Thanks Mike! (Apache Tomcat SSL Certificate Keystore Configuration)

Today at work Mike helped me out with my Tomcat SSL crap.

The Tomcat SSL Connector in the conf/server.xml file seems to want to use a java keystore file.

That keystore file is usually created with the $JAVA_HOME/jre/bin/keytool program. Unfortunately, I was given a key file by my sys admin, and keytool requires that the pem file containing the key is X.509 encoded.

The openssl program will happily take care of encoding the pem file containing the actual certificate file:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...asdfghjkl=...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work for the actual key file:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
...asdfghjkl...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

So, I asked Mike if he happened to know anything about SSL and Java keystores. He gave me this script (slightly modified from the original):
http://pastebin.com/f73d69466

His script basically automates the process of getting a personal certificate, or rather, converting between a SSL chain certificate pem file and a Java keystore file.

It does this by first using openssl to create a PKCS12 encoded version of the pem file given piped thru stdin, and then using PKCS12Import to store the PKCS12 entry into the Java keystore. Very nice.

Further reading:
Extracting private key from Java
Some Java source code for the com.sun.xml.wss package at dev.java.net

In summary, Mike is cool. Thanks, Mike.

Bye @MarsPhoenix

nelsnelson
@MarsPhoenix: Thanks for all the fish. One small triumph for a robot, some thousands of envious geeks.
less than 5 seconds ago from web
in reply to MarsPhoenix


AntonOlsen
shedding a tear for @MarsPhoenix: http://tinyurl.com/5lv8g2
20 minutes ago from TwitterFox


MarsPhoenix
[Ops: Retweet @alexismadrigal:@MarsPhoenix is finally frozen on the Martian arctic plain. Veni, vidi, fodi. RIP: http://snurl.com/5amfx]
24 minutes ago from web


MarsPhoenix
[Phoenix Ops: We promised Phoenix to continue to update here its
discoveries and future news. Another goodbye from Mars: http://is.gd/6Xfp ]
about 1 hour ago from web


MarsPhoenix
[Phoenix mission ops:We bid our good friend a fond farewell. Phoenix did us proud:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/vid... ]
about 1 hour ago from web


MarsPhoenix
[From Phoenix mission ops: Phoenix is no longer communicating with
Earth. We'll continue to listen, but it's likely its mission has
ended.]
about 1 hour ago from web


MarsPhoenix
01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3

about 1 hour ago from web

Gives me chills

When I look at this image.

http://nevver.tumblr.com/post/58212477/the-free-market-has-spoken


And yet, the Devil's hint at a joke makes me ill.

Peace and God speed, Congressman Paul.

Trying to understand science

No, not really. But I am thinking about going to church tomorrow.

I am also trying to close all the tabs in my web browser. This leads to finding stuff like this:


"I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead."


...

Man is sued by eBay Seller for leaving negative feedback

I hate most of the sellers on eBay.

They're mostly a bunch of impersonal, greedy, socially incapable, jerkfaces.

This guy is getting sued by some dumb f#%@ on eBay, just because he used the feedback feature on ebay.com, and left a negative review of his transaction.

[ Link ]

F*** YOU E-BAY!

I use craigslist.org, exclusively now. Everyone I meet on that site is really kind and nice.

Trivia Night

Wess, Courtney, Medina and I won trivia night Monday at the Thirsty Turtle.

Going into the final round, our team, the Protein Shakes, were in third place with 59 points. Team Rusty Trombones were in first place with 75 points.

The final question, for as many points as our team wished to risk up to 20 points, was, "What are the most common languages on the Internet, in order from most to lease common?"

(On our answer card, I immediately started writing, "HTML", "Javascript", "PHP", and "ASP".)

Just then the MC called out, "Spanish? English? Japanese? Chinese?". That was lucky, because I was just guessing about the web programming languages. I was probably way off.

We risked all 20 points and won first place. What do you think the answer was?

I was wrong about Kant

I was talking to Greg about Kant yesterday, and found I was wrong about two things.

First, I had said that Kant was from France, and was a Roman Catholic. This was wrong -- Kant was German, and raised in a Lutheran family. I think I had him mixed up with Descartes.

Second, at some point, I mispronounced Kant as "can't" for some reason, even though I had already been pronouncing it correctly during the conversation. Thanks Scott, for correcting me.


Greg sent me an instant message with a quote he attributed to Kant in which Kant seemed to deny knowledge and demo a need for faith instead.

Greg also said that Kant believed that morality is a function of duty to an obligation, and that the function of morality to duty was broken if fulfillment of the duty was beneficial to self.

Greg said that these two things were enough to condemn Immanuel Kant. He repeated that: condemn him.

I dunno about all that. I'll have to do some more reading.


I kinda like Kant. Here's something that he said that makes me like him:

"The [practical law] tells us what we have to do, if we wish to become possessed of happiness; the [moral law] dictates how we ought to act, in order to deserve happiness." (Critique of Pure Reason, p 452)

And also:

"All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought." (Critique of Pure Reason, p 189)

"That's what she said."

Some people that I know use this joke. A lot. Every chance they get, in fact.

There's a book called That's What She Said. [Link] (It's actually a book about poetry or something.)

Steve Carell pretty much beat the joke to death on purpose and ironically because his character on the show is awkward and lame. (Here's a collection of Michael Scott's "That's what she said" joke from The Office.)

Here's an amusing wiki about how to be annoying: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Lame/Dry-Jokes

Here's a video. [Link]


My opinion: the joke sucks. It requires very little thought, if any. I know people who have used this joke so many times that even when it is used cleverly, its humor is just lost in the din of the million other "that's what she said" jokes that were already told that day, and sucked.