It’s been a challenge the last few days to keep a good solid WiFi signal in our office, despite the device being only 20′ feet away with not even a door for obstruction. Distance to wireless device
The most recent wireless performance test using DSL reports is here:
To verify if it’s the device, something upstream, or a wireless performance issue (look at the signal strength, it’s as good as it gets),
I jacked straight into the router and re-ran the test:
That’s a massive drop in performance for WiFi. Clearly not our internet on-ramp.
So far, my only guess is that there is a transient amount of interference from some device nearby. We’re not running anything in our office or shop that should cause this sort of drop in performance. We are located in a light industrial environment, so there could be some large electrical loads causing radio noise. The question is, how do we find it and how do we mitigate it?
With the kick-off of my new Start-Up Company (this is #8 for me, since I started my first company in 1984, Bay Auto Electronics), after taking 10 years to pursue some potentially lucrative (only time will tell if those efforts ever pay off, I’m not holding my breath) employment opportunities in the Internet Security / Anti-Fraud sector.
The short term plan is for that work to continue on a project consulting basis for the remainder of the year (that is the plan.. always subject to change), however in addition to that I’ve taken on two additional clients with very diverse project needs. Those needs need to be carefully manged and time properly allocated to each of these clients and their projects.
In the past, I’ve had adequate success using Work Diary spreadsheets to call out time per project and how it was spent within each of these projects. I continue to do that now. However I want a more useful, powerful and visual tool to track efforts, tasks, sprints, milestones, etc. And in addition to that I want to expose that information to each of my clients so they can get a status update on their projects near-real time, any time, day or night, and also help project their expenses as the projects move forwards.
To make this goal a reality, I have decided to Trail out a tool recently implemented at one of my former employers. It’s name is JIRA. And so far, having only used it there for 30 days or so, I’m impressed. Here is a screen shot of my current JIRA Dashboard (projects, names etc changed to protect the innocent, etc. etc. etc.).
My Sample JIRA Project Dashboard
All that said, and after communicating with one of the helpful JIRA engineers to make sure this tool would do what I want, and provide information for my clients as well, all on one system I host, the decision was made to move forward to the project!
To get further feet-wet, I’m first downloading the distributions for both MAC and LINUX. Initially I will be installing this on a MAC workstation to get the project defines, users entered etc. To test out the waters and learn on a test environment before cutting it loose in the wild. Eventually this will roll out with a public facing (for those with the right credentials) interface for project tracking. One of the first projects that I’ll be defining in my private installation will my forthcoming programming book. After 20+ years as a professional developer, trainer, sales engineer, IT Director and Entrepreneur, there are unique perspectives I can bring to the practice of programming. Keep any eye out for announcements on this by September! 🙂
Getting JIRA – downloading distributions
The current distributions, as of this blog, are located here: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download JIRA Download Page
NOTE: – regarding OSX
As noted in the pages, installing on OSX is only suitable for evaluation purposes. That’s OK, not a big issue, I’ll have hardware available to host it in the next two weeks. Until then, running a local evaluation will be just fine. Unfortunate that the product can support Windows, but it’s not a surprising point since Apple has shuttered it’s proper Server production lines and is no only shipping MacMini servers and those horrendous beasts know as MAC Pro workstations. There IS A LOT to be said for 19″ rack compatible system, when it comes to REAL CORPORATE operations
Installing on MAC (in this case a laptop of all things)
I selected this package named: JIRA 5.0.6 (TAR.GZ Archive).
Instead of just creating more muck in my Downloads directory, I created a dedicates Atlassian directory under Applications.
I moved the file there and ran the extraction:
First order of business was setting my JIRA Home Directory. The instructions are found here at this link: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA050/Setting+your+JIRA+Home+Directory.
I chose to use the LINUX configuration script located at bin/config.sh to get JIRA setup. This I ran from a console:
You must also setup an environmen var that points to the same directory you configured using the JAVA Config dialog. Since I use the ‘bash’ shell (please, no need to comment on the virtues of ksh, sh, bash.. whatever… I’m not going to listen), I edited my .bash_profile adding these two lines:
## Required Element for JIRA
export JIRA_HOME=/Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
With that little step completed, I returned to the bin/ directory where I installed JIRA and lit up the night:
FotoCorsa-3:bin david$ ./start-jira.sh
To run JIRA in the foreground, start the server with start-jira.sh -fg
executing as current user
.....
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,MMMMMM$..3MD..ZMMMMMM.
