Thursday, December 06, 2012

Fiddler debugging tool with HTTPS

I"m using Fiddler to look at HTTPS traffic between different application servers.

HTTPS isn't setup by default and the Fiddler2 website has information on setting it up correctly and exporting the certificate for Firefox to use.

I have some brief instructions below (for my own future reference and anyone else out there).

Start Fiddler 2.4x

The steps are to go to Tools, Fiddler Options > HTTPS. Check 'Decrypt HTTPS Traffic," under "Capture HTTPs Connects," and click Yes for the scary dialog box. This exports a root certificate for you Windows machine to use.  I then chose ...from browsers only from the pull-down menu because I'm looking at HTTPS traffic only. Check the 'Ignore Server Certificate Errors,' too.

To make Firefox work with Fiddler I choose 'Export Root Certificate to Desktop.'  Launch Firefox and go to Tools > Options. Select the Advanced tab and then the Encryption (or Certificates) tab and click the 'View Certificates ' and choose Import. Import the root certificate from the desktop.

Also, when I wanted to inspect traffic in Fiddler, I used the Inspectors view on the right and WebForms > WebView to see HTTPS browser responses. That wasn't as intuitive when I first started using the program, but was quite helpful when I needed to look at HTTPS html responses

Friday, November 30, 2012

stopped 'filter' failed (Macbook Pro to Toshiba)

I tried to print today to a company Toshiba printer from my Macbook Pro.

Using this link apple support forum, I was able to delete the current printer list and add the Toshiba printer again via it's IP address and was able to print again.

You just need to go to System Preferences > Print & Scan > Right-click on your printers and choose Reset Printing System. Select OK for "Are you Sure...," and then reinstall the printer via the IP address and you should have success.

Not sure what might have happened. CUPs update?

Thursday, October 18, 2012

IPV6 Testing

Doing some IPV6 testing this week with our application server within a clustered setup.

IPV6 addresses can be a little intimidating.

For example would you like to connect to server with an address like this?

fe80::d12d:7656:6d3b:7e37

I can certainly remember 192.168.1.xxx a lot easier or a whole host of other IPV4 addresses compared to what in store for us down the road.

Thanks to DNS I won't have to remember too much, but still, it's nice to have some IP addresses committed to memory.

When I use the IPV6 I also have to put it in square brackets when using it in a browser.

For example

https://[fe80::d12d:7656:6d3b:7e37]:8888/

a little cumbersome.

Also there a %11 that needs to be appended to the address for Windows machines, it seems, in the hosts file.

Otherwise you might not see the machine when you try to ping it

fe80::d12d:7656:6d3b:7e37%11

Ping on the command line is also different


ping -6

instead of classic ping that doesn't have the dash 6.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

3rd Flatiron Climb

Did the 3rd Flatiron in Boulder today.

After a long hiatus I got to finally get back into climbing with an easy 5.2 to 5.4.

It was the classic standard route and I got to lead all 6 pitches. It had been awhile since I led a pitch but this was the perfect reintroduction to climbing at an appropriate experienced yet rusty level.
Although I did feel a little intimidated on the first two pitches due to the longevity of the rock climbing hiatus I started to feel my chops come back to me after the 3 to 5th pitches.

I'd definitely do this climb again; although not as much as the guy who has a plaque dedicated to him at the top where it said he climbed it 101 times.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Notes on upgrading to Mac OS X Lion

In the engineering wing of my company a majority of us have upgraded to Lion from 10.6.8.

One of the reasons we upgraded was that we could use the new 1.7.x JDK offered by Oracle instead of using the 1.7.x OpenJDK from Google.

Unfortunately there's some work to be done and new ways of doing things in Lion that have changed from 10.6.8.

Some of the tasks you might have to work on, or feature changes you'll need to be aware of, will be:

1) Install more RAM.

     After the install I needed to go from 4 Gigs RAM to 8 Gigs RAM. An additional update. With the new Mac Book Pros with flash drives built in the last few months, 16 Gigs of RAM is even more desirable so I would recommend going to 16 Gigs if your IT department can afford it.

