First HD-DVD now Blu-Ray 'cracked'

A couple of weeks ago was the HD-DVD protection officially circumvented. Now the Blu-Ray protection (which also uses AACS for protection) is a 'goner'. I wonder how many trillions of dollars were spent on this protection (which is being paid by the consumers who buy these discs). I just hope that the movie industry follows the music record labels (EMI n this case) in removing protection on audio CD's. B.t.w. I saw the ripped HD-DVD movie 'Serenity' on my PC, and must say that the HD quality is phenomanal. Time to become an early-adaptor on the HD format (again :-)). This means a new Full-HD TV, and an appropriate player.

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Creating Certificate Signing Requests

OK, the title might sound a little weird, but trust me..... I work on a daily basis with digital certificates (end-user, and SSL certificates). These things get more, and more common these days. More and more webservices are being 'secured' by SSL certificates. The only problem is that the technicians who run the services don't know shit (well, most of them do) about SSL and/or PKI. I don't blame them, because it tends to be a little complex. SSL certificates can be generated as selfsigned certificates, or you might wanna get a commercial SSL certificate from Certificate Authorities like VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. Anyway, in every case, you need to generate a certificate signing request (CSR), and submit it to the Certificate Authority. The problem is that there are some applications that stay in a pending mode if you generate a CSR, and wait for the resulting certificate to come back from the CA. This might take a couple of days. It would be a lot nicer if you can request the certificate on another platform, and import it in the application when you get the thing. There are several ways to generate a CSR on the different platforms;

• OpenSSL - equivalent to rocket science for most people, since it's a commandline tool
• Via webserver tooling (IIS, JAVA Keytool, etc.)
• XCA - Not very user friendly if you're requesting just one or two certificates a year.
• And probably some other 'obscure' ways

But what if your application needs a SSL certificate, or your webserver is located on the other side of the world (and you have no way of accessing it directly)? How the hell do you generate a CSR? The Windows platform itself doesn't have any tools for creating certificates (only if you use IIS or have a CA running on the platform). I hope to solve this by creating an application (cross platform off course) which creates these CSR's, and create pkcs12 (or .pfx) files when you import the resulting certificate in the tool. This pkcs12 file can be installed on the server as needed. Finally, a challenge for me to start programming again.

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New Honda Civic (lease)

Within the next couple of weeks, I need to pick a new lease car. It's probably gonna be the new Honda Civic 1.8 Executive (black). I just hope that they have some sort of iPod integration for this car. Anyone any info on that? It's got to be integrated or something, because the audio system is integrated into the dashboard, so it's not possible to place a 'stand-alone' car stereo in the car with iPod support (e.g. the Alpine car hifi components :-P).

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Wannahave TFT TV

I'll probably need a new TV next year, and it's gonna be this Philips 42PF9731D/10 TFT TV. It features;

• 42 inch wide screen
• Full HD display (1080p)
• dual HDMI inputs
• Ethernet, and USB (for viewing movies or photos from your PC :) ).
• Support playback for mp4, mp3, DivX, XviD, etc.
• 2 tuners
• Multiple in- and outputs

Only drawback is the price (+3000 euros), so the New Years Eve lottery jackpot is more than welcome. If that hapends, I'll also throw in a Xbox-360, and a Nintendo Wii.

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Near death iPod

My current iPod (Photo, 20GB) started to give funny noises. If I gently shake it, I hear weird crackling noises from, what I think is, the internal drive. I had the same thing when we were in Tibet last year. That time the entire iPod refused to work permanently. Brought it back to the shop, and it got repaired (or so I was told). No the same thing is happening all over again :( I just hope that the iPod will remain working for the next one or two months, because there might be a full screen video iPod early next year :P So, anyone wanna buy a 20GB Photo iPod (it's little over a year old)?

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Mailserver Crash

Fiddling with my (Windows) mail server ended up in a 'serious' crash. The result was one week of mail down the drain :(. Even though I still had all my mail offline in my Mail.app, there was no way (at least not that I could find) to import it again in the IMAP folders. I still have those mails in a backup of my Mac book Pro, so I could find the info with SpotLight. If anyone has any ideas to import them back into the IMAP folders, please drop the ideas in the comments. That was a Fridays night well spent :(

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Multifunction/purpose Gadgets

Do I really need a multipurpose phone/mp3 player/camera? The talks about the upcoming iPhone from Apple made me think. Sure, a Apple iPhone would definitely be cool, but do I need a cell-phone/mp3 player. I already have a cell-phone (which has a radio, and mp3 player functionality), and I never used the radio, or the mp3 player. Somehow I like to separate functionality. This way I can buy a new mp3 player (read: iPod) without having to buy a new phone. Or, if my phone dies, I can still listen to my music. Or, I can listen to music while having boring conversations on the phone. So, this leaves the question; Would I buy an iPhone?.. Maybe, but only if it's innovating. Just a convergence of a phone and a mp3 player won't convince me. Please note that I 'own' a cell-phone since 1998, and I just got my third in a 8 year timespan. During this period I also got a iMode enabled phone for free, but never used it. Mainly because the menu on the phone sucked big time. So, the iPhone needs to be very special (and available in Europe). However, I'll definitely buy the rumored new full-(wide)screen iPod with touchscreen interface. Just for replacing my 'old' (and still working) iPod Photo.

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Ngorongoro Sunset

Two more pictures from our trip to Africa. The beautiful african sunset at the Ngorongoro crater. Taken from the Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge.

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Great Service in Africa

When we were in Africa, we had some money problems. Even though they accept credit cards in most of the hotels, it's hard to withdraw cash from ATM's. During our stay there were a gazillion number of public holidays in Kenya, and Tanzania, and during those holidays, the banks are closed. So getting some serious cash was a problem. Especially when you're on safari (not that many ATM's on the Serengeti). When we entered Tanzania, we needed cash, because we needed to pay some fees (in cash). We were taken to the Impala Hotel in Arusha. Here we could charge our credit card for cash (Tanzanian Shillings, and US Dollars). I seperated the 300 USD, because we needed to pay exit-tax when we fly home again from Zanzibar. At the end of our vacation, we needed to pay the exit-tax (or departure tax) to get form Zanzibar to Nairobi. The official in charge of collecting the departure money told us that most of our money was fake...... Well, that's just great. The only place where we could have gotten the fake dollars was in the Impala Hotel. 'Damn those bastards....' Back home, I contacted the Impala Hotel by e-mail, and explained the situation. Fortunatelly, they remembered the transaction and suggested to correct the problem. They were very cooperative on solving this issue. A few e-mails later, I got the details of a Western Union Money Transfer. They had sent me the complete amount of 160 USD. There is only one thing I can say about this: Awesome service. Keep up the good work.

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Holiday images online

I've placed a rough selection of photos on my Flickr page. They can be found here. They'll be 'fine-tuned' in the next couple of days (tags, descriptions etc.), and there might be some new ones later on. Enjoy them.

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