Adam's Blog

I don't know why, but I love this photo. Up next: my favorite Photobooth mashups.

I have used SSL on several servers before, but last week I installed a certificate authority on a Windows 2000 box and generated a self-signed cert for a website we're working on. Today, I tried to generate a cert for our new email server and found that the damned thing will NOT work. It simply won't load in IE at all, and Mozilla gives me a -8101 error, which is completely flippin' useless, since I can't find any info on how to remedy this. I suspect it's because the browser doesn't "trust" the signing authority, but I couldn't, in the 30 minutes I played with it, find a workaround. I opened up HTTP again, and may have to resort to a true authority like Thawte for this, but I'd really like to solve the problem.

While acting like a jackass during our photo shoot on Sunday, I tried to do a handstand. On attempt 3, somehow, I got crumpled up and my knee came down on Jenn's toe. Picture almost 200 pounds coming crashing down in the form of a knee bone onto your middle toe. Ouch. Suffice it to say that her toe is a nice shade of red and the foot an odd mix of yellow, blue, and purple. It's nasty, and it's my fault. My father thinks I should be crown "douche of the year" right now, without even waiting for the year to expire. What can I say? If the pictures came out, it will be a funny memory, and if they don't, then I'm a schmuck.

This weekend we head to New Smyrna with Nate and Jensey, who are doing our wedding photography. They are taking us out on another engagement session, which is awesome. The first one produced some great photos, and he's already used several on his website under the "engagement photos" section. Then next weekend, we're off to Connecticut for a bridal shower. The next weekend is a shower in New Jersey, the weekend after that is my bachelor party. Then we have one last weekend before the wedding! It's getting closer!

Last night, I renewed our SSL cert using Thawte services. I had purchased certs in the past from RapidSSL, which was very easy to use, but Thawte was a pain in the butt. It's really time to redesign our website at Massey, and we just hired a group to work on it. Hopefully soon, they will have a nice, fixed width, modern looking page for us. I installed VMWare Server on a friend's server, and let me tell you, it's been updated since our GSX release. It works mostly the same way, but I need to play with it. It knows several new oSes, such as RHEL4, which is what I'm planning on installing. The reason is because I completed an online credit card charging application for work. It's pretty slick - it uses some AJAX to look up the account number and prefill the fields, including previous credit card transactions to pre-fill the cc and expiration date, and then charges online via PayFlow Pro. It's ugly, but useful.

Well, the big news is that Jenn and I got our marriage license today. So, 37 days to go, and we are now legal to tie the knot. Woohoo! She's currently typing away on her iBook (wishing for a Macbook, btw), telling people about the updates I made to paleyscheinberg.com last night. It's a simple site I built with iWeb, but it's very easy, and takes a HELL of a lot less time than writing PHP. It's static, but simple. That said, I've been writing all sorts of fun things lately. I've been really doing a lot of javascript work - tons of AJAX stuff and a lot of script.aculo.us and prototype code. I fixed several behaviors in the Galaxy code, but only applied them to /staff so far. Ultimately, it's a nice looking app and behaves really well. The next step is adding a few new features: 1. The ability to purge last fetch time, for testing purposes. 2. Turn off feed fetch time update in fetch.php (not in autofetch.php). 3. Add a newer & older link to the bottom of the page. 4. Potentially, add links to add comments to the native blog. I got a new book...

The "Galaxy" code I wrote for OSGalaxy has now been ported over to the OSNews Staff Blog section, and there's a crappy bug. When an RSS feed has more than one category (a legal setup), Magpie concatenates them into one word. So, I've written an elementary, temporary workaround for the multiple categories problem with Magpie. Essentially, rather than concatonating the categories, this script will use only the last entry in the RSS/Atom feed. It's pretty basic, but it's tested on PHP4 and PHP5 and it doesn't change much code. To use it, just save this file as rss_parse.inc and replace it in your magpie install. It's based off of 0.7a, which is from the latest release of Magpie at this time, 0.72. You can find the code at https://adamscheinberg.com/blog/s/rss_parse.inc.phps.

I've decided to learn how to play the Beatles classic "Martha My Dear" on piano. It's just too good not to learn. I have said before that I'm going to learn something, but rarely do I actually follow through. It's mainly because ever since I became competent on guitar, sometime in 1994 or so, my piano playing went to shit. My left hand has no control anymore, it's all screwy since I learned to barre frets. But I've been good in my resolutions this year. I've lost 20 pounds, like I said I would. I'm ready for the wedding. So, let's see how this goes.

Nathan was kind enough to send us a few pictures from the enagagement session. We ordered several photos, but these three are some of my favorites. This one was taken at the Disney Boardwalk, under the lighthouse. This one is at the bar at the Disney Boardwalk hotel. Everyone seems to think this one is a magazine ad or something. Another shot at the Boardwalk Hotel. Nathan really wanted us to improvise and just flirt. It's hard to do that on command, but he caught a very intentional moment and made it look really nice, effortless, and sweet. It really is us just screwing around.

Last night, someone said something about when I get married "next month." Although it's been a long time coming, it was the first time I thought about the wedding being next month. That sounds really close. I am very excited for it, and frankly, I'm ready to just do it already. The planning has sucked up WAY more time and energy than we planned, and I think everyone - Jenn, me, her parents, my parents, my sister - we're all just ready for the party. So the countdown begins here: 40 days and counting.