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I heavily use email on my mobile phone. Actually, i’m using ssl for sending emails. Suddenly out of nothing it stopped working. Receiving via imaps wasn’t a problem, but outgoing mail stuck with “unrecognized command”. Yeah, great. Checked configs in my phone, on my server, nothing changed.

Today i read this:

Der Mobilfunkanbieter O2 filterte in seinem UMTS- und GPRS-Netz zeitweise Befehle zur Aktivierung von verschlüsseltem E-Mail-Versand. O2-Pressesprecher Albert Fetsch erklärte, Ursache sei ein Software-Update und ein Hardwaretausch einer Firewall an einem Standort im Core-Netz Anfang September gewesen. Das Problem sei nur punktuell aufgetreten und nun behoben.

Source heise.de

It basically says that German provider O2 filtered some commands for encrypted email, namely STARTTLS.

I recently got the impression that i always stumble upon such things, invest a whole lot of time, get angry, stressed and what not. I hate feeling miserable for other dickheads mistakes.

Apart from that, interesting lapse to make in a softwareupdate.

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Talking with him was great, Cebit… I’m not so excited. Less comercial overkill and more interessting nerdig topics would be better. Also, i woke up with cold this morning, should have listened to this post.

Anyway, was a nice trip in the end and not that expensive.

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This post among a lots of other things that i recently experienced with OS X 10.5.x on my MacBook and my PPC iMac lead me to one conclusion: Just try it linux for the desktop once again. The last time i did it was around 2002, 2003… Not a too pleasant experience. In the meantime, thinks have changed, i guess and i myself do have some good knowledge with Debian Linux on multiple servers so why not try to bring this back to my office.

So, welcome my new desktop, which will hopefully be delivered by next week:

This Dell Vostro 200 comes with Vista Business… I won’t touch this but install a 2nd hardrive and opt for Debian/Lenny. I’m not under any time pressure, so i’ll try to fit the environment to my needs in every detail as possible. I you’re interested, i’ll keep posting about it.

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Bloggers in Germany often write about devastating calls to phone, computer or software hotlines. About employees who give a shit about the actual problem. This post isn’t going to be one of them.

I called the Parallels hotline about a funny problem with my account. I really didn’t have such a nice conversation with a helpdesk in a long time. An interested employee who really wanted to help me. Kind of a relief not talking to someone who is randomly bored, not interested, plain stupid or in any other way distracted.

My problem itself is funny on one side and on the other hand a “don’t ever think about implementing a system that way”.

I really had a good password on the Parallels website, with some special chars and one very special char, a german umlaut, namely the “ü”. Never had a problem with this until they did redo their website and the backend. Suddenly i couldn’t log in anymore. Hm, my browser did safe the password, i remembered it correctly so what the hell is wrong? There was the usual “(i’m stupid and) forgot my password link”, so i clicked this and got my password delivered via email. Huh? There a still people saving passwords in plain text? After for example someone stole reddits database with lots of email addresses and plain text passwords? I felt relieve, that i mostly use different passwords on different accounts.

Please, people, the least thing you could do is to hash you passwords, just to prevent a casual hacker to take your users data away. And even a simple md5 hash would prevented my silly problem ahead. Go with sha or sha512 or the best you can do, salt and hash your password, crypt or bcrypt. Their are libraries for every major programming language available to do this, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Why could this saved me and Parallels a lot of problems? A simple md5 hash would have change the “ü” to some arbitrary character which for sure would fit into the ASCII alphabet and an upgrade to their website backend wouldn’t have the data in the user table mutilated. Thanks! I guess I’m the only international customer with German umlauts in his password.

The most funny thing about the conversation was dictating a funny German word to a native American English speaker and hearing her repeating it. She could look up my account and saw the letters… Trying to log in with them wasn’t possible, neither resetting the password… For that, i must be logged in. Haha.

I guess i could be pissed about the need to open a second account, but the conversation was fun. And in the end, Parallels Desktop is a great product and what the heck, someone messed up and they didn’t blame it on me like many German hotlines do. Furthermore, i was really happy, realising that my rusty school English is still not that rusted and that I’m still able to communicate some problems without much hassle.

But going back to the password problem: Please start writing serious authentication code, it’s not that hard. Thank you.

Edit: I must say, the Parallels support really rocks! They did manage to reset my account and they did read my emails the first time i wrote them and did not respond with some standard templates like many others do. I really appreciate this and this post isn’t in any way a rant against Parallels or their support team, but it is ranting against thoughtless database design.

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The speaker, Dierk König, encouraged live blogging, so here we are:

Some ActiveRecord bashing and many, many windows machines around. People fiddling around with their Java Paths, IntelliJ IDEA, which should be way better and more impressive than Eclipse or my nifty little TextMate… In the meantime, everything works fine on a real OS (that is everything else than Windows, for that matter…)

I’m already bored and expecting something more to happen. Everything said in the last 3 hours or so has been written down somewhere on the Internet.

As i don’t want to bore anybody else, i’ll guess i have look at my feedreader.

Hey, the beat goes on, configuring some weird IDE has stopped…

Would anybody really read my live blogging? If a tree falls in a forest…

JEHOVA! He said G-String

So again, how are strings called in the Groovy JDK? G Strings?

Hm, breaks are wonderful… Too much to eat, too much coffee…

The guy next to me didn’t manage to get the command line version working neither any IDE… Help is not wished.

At least, there’s a recent issue of german magazin in the conference file… With the title story about Ruby on Rails, hrr, hrr .
Sometimes i think the IT world needs more egomaniac, rockstar-like developers like Heinemeier Hansson

Why on earth does one guy write the code from the beamer down on a sheet of paper while he’s checking his emails at the same time?? Sometimes the outer world seems like a strange place to me. Strange and weird.

Funny thing: Received a 1&1 spam mail about some profiseller foobar this morning. There are two guys from 1&1 at the opposite desk… Well, i’m too good educated…

Is it a good idea to but lawyers and webprogrammers into the same hotel?

“Divs are good for updating thingies on the page”

I guess its obvious that english isn’t my native language (can’t get the thought out of my head that tante is mocking me…), but language and spoken words always creates a frame for thoughts and far to often, a cage… And for that being said, one should pay more attention on how to paraphrase things.

I really hate it if the speakers machine is not prepared well. I really do enjoy giving little demonstrations but i’m fastidious to paranoid that everything is taken care of, tested and proved to be working… If their only 8 hours time, not working improvisation sucks.

I have to say, i really do like Groovy, it’s a chance to get some serious scripting into Java at home… err i wanted to say, at work. People tend to focus on just one language and limiting themselves, but with Groovy i can argue: It’s Java with some fancy things on top. And at least for me, it’s a good thing.

“Mit diesen Dingen kann man beliebig fancy werden” — Argh, my head schmerzts…

I should collect some pudding for the gay bar to see if this guy is really as witty as he writes. Would pudding suffer to pay you or do want some Hägen Dasz?

Party is over… Good night & good fight

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