=NMMMMMM,. .,MMMMMMD.
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Atlassian JIRA
Version : 5.0.6
Detecting JVM PermGen support...
PermGen switch is supported. Setting to 256m
If you encounter issues starting or stopping JIRA, please see the Troubleshooting guide at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Installation+Troubleshooting+Guide
Using JIRA_HOME: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
Server startup logs are located in /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone/logs/catalina.out
Using CATALINA_BASE: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
Using CATALINA_HOME: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
Using CLASSPATH: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone/bin/bootstrap.jar
Using CATALINA_PID: /Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone/work/catalina.pid
Opening up JIRA for the first time..
Having started JIRA on my localbox, I connected to port 8080 (the one I used as the default in the installation) and started to complete the setup:
It turns out I’ve made some sort of configuration/installation errors that was not called out in the documentation. Such is the story of software installation. I’ll have to get this one sorted out before continuing on. JIRA startup error.. this might take a little time to sort out my installation error.
Creating a dedicated JIRA user
Performing a little re-wind, I decided to create separate user account, that can be the JIRA home. This was suggested in the docs but I just didn’t grok it at the time (it’s after midnight.. some slack should be afforded). Created dedicated JIRA user.
Now.. back to the environment files… first I’m going to log into the new user and create a place for JIRA, copy it’s path, then update the configs.
I logged in to the new user, via the terminal window, then edited (creates actually) the .bash_profile for the user setting the following as the JIRA environment:
jira$ vi .bash_profile
## Required Element for JIRA
export JIRA_HOME=/Users/jira/jira-home
Next, I had to sort out one permissions issue in the Applications directory, and that had to do with the permissions to updates config files in the Altassian directory. To do this, I switched to my root user (su –), moved to the install directory and executed this command to allow group write at all the directory levels for the group user (in this case ‘staff’).
su
Password:
sh-3.2# pwd
/Applications/Atlassian/atlassian-jira-5.0.6-standalone
sh-3.2# chmod -R 775 *
I closed that terminal window, then logged my desktop into my new jira user and re-launched the configuration program (see above if you’ve forgotten how that is started up), and reset the home directory: Re-Setting the home directory
Tested the connection: Testing DB connection.
Set the ports I wanted to use for JIRA (defaults shown): Checking / Setting ports
Then kicked off JIRA again, but this time as the jira user. This time it stuck, took and started:
Next step 2 of the installation is presented, and the requisite settings defined. I’m going to run in PRIVATE mode, as I don’t want to have people attempt to add users to my JIRA without my permissions. That sounds like a licensing seat disaster in the making…. Step 2 of Setup.
NOTE: You will need to sign up and get an evaluation license key to go any further. Since I intend to purchase the product in the new future, unless the evaluation determines another course of action is required, this is a non-issue for me. You may be hesitant to do so, for some reason, one I won’t guess, but if so, be aware of that before digging yourself too deep a hole.
Two more quick steps follow, such as setting up your primary Admin User (sorry, NOT going to show you my settings there), and one last step confirming the setup was successful, before being shuttled over to your new Dashboard! Dashboard Login
And.. VIOLA!!! Notice the red warning at the far lowest left, the Evaluation DB attached is IN MEMORY only and most likely will be wrecked on a power fail or other shutdown. This could be a big issue on a laptop, wouldn’t you say? Regardless, this IS an evaluation after all…. so… next steps tomorrow will be to see how this all holds up over the next week when I’m back in CA and can install this on my office’s internal servers. Running, living, breathing JIRA!
Are you a developer that commonly uses SSL / HTTPS communications on your websites? Do you have multiple development environments hosted on the same domain (such as separate client demo/eval/testing VirtualHosts?), then a wildcarded SSL cert might be for you.
Generating one is very simple process. You will need to have the OpenSSL libraries installed on your computer. All but the worst of Operating systems is likely to have this already installed. If not, you can always go here and get a package: [OpenSSL.org]
Enough reasoning and rationalization, time to get down to business.
Overview
First you must have a private key generated and installed. Second that key is then used to generate a simultaneous signing request and cert signing operation.
Once you have your files created, reference them in the Webserver of your choice (such as nginX or Apach2, if you are using IIS… my heart aches for your plight), using the documentation for that webserver. I’m not going to go into there here, because I’m just taking the time to share this simple process fore generating the CERT.
Step 1 – Generate your private key
If you do not have a private key generated, I’m going to show you have to do it. If you have one that you want to use already, and you know where it is, move onto the next step.
