Import Self Signed Certs

Day three of using self signed certs and I was tired of telling chrome to accept it. Under the wrench menu there was an import certificate process. However, for Ubunutu, what it really needed was importing them into the OS keystore

First step, install the libnss3-tools:

sudo apt-get install libnss3-tools

There is a mention on that page linked above that says the cert needs to be imported as a CA due to a bug. On Natty Ubuntu it was not necessary. I put the following function in my .bashrc

function trustCert() {
[ $# -ne 2 ] && echo "you need to provide [certificate_nickname] and [certificate_filename]" && return 1
certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "P,," -n $1 -i $2
}

Gradle Dependencies

I was looking for the command to tell gradle to list the project dependencies (think maven dependency:tree). I came across this closed bug. Annoyingly that bug does not say how to actually output the listing.

Well, it's a command line option (run gradle --help) that was deprecated in favor of:

gradle dependencies

Architecting and Building A startup

This is not my usual flavor of posts in this space. However, it seems like a good place to mention that my users of Book Mobile have been feeling even more abandoned lately as I've left the corporate world to Architect and build a startup. Stealth mode requires that I say nothing about the startup or it's architecture.

Hopefully those Book Mobile users understand the nature of spare-time-projects and how that spare time ebbs and flows.

Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat Android UDEV Settings

Thank you Esua Silva for referencing the Maverick udev syntax for my 70-android.rules file. I have a nexus one so of course my vendor id is 18D1:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0666"

The syntax change from Lucid to Maverick should have been easier to find.

Android Book Mobile Version 1.8

I've finally released my first cut at Amazon integration. This will hopefully be THE revenue stream. As always Book Mobile is free and ad-free. The search result screen now includes a button to open a web browser with the Amazon page for the current book. As part of this integration I now, for the first time, have some metrics about how much the application is being used. All of this is completely anonymous! The last thing I want is the responsibility keeping personal data safe from attack.

In the first 24 hours there have been 664 books successfully looked up. The sad part is that only 7 of them where clicked through to Amazon and non of those users bought anything. So far the only revenue is from last week when my wife used a beta version to buy me another Elmore Leonard paperback -- thanks honey!

This release included a large refactoring of the result screen where most of the error reports are occurring. Please update so I can fix any remaining issues! Better yet, if you are running Froyo you can look for that auto update checkbox on the market application update screen.

Microsoft Office Has one Cool Feature

I know that Microsoft Outlook has many pundits. I'm one of them. But that mail client has one thing going for it. When I type "doe snot" when I really meant "does not" -- Outlook would catch the typo and put the "s" where it belonged. Mind you, I don't think this is a redeeming feature.

Eclipse Search in Debug View

Well, I was debugging Glassfish via a remote connection and needed to find a particular thread to pause. Of course I was looking for the http worker threads. Scanning that long list of threads is just to painful. So I thought, "Can I search this?" I hit F5, and low-n-behold a search window comes up listing the threads. I type "*HttpWorkerThread", select one, and am returned to the Debug view with the same thread selected.

Thank you Eclipse. Thank you for just working -- the way software should.