Originally, after seeing the ad, I checked out the website, and put it into my look-at-later pile, until one of my friends posted a twitter update via Path. Once it was back on my radar, I signed up for my account and downloaded the application to my iPhone.

Path is very mobile-centric, which is very relevant today. It’s referred to as a “smart” journal, designed to help you keep track of memorable moments in your life. Once installed on your phone, it can track your day and routine, helping you to capture meaningful events. Accounts are limited to 150 friends, which is explained as limiting the sharing of these moments to the most important people in your life.

The signup process via the browser was still very straightforward, but only your settings are available via the web. The first thing I did, was try to change my profile picture, which I confused with my “Cover” at first. Path actually has TWO images that represent you. A small circular avatar, as well as a more broad “cover”, which serves as a backdrop. It doesn’t appear that there’s any way to change your profile picture from your desktop at this time, however, It is possible to change your vital stats and password. There’s also a section with links to remove any connected services, such as Facebook or Twitter, but again, no links to add them.

Switching to my phone, my first impression is that the application is beautiful. Everything is smooth, fast and good looking. When you create a new post, you’re given 6 options: Photograph, People, Place, Music, Thought and Awake. Each contains a slightly customized screen with information that you’d want to share about a particular media.

I was most impressed by the music post screen. It gives you an option for the song currently playing in the iPod app, or a selection of recommended music, which is probably a feed of other recently posted music by other users.

From many of the post screens, you can select a location as well as the people that you are with. The people appear to be limited by your address book, rather than your Path friends.

I was least impressed with the Awake post type, as it’s only use is to indicate your waking state, which isn’t very applicable for me. I’m going to try out out, but it feels like you’d be spamming the feed, unless you were using it to indicate a nap, or being awake at a strange time, neither of which I really do.

Also available are a series of selectors to syndicate your post to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Foursquare. I’d like to see WordPress integration, as I don’t have a Tumblr blog and I’d really like to be able to syndicate things like my music posts. I can, however, understand the difficulties of WordPress and self hosted blogs, compared to a pretty Tumblr API.

When it comes to reading updates, the application uses a beautiful timeline. It’s able to display all types of media posted using the application, and has a variety of easy to understand icons while you’re skimming though. Again, the music sharing interface shines though here. When you select a song that’s been shared, a window pops up with links to purchase the song, or display further information. My one gripe is that a preview starts playing immediately, which may be inappropriate for some situations. Largely though, when clicking on a shared song, you’ll want to hear what it sounds like.

You can replace “$LOAD_PATH” with “$:”, but I find the long form more readable.

file_path = __FILE__
while File.symlink?(file_path) do
  file_path = File.dirname(file_path) +'/'+ File.readlink(file_path)
end
#this is your real path. For example only.
puts "resolved path: #{file_path}"

# add your lib directory to the load path.
# Two directories up, as i'm keeping my primary .rb file in project_dir/bin
# search our libraries first to give priority above system installed libs.
$LOAD_PATH.unshift File.expand_path("../../lib/",file_path)
# require something from your lib directory
require 'mylib/lib.rb'

I’m already 100% bought in to the “Apple Way”.

Firstly, i’d like to point to a couple of neat things that people have been saying about the iPad.

Gruber nailed the hardware implications in his post:

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.

Stephen Fry’s post can be boiled down to:

it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device.

Some of my peers have been skeptical on the impact of the tablet; It’s just a big iPod Touch to them. To me, this is another device that fits quite nicely into the way I run my computing experience. Most of them have no idea how the whole package fits together.

I’m already 100% bought in to the “Apple Way”. I’ve got an iPhone and an Apple TV. I’ve got a MacBook. I’ve even got a few Airport Express units. All of this stuff together allows me to have a pretty seamless experience across my home. The iPad will just add another layer to my setup.

Apple’s ecosystem extends beyond the ability to get content or have a snazzy device. It’s about how their whole media experience fits seamlessly into my computing. I can grab music from the store, copy over to my wife’s PC and then control which portions of the house it plays on using my iPhone. It’ll even play on my entertainment centre via my Apple TV.  Even the DRM on TV and Movies is unnoticeable to me, as I only have media devices that support FairPlay. Even my non-DRM cd rips are supported across the entire setup. It’s not even too hard to let my friends play their iTunes music over my speakers, all without cables.

The iPad probably isn’t as compelling a device for somebody that runs a Microsoft household, but even PCs will run iTunes, which gives you a gateway to this awesome way to run your media.

The iPad already has access to many of the applications that I’d like to use in a tablet platform

From a software perspective, I think that the decision to have the device run the iPhone OS rather than full blown OSX is a great move. The tablet is first and foremost a mobile device; by forcing the iPad into the same category as the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple is ensuring that the expectations for the device remain clear – it’s not a replacement for your laptop and you’re not going to be able to run iMovie on it.

Using the App Store, the iPad already has access to many of the applications that I’d like to use in a tablet platform on the go. SSH, VNC and Remote Desktop clients are already on my iPhone, but will become much more usable on the bigger screen. Software developers will soon start to port applications that were previously impractical on the iPhone – They’ll be geared to run on a multitouch platform and scaled to the computing capacity of the device. I’m looking forward to apps like Coda, which would allow me to be productive without hauling around the MacBook that I use for heavy lifting.

