Roachys Weblog

It seems whenever we order a new Blackberry handset there is some form of failure – services aren’t fully applied or done in a timely fashion resulting in the Blackberry being out of sync or not accepting all services.  I’ve documented the steps here that can be used to get the 8310 Curve working:

1) Ensure the service provider has enabled all services on the device – this is the most common problem for me….

2) Ensure that GPRS is functioning correctly.  The GPRS text at the top right hand sign should be in CAPS

3) Go to Options -> Mobile Network ->Data Services and ensure that Data services are switched on.

4) Go to Advanced Options ->Host Routing Table.  There should be a list of Routes.  select the top route and click “Register Now”

5) Set up an email address at O2email.co.uk

6) Go into the EMail setup wizard on the handset and create a user account.  This is a container for the email address.

7) When all steps are complete, if the handset is still not receiving email, log into the o2email.co.uk website from a PC browser.  Send a new service book.

Hope this helps someone….

I keep on finding and losing bookmarks of good base64 encoding and decoding sites, so thought I’d link to one here:

http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/base64.php

Useful when trying to test SMTP-Auth on a mailserver and needing to encode usernames and passwords!

We’re just trialling the Blackberry Professional software here, but with a change of heart as to the test user attempted to delete the user to re-add another.  Unfortunately although the Blackberry Professional Software allows you to delete users, it didn’t successfully purge the user from the database.  This meant that we couldn’t add an alternative user (the software comes with 1 user licence to trial with).

The solution is to manually remove the user from the database.  This can be done using the OSQL command line utility.

osql -E SERVERNAME\DATABASESERVERNAME
1>use BESMgmt
2>select DisplayName from UserConfig
3>go

This will show the DisplayName of the user.  For the sake of this document, we’ll call the user “testuser”.

To delete the user, then enter:

1>use BESMgmt
2>delete from UserConfig where DisplayName=“testuser”
3>go

1>exit

That should remove the user.  On checking within the Blackberry Professional software there is now no longer a user, releasing the licence.

Firefox 3 is now well and truly into it’s beta phase, and one of the headline features is the way that it handles invalid SSL certificates.

I first noticed this when building a test environment to trial a few different web-based CRM systems, and I’ve got to say that there are some big pluses to this.

SSL certificates are cheap now and really for any commercial site out there, there should be no excuses for not using a real certificate.  Windows Vista has proved that if you present users with a dialogue box enough times they will just habitually click through without second consideration, thus making them vulnerable to a plethora of security woes.  This is a big security step forward and will hopefully encourage businesses out there to pull their socks up when it comes to using valid certificates (the biggie is likely to be the ability to use self signed SSL certs in Exchange/OWA!)

There is a method of bypassing this (if needed for testing purposes).  For example, I am wanting to test a site in a lab environment, therefore my vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks is absolutely zero….

You can go to Preferences->Advanced Preferences->Encryption->View Certificates->Add Exception and then get and approve the certificate for your server…

Commentary with the Firefox developers is available here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431827

….and a good explaination of the reasoning behind the fix here:

http://blog.johnath.com/index.php/2007/10/11/todo-break-internet/

Had a real problem with documents in OpenOffice opening in Read Only mode.  As per advice on loads of sites, I selected the section and went into the Format Menu and unchecked the “protected” checkbox

This, unfortunately had no effect, and the status bar still said the document was “read-only”.

This was driving me nuts until I found the following on Ubuntu Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/215420

It turns out the error is due to the Table of Contents that I had earlier in the document – the read-only status of the TOC propagates to the rest of the document.

By going into the Insert-Index and tables and removing the check for “Protected Against Manual Changes”, then the document then becomes writeable!

Problem solved.