Getting self-signed SSL certificates to work on Firefox 3.5

Theres alot of discussion lately about Mozilla’s decision to annex self-signed certificates in Firefox 3.x; up until now Firefox would have grudgingly lived with self-signed certificates – when reaching a website that was self-signed all you had to do was click the ‘add exception’ link at the bottom of the warning message, but no more!

When you visit a website that secures itself with a self-signed SSL certificate your now more likely to recieve a much more ominous warning telling you that the certificate is invalid and no obvious way to allow you to proceed regardless.

Having recently setup a secure subversion repository I had this exact problem also. This morning I found a solution, its not ideal but it works perfectly. To make Firefox play nice you have to add your CA (certificate authority) certificate AND your server certificate to Firefox’s list of allowed authorities, then and only then do you get the option to add the server as an exception. Here’s how you do it:

You will need a local copy of the ca.crt and server.crt certificate files.

Open the certificates window

Firefox Preferences -> Advanced Tab -> Encryption -> View Certificates

Import your Certificate Authority file

Authorities Tab -> Click Import -> Browse to your ca.crt file

Import your Server Certificate file

Servers Tab -> Click Import -> Browse to your server.crt file

Thats it! Next time you visit your website (https://mywebsite.com/ for example) you should now be able to add an exception to allow the self-signed certificate.

Reaching the Firefox preferences window differs slightly from OS to OS. In Mac OS X its Firefox -> Preferences, in Linux its often Edit -> Preferences and in Windows its Tools -> Preferences. Its beyond me why Mozilla couldn’t keep it consistent, but there you go.

I hope this post helped you.

Review: iPhone Stencils

I woke up today to find these waiting for me:

I bought two so I could have one on my desk and one in my bag at *all* times. You never know when a creative idea might strike! I’d also imagine losing one wouldn’t be too hard at all.

There’s not really an awful lot one can say about these iphone stencils, they’re metal templates which help designers draw concept iPhone apps. Containing most of the elements an iPhone app designer would need: buttons, icons a slider etc.

The first thing I noticed as I opened the minimal packaging was the pencil. I love that they included a mechanical pencil – the idea, its sound and very nice. In practice however, I hate this pencil – its plasticky, its cheap and its utterly useless to me. A simple run-of-the-mill pencil would have satisfied me more than the cheap feeling and poor performance of this pencil. More than anything, it made the few rough edges around the stencil even more pronounced, which is kind of odd considering none of my pens or pencils seem to suffer from that.

Moving onto the stencil itself, as a design tool its perfectly balanced. it has the right number of shapes, does the job admirably – though I would’ve liked a square cutout to mimic the home button square, but its not like its necessary. There were a couple of issues however: it sucks up finger prints worse than anything I’ve seen in recent memory, which is disappointing considering the pictures on the store suggest that its almost a matte-type surface, which I would have preferred.

Smoothness is also a bit of a nagging point, the edges on the outside are not quite up to my standard of ’smooth’. Its rough enough to make your writing impliment jut out – at least in one place, where they’ve clearly cut out the template from the rest of the stock. I expected more from seeing the pictures of it to be perfectly honest. However, like I mentioned earlier, it all depends on your drawing implement of choice; with most I’d imagine the minimal roughness will not be noticeable – its just a little irritating for the needless perfectionists. uh huh… me.

Finally, the metal stock is really too thin. I’m sorry but this I just had to bring up, its incredibly thin – too thin in my view. It would take nothing to bend it out of shape, in fact so much so that I can see it easily being bent out of shape if left in a bag without being protected inside a hardback book. For $16 US each, plus the international shipping costs, I would have hoped for something a little bit more sturdy.

All things considered however, I think these stencils are a wonderful aid for sketching up iPhone app designs. I usually prefer photoshop to anything else, but sometimes you need that hands on-touch.

On that note, its time for bed. I’ve spent all day playing with these things, my desk is a mess and its well past 2:30 on a weekday!!

** Updated to include links to Design Commission website

iPhone 3GS Problems

Yes that’s right, the iPhone 3GS I got on launch day (26th June) is already useless.

The iPhone3GS is now completely unresponsive to input on the top row of icons on the home screen and has intermittent responsiveness everywhere else. At one point it even opened spotlight search, and typed ‘ipo’ by itself!!

I believe this was an existing issue with the device which was made worse when it dropped on the ground as I was getting out of a car, it fell all of one foot into concrete/grass (only slight cosmetic damage). But ever since, its just gotten much worse, ever since I had the iPhone it was opening apps every now and then without my input. I would take it out of my pocket and somehow it had opened some app or other while in the locked mode.

So, now I’m waiting for apple to send me the coffin to send to them for it to be replaced. Will try to put a hold on my o2 contract as soon as possible – theres no way I’m paying for repair time!!

BinaryClock for iPhone almost complete

I’m still awaiting approval to the iPhone Developer Program so that I can actually test the app on an actual iPod and iPhone but in the meantime, heres a sneak of what the BinaryClock will look like: