Bill St. Clair's blog

iPhone 2.0

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:23:43 +0000

iPhone software version 2.0 was available today, a day before launch, from Apple's web site, thanks to the ingenuity of the Mac Rumors folks, who have since removed the URL, though it probably still works. I got the 250 meg download, and followed the simple directions to install it, and, voila, App-Store-ready iPhone. Below is a screen capture of a page full of App Store apps. That's another new feature of the 2.0 software. If, while holding the home button, you press and release the power button, it takes a picture of the screen, and puts it with the photos taken with the camera. You can view it there, mail it to somebody, or load it onto your computer.

The iPhone 3G hardware goes on sale tomorrow morning at 8am. I don't plan to buy one. My year-old iPhone works fine, especially with the nifty new software.

Debugging SSL Connections

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:24:59 +0000

I've had a little trouble with the SSL certificate for this site and for some sites for which I do technical maintenance. I wrote up a little about that in Intermediate SSL Certificates. Well, I asked my web hosting provider to install the intermediate certificates for another web site that is also using a GoDaddy certificate. They said that they had done it, but I was still getting warnings in Safari, on both my Mac and my iPhone. So I did some Googling, and found some simple Java code that I could modify, and enable debugging while running, to show the SSL handshake during a connection to a web site.

I have uploaded that code as billstclair.com/blog/images/ssltest.zip. The zip file decompresses into the "ssltest" directory, containing the following files:

ssltest	a bash script to run the java program
ssltest.class	the compiled version of the Java program
ssltest.java	the source code for the Java program
ssltest.zip.sh	a bash script to create ssltest.zip

You're certainly welcome to look at the Java source, and change it to your liking, but to use the program, you just need to cd to the ssltest directory in your shell, and type the following:

Quote:

./ssltest billstclair.com

Or change "billstclair.com" to your favorite SSL-enabled web site. It prints quite a bit of stuff, but the most interesting to me were the lines beginning with "chain [", which show the certificate and the intermediate certificates, if any.

I didn't include an ssltest.bat file for Windows, because I have no way to test it, but it should be pretty obvious how to convert the bash script into a Windows batch file.

Enjoy!

Go West, Middle-Aged Man

Wed, 28 May 2008 09:56:38 +0000

I spent the last two weeks in Montana and Wyoming.

Flew from Hartford, Connecticut to Bozeman, Montana, and from Denver back to Hartford. Took my Cold Steel African Walking stick with me on the airplane. Canes are allowed by the Taking Scissors Away goons. Traveling with a cane has some benefits. I asked the TSA guy in Hartford whether my wife could accompany me to the gate. On seeing my cane, he said that we could ask the airline for a pass to allow that. The airline lady said that usually TSA gives them grief for passes. She was surprised that one of them had recommended it. They looked hard at my plastic cane, trying to take it apart to reveal an imagined sword inside, but let it through. And they let my wife through with her pass.

Went to Montana to meet in the flesh some formerly cyberspace-only friends. Met Elias Alias, the owner of The Mental Militia Forums, Iloilo Jones (pronounced: ee-low ee-low), the director of FIJA, Doug Buchanan, the mind behind think.ws, Kirsten, the owner of Get Your Hands Dirty!, and a number of others. Ate red meat and drank real wine for the first time in twenty-five years, and took a liking to Backwoods Wild 'n Mild Cigars, the "sweet aromatic" flavor.

Learned that Montana has very nearly Alaska carry. Outside the cities, you can carry any way you please. No permit required. Many of the cities require permits to carry concealed, but "concealed" is defined as "covered by clothing". It's OK to carry in a fanny pack without a permit, or to open carry, though most city dwellers carry concealed with a permit. I didn't see any open carry there, or in Wyoming, except by police.

I drove the 600 miles from Bozeman to Cheyenne, where I grew up, and where my mother still lives, in a rental car, which was cheaper, and not a lot slower, than flying. Drove I-90 east, which heads south after passing through Billings. The mountains dropped away and I found myself, though still in Montana, in country very similar to my Cheyenne home. I wept tears of joy, while driving and drinking in the scenery. Wyoming is truly my home. "Like no place on Earth". I hope to return there permanently one day.

