David Sirr's ...stuff

This being my first attempt at setting up a leopard webserver i was getting a tad frustrated with apache and the SSL setup for one of the websites. Everytime I dropped in the site's config the server wouldn't start, giving a bad passphrase error in the console. Not being able to find an option for this in my SSL config I was going around in circles and getting scared that this would be a show-stopper for our new server, especially after reading so many forum posts saying that SSL in leopard was a nightmare requiring custom builds of apache and openSSL etc... Salvation was found in the Server Admin tool... despite the fact that once you start manually editing the virtual host site files the lovely web config panel ceases to recognise any of your sites, there is a quite useful 'Certificates' button when you select the root node of your server. I had already copied all the related cert files from the 10.4 server to /private/etc/certificates, so it was then a simple matter of choosing the import certificate option and figuring out which files to put in what box. My files ended up being:

• certificate file (*.crt)
• private key file (*.key)
• certificate authority file (*.chcrt)
• private key passphrase (this was the thing that instantly fixed it for apache)

From here it worked like a dream! I hope this will save similar worry to some of you out there...

I've just added a new section in the pages area of the blog with detail of my open source projects that will be kept up to date. So far i've only put up CFGrowl project, but more to come!

When you're the author of second-life. I've recently had to write an application  for work to manage registrations to a private island in second-life. It worked fantastically in development and interfaced  second-life's beta registration API. The problem is that when we launched it we had reports from users that it was throwing errors for hours at a time and would come back randomly, always with the same malformed response error. This is a reasonably high profile project in the education arena with many schools from all over the world participating and second-life staff were involved in the inception phase. So when we logged a support ticket to plead for assistance their staff closed it immediately with, "this is known beta product and we do not support it". Nice response guys! Examination of their API wiki shows it's been in beta for well over 2 years!! As a developer how do they expect us to even bother looking at their platform as being viable when there is no support and no endpoint in sight. A highly disappointingly experience all round...

I've added an essential software list to this blog that contains a list of software that i use daily in my web development and a second list of more general apps i can't live without. This is a great resource if you are new to a Mac dev environment and aren't sure what apps to use on OSX! I plan on keeping this list up to date whenever i find any awesome new apps

 

ARGH!!!! a so much time wasted... on what? One Apache virtualhost rewrite section :( Problem: enabling friendly URLs in wordpress Supposed Solution: cut and paste sample apache code from wordpress admin

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Frustration: Multiple random frigged up errors that require pulling all my hair out, wasting a couple of hours, and reading countless useless articles on google Salvation: Doubting leopard server / Apache's ability to parse plain text in a simple and logical fashion, I manually typed every line of the sample code verbatim rather than copy/pasting any of it. and... it works like a charm... so to reiterate... ARGH!!!! Lessons learned: type your code, even though it may take longer it may be shorter in the long run! also, if you want to use rewrite within a virtualHost instead of a .htaccess, you need to be inside a <directory> to use the RewriteBase which will help keep your assets working correctly after a rewrite. Lastly use blogcfc instead of wordpress! (i would be if only blogcfc had this lush hemmingway theme :) )