2) Installing the latest JDK 1.7.x from Oracle

     This is an easy download and install from Oracle. There seems to be a new path for the JDK and you'll have to work on your Java Preferences to reenable old Java versions.

3) Getting used to the new virtual desktop layout in Lion.

     Unlike prior versions, the virtual desktops are laid our horizontally and you add more from left to right, instead of classic cardinal direction layout having four desktops arranged in a square like pattern.

4) F8 doesn't seem to work to see all your desktops.

     You'll need to use F3 to see your desktops and add new ones by mousing to the upper right and clicking the plus sign.

4) Using Lion's VPN client instead of Cisco's VPN client

     Cisco seems to not have a VPN client for Lion yet. It stopped working for me once I upgraded to Lion.

5) Getting used to Lion's ostensibly slower user experience

     Lion is definitely slower and if you have encryption features turned on that could also cause additional slowness.

6) ITunes not working anymore if you have an earlier Lion DMG file since it doesn't automatically update ITunes to the latest version.

    Since you might get a Lion DMG installer from a few months ago the ITunes that gets installed could be a few months older and your ITunes will not launch anymore so you'll need to manually download ITunes and reinstall.

7) Having to work on password timeout settings since those will be overwritten. I had a 30 second timeout for a screensaver on my MacBook Pro, which would automatically lock my user session.

     You'll have to update your preferences under System Preferences for Desktop & Screensaver and Security and Privacy.

8) Vertical scrollbars are not automatically enabled.

     This was definitely a huge annoyance for those of us who like using scrollbars instead of the new gestures. Under User Preferences > General I selected Always for Show Scroll bars.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Perry Canyon to White Rock Trail and back

Did a new ride just south of Brigham City today with my sister-in-law.

I found the ride on utahmountainbiking.com under Ogden Area rides. It's at the bottom of the page.

We rode in monsoon (raining or slight drizzle) weather for 90% of the ride so it was a change from what we did the day before when it was sunny and in the low 90s on Snow Basin mountain.

The trail is certainly hard to follow at points but the website is pretty good in giving directions. It would help if there were a couple more signs but we made our way around the loop in about 4.5 hours with plenty of breaks.

You're cautioned in that the trail is a little overgrown - especially when wet - and that parts of the trail are not well worn and can be considered primitive or faint since it seems to be one of the newer loops on the Wasatch front. Thankfully, the fainter parts of the trail are on the lower sections and the upper sections, whether on the Perry Canyon or White Rock Trail are easier to follow, the higher you go.

I would recommend doing it counter-clockwise like they mention on utahmountainbiking.

Also, follow the single-track up from the parking lot and you'll see the turnoff for White Rock inscribed on a tree limb with Grizzly on the left if you'd like to try clockwise.

Don't use any of the roads up to this point; unless you need to cross them to follow the single track. You should only have to cross the creek once in Perry Canyon too and that's in the beginning - within the first half mile.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Tough Mudder Beaver Creek - June 9th, 2012

Did Tough Mudder, Beaver Creek for the second year in a row last weekend. Thankfully it was a sunny day and warm because it was a tougher course due to longer mileage, higher elevation gain and some tougher obstacles at the end of the course.

I signed up last September, which saved me quite a bit of money over registering late; although the total cost was still about $118.00.

The group I did it with (from work) was a little bigger this year but by the start time it was more fragmented due to some people deciding to start earlier, or not starting at all due to being injured before race day.

I'd definitely say that the mileage affected me more this year and due to a few more colds over the winter, and early spring I was unable to train for the event as much as I wanted.

As a sample of the course here is a video of the hill climb we had in the middle of the race:



For this year I got rid of the camelback and found the aid stations sufficient. I kept the small fanny pack for sunscreen, gloves and video camera. I also kept the neoprene vest for the water/mud sections and to keep my torso and shoulders from getting scuffed up too much.  If I do the race next year I'll keep the vest and fanny pack.