Open a termnal window and execute the following openssl command to generate a private key. For my own installations I never use a key shorter than 2048. Most of the time, I use one that is quite a bit longer. That said, 2048 should provide a sufficiently long key for any practical SSL purposes. Yes, SSL has security issues and a motivated hacker can likely piggy-back it, regardless of your key size… but for the sake of argument and getting through this post, we’ll pretend the Interwebs are a safe place.
Move to the location where you will store your private key (this is a typical location, you can use whatever you want): cd /etc/ssl/private
Run the command to generate the key: openssl genrsa 2048 > my.super-awesome.hostname.key
Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
......................................+++
.........+++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
So, now we have a key: ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1679 Jan 9 09:41 my.super-awesome.hostname.key
Step 2 – Generate your CERT
This is the fun part, and the 2nd of the super easy steps. To complete this you’ll want to know up front, some important pieces of data, such as the hostname for your site (I’m going to use super-awesome.net for this example). You want to have the address you want to use handy, including the country. Also want to have an e-mail address that will be published in the SSL cert to contact you, and a department and company name if so inclined. Below the actual command and responses will be in bold:
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Kellyfornia
Locality Name (eg, city) []: Sac-of-Tomatoes
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Crazy Assembly House
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Committee on wasting tax payer money
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []: *.super-awesome.net
Email Address []: admin@super-awesome.net
Verify that you have the file: ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1927 Jan 9 09:50 my.super-awesome.hostname.cert
That’s all there is to it! You’re done. Now you have a Self-Signed SSL wildcard sert for super-awesome.net. This would allow you to secure (and I always use the word secure with a certain degree of sarcasm) any sub-domain / hostname under super-awesome.net. Examples of what it would handle:
Now, it’s important to note that this DOES NOT secure anything beyond that first level.. here are a couple more examples:
https://www.super-awesome.net -- OK
https://qa-server.super-awesome.net -- OK
https://some.client.super-awesome.net -- FAILS
https://another-client.super-awesome.net -- OK
https://test.ya-client.super-awesome.net -- FAILS
Extra Credit – viewing the contents of your CERT
It’s all well and good to generate the cert, but what if you want to verify it’s properly setup? What if you find a cert on your system and you want to know what it covers, when it expires, whom might own it, etc. Well, that’s possible too. Running a simple command we’ll examine the SSL Cert just created. The important info is in the ‘Issuer’ and ‘Subject’ blocks.
openssl x509 -noout -text -in my.super-awesome.hostname.cert
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0x2)
Serial Number:
c4:3d:66:b4:e3:cc:61:86
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: C=US, ST=Kellyfornia, L=Sac-of-Tomatoes, O=Crazy Assembly House, OU=Committe on wasting tax payer money, CN=*.super-awesome.net/emailAddress=admin@super-awesome.net
Validity
Not Before: Jan 9 17:50:56 2012 GMT
Not After : Jan 6 17:50:56 2022 GMT
Subject: C=US, ST=Kellyfornia, L=Sac-of-Tomatoes, O=Crazy Assembly House, OU=Committe on wasting tax payer money, CN=*.super-awesome.net/emailAddress=admin@super-awesome.net
Subject Public Key Info:
Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
RSA Public Key: (2048 bit)
Modulus (2048 bit):
[...] /* removed the modulus to keep the post short */
Exponent: 65537 (0x10001)
X509v3 extensions:
X509v3 Subject Key Identifier:
9D:72:0C:A0:E6:EB:77:2C:77:EF:E8:9E:B7:BC:9F:53:81:1A:40:9D
X509v3 Authority Key Identifier:
keyid:9D:72:0C:A0:E6:EB:77:2C:77:EF:E8:9E:B7:BC:9F:53:81:1A:40:9D
DirName:/C=US/ST=Kellyfornia/L=Sac-of-Tomatoes/O=Crazy Assembly House/OU=Committe on wasting tax payer money/CN=*.super-awesome.net/emailAddress=admin@super-awesome.net
serial:C4:3D:66:B4:E3:CC:61:86
X509v3 Basic Constraints:
CA:TRUE
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
[...] /* removed the signature to keep the post short */
Looking at the Subject breaks downs as follows:
Subject: C=US, ST=Kellyfornia, L=Sac-of-Tomatoes, O=Crazy Assembly House, OU=Committe on wasting tax payer money, CN=*.super-awesome.net/emailAddress=admin@super-awesome.netC=US - Country code 'US'
ST=Kellyfornia - State or Provence.
Sac-of-Tomatoes - City/Location
O=Crazy Assembly House - Company or Organization name
OU=Committe on wasting tax payer money Organizational Unit (department, etc.)
CN=*.super-awesome.net - Canonical Name (hostname / domain) that
the CERT services. In this case it's a wildcard, signfied by the '*'
That's all there is to it. Now, secure those website communications!
With the impending launch of my new enterprise, it’s time to get down to the business of creating a logo. This article will document the process, good or bad, success for fail, the steps I take will be detailed here for your amusement, edification or horror. You be the judge.
STEP 1 – Get the idea formulated.
Get get started, sketch out a general idea for the logo. Since this I am still a pre-launch state, that drawing will remain a work of the readers imagination. I will tell you though, that after a few iterations I knew what I wanted to go after, and what base information I needed.
First I decided that one of the components I needed for this logo project was an image of the crescent moon. This was of course very easy to locate on the web. There is no lack of such images.
Google search for some sample images
I decided on a sampling of the images and saved them off to a special directory on my computer. Now it was time to step away for a few minutes, clear my mind and and prejudices regarding the images, and then re-open the directory and look at each one. After some time, I selected one of the images that seemed to have the most promise.
Now, it’s important to NOT get locked in or bogged down on one image. Don’t shoot for perfection here, you must be comfortable with the concept that your first, seconds, or maybe even your fifth attempt will be abject failure. It’s a process, and if it will take you 5 attempts to get it right, you’ll never get there unless you get through those first four… so.. let’s get to it.
Step 2 – Open and adjust image to suit
Select your first best guess as a starting point and open the image in some photo editing software. My choice is Photoshop:
The goal I have in mind, requires the crescent to be on the other side of the logo, and the curve must extend over the top. So, this image as is, will not do. Opening up a variety of Photoshop tools (at this point I should point out this is NOT going to be tutorial on how to use photoshop, there are plenty of those done by people better than I at providing such help), I flipped the image and rotated it clockwise 22 degrees.
The next step was to then upon up the ‘Levels’ tool and start cranking in as much contrast, at both the white and black ends of the scale, to remove as much detail as I felt practical. This is needed to get the image close to something you can work with then we open this up again in vector editing suite. This will hopefully make sense, shortly.
This is when things start to get tricky. I know that I may need to go back to photoshop and crank in more contract, or maybe I need to change which end of the contrasting I apply to get just the right amount needed when I move to Illustrator and start my vector editing. Take a few moments to look at your image, if you are attempting something yourself, and apply any tweaks you feel you need now. You’ll notice the file name has changed. I like to keep a good clean copy of the original files aside in case I really destroy the current version. Hitting the “reset button” is more likely to happen than not. Don’t get discouraged if you have to start over. It’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all, simply because you’re afraid to fail. The only way to completely fail is to never try at all.. Be a DOER… not a WISH I DIDer! Here I am making a few more adjustments.
STEP 3 – Open in vector editor
Now, it’s time to find out if I did enough contrast adjustment. This is also the point when I find out if I have a clue what I’m going in Illustrator. caveat emptor, you’re getting what you paid for here.
Now, before doing anything, I’m going to save the workspace. Again, it’s nice to be able to get back to the beginning if something goes wrong.
Next step I want to increase the size of the workspace into roughly a 2×9 ratio (height x width). This will give me room for the next parts of the logo, including text etc., and finally used one of the built in tools called “Live Trace” to convert the image into an Illustrator vector:
Here is what the resulting vector nodes look like once the trace is complete. I adjusted the minimum pixel and path size vars up and down until I had a trace I liked.
After inverting the image, using live trace and use the ‘Auto convert to Live Paint, I had the primary image I wanted. Following the conversion, I added a target and underline, then selected a text I wanted to use. Again, I’m not totally in love with this text and I way decide to change this later, but for now, to test this image, I have to start somewhere. Of course, Sample Company is *not* the name I’m going to be using, this is just that, a sample. After about 3 hours of work, mostly poking around in Illustrator for the options I really wanted to use I have this concept proof.
Step 4 – wrapping things up
Once the new image is saved, make sure cropping is properly set and export the image to the apps you need. For me, I needed it in a transparent .png for use with invoices, letterheads and publishing.
This is just the beginning. Once the new company is fully launched I’ll be posting the final logos. Keep an eye out for more news on Jun 18th!