Went to the Libertarian Party's national convention in Denver last Friday to meet L. Neil Smith and Scott Bieser, who were there to sell books. Sat with Scott for a couple of hours while Neil was upstairs nursing a cold. Interjected a few comments in a video interview of Scott by V Magazine. Thirty seconds of fame? Maybe. Went to lunch with Neil and Scott at a nice burger joint. Neil's cold made it hard for him to talk. Snapped the photo below of Neil with my iPhone. Forgot to get one of Scott. Duh.

Before going to Denver, I called the hotel where the conference was held, said I had a question about hotel policy, and asked whether the wearing of sidearms was allowed in the hotel. The lady who answered the phone said that she thought not, but wasn't sure, so she connected me to the front desk. The lady who answered there assured me that it was OK, even when I asked whether Denver had a "law" prohibiting it. Well, Denver DOES have such a "law", and their override of state law allowing open carry everywhere, and forbidding local override, was approved on 5 November, 2004 by the District Court of the City and County of Denver, Colorado, whose decision was affirmed (PDF) on June 5, 2006, by the Colorado Supreme Court, in a vote of three to three with one justice not participating. I guess some animals really ARE more equal than others, at least the pigs in Denver.

Did some shooting, both in Montana, on a state-owned parcel with a hill as a backstop, and in Wyoming, at the Pine Bluffs Sportsman's Club, about 30 miles east of Cheyenne, on the Nebraska border. Their pistol range has steel targets at 25 yards that you can knock down and pull back up with a rope from the firing line. Good fun!

Watched "The Chronicles of Narnia: Price Caspian" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" with my mother. Enjoyed both.

No problems getting through security on the way home, except they wouldn't let me take a bottle of water. Sheesh. Yes, you too can fly on Sheep-Are-Us Airlines.

Major Appliance Time

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:53:18 +0000

We bought a brand new washer & dryer shortly before my son was born, over sixteen years ago. Sears Kenmore brand. They both served us well until recently, when the dryer motor died, and the washer bin stopped turning around. I decided it wasn't worth the money to replace the dryer motor, and didn't feel competent to work on the washer myself, so rather than pay Sears $100 for a repair guy to come out and possibly tell us the washer cost nearly as much as a new one to repair, we bought new ones.

I saw a new style of washing machine in Sears a few years back. Top loading, but with no agitator inside, just a little bump in the middle, and water jet holes. Well, we got one of those. Whirlpool brand name, though apparently Whirlpool makes Kenmore stuff. They were delivered today, after a two week wait from our purchase. And they're nice. Washed a long week's worth of clothes today. Quite satisfied.

I can't afford to buy major appliances very often, so it's nice when I can. Wish I could afford a new refrigerator.

Click the "read more" link for pictures.

Samsung S730 Camera

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 02:14:15 +0000

I bought a Samsung S730 digital camera at Target the other day. Was there looking for a birthday gift for my daughter to give to a friend of hers, and it jumped out and grabbed me. $100. There were hundred dollar cameras from HP, Nikon, and Kodak there, but they were out of stock, and this one has more pixels. Haven't played with it enough to know how good its lens is, but it takes movies, audio, and still photos. Comes with very little memory, but $25 got me a gigabyte SD card, which holds over 700 full-resolution (7.2 megapixel) images. Nice to have a better camera than the one in my iPhone.

Self-portrait, no flash

Denali camera case

Coke machine at laundromat

SSL Access Available

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:41:42 +0000

Well, I finally paid the $15 that site5.com charges to install an SSL certificate, so you can now get get encrypted access to this site.

https://billstclair.com/blog/

You will likely get a warning that the Certificate Authority (CA), CAcert.org, is unknown to your browser. That's the drawback of using a free CA. There will likely be an option to add their certificate. Do it if you want to get rid of the warning (and warnings for similar certificates from other web sites).

If you say www.billstclair.com, you'll get a warning, every time you visit here after relaunching your browser, that the domain doesn't match the certificate. So don't do that unless you like the warning.

Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:13:33 +0000

When I tried to run Skype today on my Macintosh, nothing happenned. Looking in the Console log, I found this cryptic message:

Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Only found one Google hit, and it wasn't helpful. Tried renaming Google preferences out of the way (in Mac OS X, those are the "~/Library/Preferences/com.skype.skype.plist" file and the "~/Library/Application Support/Skype" directory). Same thing. Reinstalled Skype by dragging from the distribution DMG to my Applications folder and clicking "Yes" on the overwrite query dialog. Back in business. Don't know why it happenned, but that fixed it.

iPhone Reverse Polish Calculator

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:32:24 +0000

billstclair.com/calc.html is a Reverse Polish calculator for the iPhone. I found the code for this with a Google search, and reformatted it for the small screen. Looks funny in a regular browser, but is just the right size on my iPhone. Scroll down for trig functions, the rest of the machine state, and a calculation record.

Locked In

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 02:33:25 +0000

I was headed outside to give the dogs a walk at about 4pm this afternoon. Got their radio fence collars off and their leashes on, went to open the door, and, it wouldn't open. No amount of turning or pulling would make it budge. Screwdriver time. Took off the inner door handle, pushed the outer door handle out. Still wouldn't budge. Half an hour later, I'd managed to break apart the mechanism and convince the bolt to move, so I could open the door. I guess 25 years is a long time for what was likely a used part when the house was built. Off to Home Depot for a brand new Schlage locking handle set. Just $22. But it needed a little deeper hole than the old set, and I couldn't find my little hand saw, so it was chisel time. Finally got it to fit, and now we can lock our front door. Yay!

Second Cockatiel

Thu, 10 May 2007 13:55:31 +0000

Well, the girls in my family did it. They bought a second cockatiel to keep Sunshine company. So far, the new bird has been absolutely silent. She won't be out of her cage for a little while, so that's where I took this photo. My daughter hasn't named her yet (nor are we sure that's she's not a he).

New Web Hosting Service

Thu, 03 May 2007 01:12:41 +0000

I've been very happy with NearlyFreeSpeech.net (NFS). They've been serving billstclair.com for quite a few years now. But my bandwidth has risen to a gigabyte a day, which means a dollar a day for NFS' hosting. That's $30/month. I was clued into a new hosting service by one of the guys on the Linkinus IRC channel (Linkinus is a nice Mac OS X IRC client). I can get more bandwidth for $10/month there than I'm getting for $30/month at NFS. They don't have the free speech philosophy of NFS, and I don't know yet how their reliability and speed will compare, but so far they look faster, and money is tight. I can go back pretty easily, should that become necessary.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy my new home. Same domain, same politics, different web service provider: Site5.com.

Liberty!

Snowman

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:16:58 +0000

Found outside my house this morning:

New Hat

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 14:09:27 +0000

I got a new hat at Agway yesterday. Made in China for Carhartt. I've been wearing a knit pull-over hat in the winter time for as long as I remember. Switched to a baseball cap when I bought my hoodless rain coat. Now I wanted a brimmed hat with some winter warmth.

I thought I'd never put the new hat's flaps down over my ears, but today the thermometer said 7 degrees, so I did.

Do I look like a hick, or what?

Shift of Blog Energy

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:30:47 +0000

I'm spending a lot of my blogging time at my iMac Pr0n Blog these days. Don't know how long it will last, but at least until configuration of my new machine slows down.

Drupal, the blogging engine I use for this site, is very nice, but I must admit that I like the simplicity of BlogMax, which I'm using again at the iMac Pr0n Blog.

Sick as a Dog

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:00:59 +0000

I awoke on Monday morning around 4am for my morning pee. Felt sorta funny. Felt even more funny when the "pee" came out of my nether regions. Yes, boys and girls. Your intrepid reporter had food poisoning, or a stomach flu, but by whatever name you call it, my bowels were liquid, I had one four-part purge by mouth, and I couldn't stay vertical for more than a few minutes until yesterday afternoon. Subsisted on water and Poweraide.

Feeling well enough to sit at the computer this morning, but still a little fuzzy, and still not hungry. Don't know yet how long I'll manage to stay vertical.

Got a call yesterday afternoon about bringing food to the upcoming winter fair at my daughter's school. Was told that I was one of fourteen so affected. Think it was something we ate.