5rubrast
tebra2ep 4awraph4

Now these passwords are all well and good but you are not likely to memorise them are you? Which means you will either write them down or you will just memorise one, which you would use everywhere. Once again breaking the rules.

So here is better way, which not only generates strong passwords, unique to each website but also makes them easy to remember !

First off choose 4 characters, a mix of letters and numbers (ideally more numbers then letters). These 4 characters are the only thing you will need to remember. For instance r085, which I will use in the examples below.

Next up, when you need a password for a website, take the first 4 characters of the website’s domain name and alternate them with the characters in your secret 4 character string, for example:

facebook.com:
                f a c e
                   +      = fra0c8e5
                 r 0 8 5 

twitter.com     t w i t
                   +       = trw0i8t5
                 r 0 8 5 

gmail.com       g m a i
                   +       = grm0a8i5
                 r 0 8 5 

digg.com        d i g g
                   +       = dri0g8g5
                 r 0 8 5

And voila you get nice strong passwords, unique to every site !

I just had to set up a test certificate for my local install of Jboss 4.2.3 to try out some SSL code. It wasn’t completely obvious so here are some notes on how to do it.

First off you need to create a self-signed certificate. You do this using the keytools application that comes with Java. Open a command prompt and run the following command. You will need to change the path to your Jboss conf directory to reflect your install:

C:\>keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore C:\jboss-4.2.3.GA\server\default\conf\localhost.keystore

When prompted use a password of changeit everywhere. It’s important that you answer localhost to the first question:

Enter keystore password: changeit
Re-enter new password: changeit
What is your first and last name?
  [Unknown]:  localhost
What is the name of your organizational unit?
  [Unknown]:
What is the name of your organization?
  [Unknown]:
What is the name of your City or Locality?
  [Unknown]:
What is the name of your State or Province?
  [Unknown]:
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
  [Unknown]:  NZ
Is CN=localhost, OU=Unknown, O=Unknown, L=Unknown, ST=Unknown, C=NZ correct?
  [no]:  yes

Enter key password for
        (RETURN if same as keystore password): changeit
Re-enter new password: changeit

Next up you need to configure tomcat to create a SSL connector.

Edit C:\jboss-4.2.3.GA\server\default\deploy\jboss-web.deployer\server.xml and find the commented out SSL connector example, uncomment it and tweak it as follows:

<Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true"
maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true"
clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
keystoreFile="${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/localhost.keystore"
keystorePass="changeit"
/>

Finally add two System properties to your Jboss startup command to get the javax.net.ssl library to use your new keystore. These are only needed if you need to make SSL calls back to yourself. I needed them because I had CAS and 3 apps authenticating with CAS all running in the same dev Jboss instance:

-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=C:\jboss-4.2.3.GA\server\default\conf\localhost.keystore
-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=changeit

Ok now browse to http://localhost:8443/

Your browser will complain about a self-signed certificate. Just follow your browser’s instructions to add this certificate as a security exception so you won’t be prompted again and you are all done.

ClearPoint held one of its regular tech-drop get-togethers last night covering Google Wave.

The Cloudbreak team gave a good walk-through of the product  and I gave a quick overview of some of the technology inside Google Wave and it’s APIs.

Here is my slide deck:

The PDF (with notes) can be downloaded here.

For those of you who know nothing about the wave, here is short intro video:

Wow, I have just announced the launch of my pet project: split-the-bill.com I’m feeling  excited yet panicked at the same time.

It will be very interesting to see how this pans out (hopefully well). For more details check out http://blog.split-the-bill.com/the-cat-is-out-of-the-bag-2

I have an Android G1 Developer phone (based on the HTC Dream) and have had major issues getting MMS to work with the Vodafone network in New Zealand. Vodafone was next to useless in resolving this problem but after bashing my head against a wall for ages and “phoning a friend” (thanks Nick) I finally have a configuration that works.

Interesting enough I actually resorted to debugging my phone to see where the issue was and then took a wander through the Android source code to see why things were going wrong. In the end it turned out to be simple case sensitivity issue with the APN type field for the MMS APN  (it must all be in lowercase) !

So in case anyone else is having the same issue here are the details of the two APNs you need to setup. These should work for any Android based devices:

Name: Vodafone NZ
APN: www.vodafone.net.nz
Proxy: <not set>
Port: <not set>
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: null
MMS Proxy: <not set>
MMS Port: <not set>
MCC: 530
MNC: 01
APN Type: default

Name: Vodafone NZ-MMS
APN: live.vodafone.com
Proxy: <not set>
Port: <not set>
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: http://pxt.vodafone.net.nz/pxtsend
MMS Proxy: 172.30.38.3
MMS Port: 8080
MCC: 530
MNC: 01
APN type: mms

Finally got off my butt and packaged up version 1.0.0 of SvnViz. It can be downloaded from sourceforge.

SvnViz builds visualizations of the activity within a Subversion repository. Here is an example of the default visualization run against the project that I am currently working on. Green dots indicate file adds, blue dots are modified files and red dots are deleted files. The greater the activity of the user the higher their score.

SvnViz also provides a framework for creating your own visualizations. Simply extend the FrameViz class and implement the generateFrame method. To run your vizualization class, instead of the default class, just pass the fully qualified name of your class to the application using the -vc parameter.

Source files can be downloaded from here. All code is released under the GPL.

Have fun and drop me a line if you come up with an interesting visualization.

This is actually more of a note for myself but it may be of use to you. I often find myself running up Linux VMs to test and build LAMP based systems but since I (generally) use Windows it is a major pain to have to transfer files via scp or worse edit files using vi.

However is you install Samba into your test VM, you can simply browse to the folder using Windows explorer and edit the files directly. The following configuration exposes your /var/www folder via Samba and makes its content editable by everyone. It makes the files read/writeable by all and makes sure that www-data remains the owner.

Needless to say this configuration is very very insecure and MUST NOT be used in production !

[www]
comment = apache root folder
path = /var/www
guest ok = yes
browseable = yes
create mask = 777
directory mask = 777
read only = no
force user = www-data
force group = www-data


Update: The latest images from Microsoft now ONLY work under MS Virtual PC ! Not so useful if you are a Mac developer or you want to run under VMware like we are. Microsoft is aware of the problem, hopefully they fix it soon.

I’ve been setting up a bunch of VMware images for testing various browser and OS combinations. This has worked out very nicely and the best thing is you can do it all for free !

In my travels I came across these very useful images from Microsoft, basically XP and Vista installs with various flavours of Internet Explorer ( 6, 7 and 8 ) installed.

These are free for download (but they do expire) and can be easily run using Microsoft’s free Virtual PC.

To get these images to run under VMware, you first need to set up the images to run under Virtual PC (to create a .vmc file) and then you can converted the images to the VMware format using the VMware vCenter Converter. This tool is also free.

The VMware Converter is also able to create an image of your locally installed OS, I haven’t tried this but it could be useful for backups and the like.

All up its taken about 2 days to set up XP, Vista & Ubuntu images running combinations of IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 4 and Chrome.

Now the fun really starts….