I think for next year, if they have a similar course layout, I'll probably pack knee pads since the course obstacles had a lot more crawling than last year.

And, since I forgot the baseball cap this year, unlike last year, I'll try to use it again next year since the high altitude certainly burns the top of the forehead.


Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Cooked Matambre for Memorial Day BBQ

Lisa got a new gas grill and I've been able to try a couple of new recipes on the grill; one being a Matambre roll.

I recommend Steven Raichlen's book, "How to Grill," which has a good recipe that's easy to follow.

Gas grilling with the amount of irradiated heat coming from the burner caused the meat to cook faster than expected so when we were finally ready to serve it was good but could have been a little moister.




Friday, May 25, 2012

SSH > read from remote host < > operation timed out

I have a MacBook Pro and I connect to a lot of Linux Enterprise machines throughout the day from the terminal window.

Unfortunately, I was getting hung SSH sessions after going to lunch where the session would have to quit on its own to give me the terminal prompt again.

As in a majority of my research forays I had to do some Google searches and found I needed to update my /etc/ssh_config and /etc/sshd_config files on my client and server machines.

Adding these lines to my ssh_config on my client side Mac in /etc/ssh_config >


Host *
ServerAliveInterval 240

AND on the server side in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, enabling >

ClientAliveInterval 240

seemed to work.

I made sure to restart my sshd server too with the command /etc/init.d/sshd restart.

Haven't had session timeouts in the last day...





Tuesday, May 01, 2012

One Simple Trick!

I really dislike the one simple trick ads that have been online for the last few years.

I really wish they would go away, but I can see their appeal. I've certainly been sucked in by wondering what the one simple trick would be for some of those remedies they are selling.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Basil wilted from cold getting down to 36 degrees overnight

I left my basil and Italian parsley out overnight on my front porch. The early morning temperature according to the NCAR foothills lab weather site got down to 37 degrees.

I didn't do my due diligence with researching basil cold tolerance so the leaves wilted :) I brought it in late morning and will keep it in the house for the next few days.

According to one site, as long as the basil didn't freeze it should come back but I might have to trim some of the stems and leaves that might necrophy.

Update: After 8 hours the leaves did come back so it didn't take too long

Here are the photo of the basil plant after it was taken inside:


Here is a photo of the plant after 8 hours inside:


Monday, April 16, 2012

Jira Administration - custom fields

We use JIRA here at work. 

For logging bugs we have users fill out a form for a defect and then submit.

To edit those forms we need Administrative privileges and when you get to the form in question there are fields and custom fields.

Some fields just update the Field label and you actually need to click on the left side on Custom fields for some fields that use pulldown menus (e.g. versions for a product).

Maybe less than intuitive but for some JIRA form edits you need to look at the custom fields screen.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Believe half of what you read and three-fourths of what you see

Great adage my 9th grade teacher taught us.

Amazing how we can forget something like this. Wonder how many people applied this when they were investing with Bernie Madoff.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Resolving runtime JUnit issues when Eclipse builds your JUnit project flawlessly

Currently I'm writing automation using JUnit to test REST endpoints.

I'm using Eclipse Iridium with Perforce and Maven as plugins. Eclipse builds my automation project just fine and I can also build successfully on the command line too using Maven (e.g. mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true clean install).

When I launched my JUnit class I was getting a method not found error. After some exploring through Google I found a very handy Java method call to resolve my runtime dependencies and see what JAR file Java and/or Maven were using.

The method I used was:

System.out.println(Base64.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation());

The link to the original article is here.

It seemed under my .m2 directory a prior version of apache commons was being used during runtime (1.2 versus 1.5).

As a temporary stopgap measure I copied the 1.5 JAR file into the 1.2 Maven repository and I got my runtime working.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

microsieverts, millisieverts, fukushima and abcnews

Watched an ABC news segment today, reporting the current progress a year after the Fukushima accident. The reporter took some geiger counter readings a little over a mile from the plant (while traveling in a car) and stated that readings were 20 micro sieverts an hour. I wanted to compare that to other more common day radiation doses and also compare how cumulatively damaging that hourly dose would be over the course of a year.

To understand sieverts and it's smaller units of measurements I needed to do some research first.

First, I realized that one sievert can be very damaging; close to lethal if all at once, and still very dangerous - if not mortally so - if over time.

For more common everyday radiation sources, milli and micro prefixes are used to denote much smaller radiation exposure incidents.

Milli denotes a thousandth of a unit or in this case: 1/1000th of a sievert. Mathematically its factor is denoted by 10-3. The letter m is its symbol.

Micro denotes a millionth of a unit or in this case: 1/1000000 of a siervet. Mathematically its factor is denoted by 10-6. The letter µ is its symbol.

For an average US user the average yearly radiation dosage is around 3 millisieverts.

How does that equate to the 20 microsieverts an hour the reported recorded near the plant?

For my calculations I used the Microsoft calculator in scientific mode.

To start with the micro measurement I entered 1, hit the Exp button, the +/- button, and then 6. I hit equals to get 0.000001, which is a millionth of 1. I then multiplied by 20 to get 0.00002.

To reach the average US yearly dose it would take 6.25 days near the Fukushima plant.

How much radiation would the 20 microsieverts per hour be if added over the course of a year? I multipled 0.00002 by 24 and then 365 to get 0.1752 of a sievert. To make it easier to read I multipled by 1000 to get a millisievert result.

175.2 millisieverts was the answer, which is quite considerable but shouldn't be lethal over that long a time. US nuclear works were 'classically' allowed up to 50 milliseiverts a year; now 20.

So if you lived near the Fukushima plant for a year you'd get 3-8 times the dose of a nuclear plant worker.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Test RESTful endpoints for OAuth with curl

It's weird I never really got into RESTful testing while at BEA or Oracle but now I have an opportunity to do some REST with OAuth at my current job.

Basically POST, GET, PUT, DELETE matches CRUD operations.

I can also easily exercise REST endpoints with curl on the command line too.

For example I can use an example curl command line below to retrieve a user record using the GET endpoint:

curl --basic -u [username to authenticate with]:[password] -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X GET https://localhost:9031/pf-ws/rest/oauth/clients/[username to retrieve] --insecure

For POST and PUT endpoints I need to reference a file to add a record or update a record.

Monday, February 06, 2012

LDAP Provisioning - Error code 50 with Active Directory

I've been testing Express Provisioning with our product and was getting a console error from our application server:


ERROR [LdapExpressProvisioningProcessor] There was an error provisioning the user. Insufficient privileges provided: javax.naming.NoPermissionException: [LDAP: error code 50 - 00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150A45, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0
]; remaining name 'CN=john,CN=Users,DC=dev,DC=global'

I had to do some queries on Google but found that I had to change the permissions for the user I logged in with to the LDAP datastore.

For Active Directory I had add the user to Administrators. That was accomplished by right-clicking on the user, selecting Properties and then selecting Member Of. I typed in Administrators and added that group to the user and then was able to accomplish provisioning to LDAP accounts on the Active Directory server.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Patagonia R4 Regular Fleece Jacket

I bought the R4 jacket back in 2007 but I had another Marmot fleece to wear that I have traded in for this.

I only really started using the jacket last fall since I had some other jackets - in addition to the Marmot - that I preferred.

People keep asking me how a fleece can be warm but this jacket has some Polartec WindBloc laminate between the mesh on the inside and the fleece on the outside.

I've already used it for skiing and can't complain to it's effectiveness on the slopes.

It definitely works for Colorado winters.

There you go - a commercial endorsement on this mini blog.

Exploring ELK (Elastic) Stack for hack-a-thon

At my current gig, our group finally got to do hack-a-thon week and I joined a team project that tied together a few of the technologies I&#...