I’ve also seen complaints about the hardware being underpowered. I’d agree if this was a desktop device, but it’s not. It’s got plenty of power for basic apps and browsing the web. I wholeheartedly agree with their decision to use custom silicon, as you get much more efficiency from using hardware designed to do a specific task. While I’m skeptical of their battery claims, there’s absolutely no way you’d get anywhere near those numbers if they’d used an off the shelf solution. The opportunities for power management are also better when you’ve got something that will only operate in spikes.

I’ll be ordering an iPad as soon as they’re available in Canada, and I look forward to the innovative things that the App Store developers will bring.

Due to some security policies on the system, ssh -X wasn’t working out for me. I decided to manually set the display on the remote machine to point at a local X server.

I ended up having to make the following changes to the preferences to allow remote display forwarding (not through ssh)

It’s a good idea to toggle the settings back when you’re done.

The solution for me was quite simple. The URL you are publishing to must be present in the Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) list of your SharePoint site. I was trying to publish to the IP rather than the server name, which was not in said list.

The URL you are publishing to must be present in the Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) list of your SharePoint site.

I was attempting this strange behaviour due to some temporary naming issues that i’m having in my lab network. While most SharePoint folk will not come across this error, I figured it might be useful to throw in my two cents as other people may tossing together temporary sites with little regard to the proper configuration of AAMs.

One of the comments on this blog post clued me in. The person mentioned missing host headers, at which point I realized that IIS probably doesn’t send them if you’re not requesting a “valid” SharePoint URL, as SharePoint itself probably adds the MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices header which Infopath uses to determine if the publishing target is valid.

All you can really do is create VMs and view the consoles, but it works a heck of a lot better than the web interface.

If you’ve got it running on a non-standard port, you can connect to the SSL enabled port via

<ip of machine>:<vmware ssl port>

There are quite a few sources of information on this around, but to get it to work in all browsers with my own CA required chopping bits together, which i’ll outline below.

Before you get started, consider the security implications of having a certificate that lists all of the sites you are using SSL on. If somebody inspects the certificate, they will see the entries for all of the sites you have included. This can allow an attacker to look for a weak application running on the server under a different domain. It can also have privacy implications.

First, I created a new CA, following this awesome Ubuntu document. There’s also an alternate method that leverages make files.

The biggest two issues I had with my CA configuration were:

1. I set a subjectAltName value under my x509 extensions, which overwrote the requested data from the CSR.
2. Under the CA policy, I didn’t match up required and optional fields, which also caused openssl to yell at me when signing the CSR.

After your CA is set up, you’ll need to get the CSR generated. Firstly, you need to configure the X509 extensions to include your extra data – At this point, it’s not possible to specify the data via the command line, but you can use the configuration file, or some cool environment variable magic.

Firstly, depending on the method chosen above, you’ll need to specify the alternate names. I decided to go the configuration file route. On the webserver, it ended up looking something like:

[ req ]
default_bits		= 1024
default_keyfile 	= server.key
distinguished_name	= dn
attributes		= req_attributes
string_mask = nombstr
req_extensions = v3_req # The extensions to add to a certificate request

[dn]
C = CA # Your Country Code
O = Organization Name
0.CN = *.domain1.com
1.CN = *.domain1.com
2.CN = *.domain1.com

[ v3_req ]
subjectAltName=@alt_names

[alt_names]
DNS.0 = *.domain1.com
DNS.1 = *.domain2.com
DNS.2 = *.domain3.com

From there you need to create your CSR, which requires a keyfile and a place to store it. I like to use /etc/apache2/ssl. Run the following

mkdir -p /etc/apache2/ssl
cd /etc/apache2/ssl
openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -text -config /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf -extensions v3_req

You’ll get a bunch of output and can verify your CNs and AltNames are correct. the CSR will be the bit at the end, but you can copy all of the output over to your CA for signing. I don’t usually keep my CSRs around, but as I add domains, I just run those commands to add them to my certificate.

Now, on your CA, assuming you’ve followed the Ubuntu documentation, run the following from your CA directory.

openssl ca -config caconfig.cnf -in ~/ssl/lako2.req -out server_crt.pem -preserveDN

Voila! you will now have a certificate that can support multiple hosts.

From there, you need to distribute your CA, and get apache to use your shiny new certificate. Getting your CA certificate out is as simple as placing your CA .cer file in a web accessible location. Have your users point their browser to it’s URL, and they should automatically be prompted to trust it.

My Apache SSL configuration, per site, is the same as the regular definition, with the following added. It’s taken almost straight from the stock Ubuntu SSL configuration.

#   SSL Engine Switch:
#   Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host.
SSLEngine on

SSLCertificateFile    /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

#   Server Certificate Chain:
#   Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the
#   concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the
#   certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively
#   the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile
#   when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server
#   certificate for convinience.
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server-ca.crt

#   SSL Engine Options:
#   Set various options for the SSL engine.

<FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">
SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</FilesMatch>
<Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin>
SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
</Directory>

BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

If you end up adding additional sites, you can just modify your config files, regenerate the request and resign it.

function n {
  "$@"
  status=$?

  if [ "$status" == "0" ] ; then
    result="completed"
  else
    result="FAILED ($status)"
  fi

  growlnotify -m "Script $result" -s "$@"
}

Non-mac users, eat your heart out.

For bonus points, you can plug this sucker into prowl. I plan to make a standalone prowl equivalent for use on other *nix platforms with cURL support.