Shannon Whitley

I admit that I’m not the hippest guy to walk the planet, but I never really thought of myself as a prude either.  With the premiere of the new “90210″ last night, I’m having to rethink that.  Okay, I only watched the first fifteen minutes, mostly for the memories.  When the original series came out, my wife and I had just started dating.  Back then, I enjoyed making fun of the storylines and checking in to see if Dylan was “…heading down to Baja.”

The first fifteen minutes of the new 90210 showed students throwing around vagina jokes and passing out drugs like they were candy.  That’s not the Aaron Spelling series I remember.  How many special episodes would it have taken to get to the topics of sex and drugs?  Where are the shots of the actors at the end of the show, telling me how this all looks glamorous, but that the subject matter is very, very serious?

Have our morals really changed that much in 20 years?  It’s funny to look back on the old shows where the husband and wife slept in separate beds.  I used to laugh at that.  Now, I wonder how much farther we can take this.  Considering all the issues we have in society, is it time to consider that maybe Dan Quayle was right?

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Is the title of this post any more ridiculous than this headline, “Historic first: Obama nominated by Democrats?”  I watched last night as the stories poured in.  This is an historic moment.  We are so wonderful to finally let a black man run for president on a major-party ticket.  Of course, the fact that we even refer to Obama as a “black man” is telling in itself.  It shows that we really haven’t come that far from the one drop rule.  We are so focused on the color of his skin that his “blackness” dominates the news stories. 

Obama was raised by his white mother.  He is just as much white as he is black, and yet the headlines continue to call Obama a black man.

Obama’s skin is dark and he has immersed himself in the culture of Black America.  I am not challenging his “blackness.”  What I am challenging here is our need to continue to identify people based on their skin color.

Halle Berry was hailed as the first black woman to win an Academy Award.  She was raised by her white mother.  Tiger Woods is routinely referred to as a black athlete, and yet he is more Asian than black.

Is this a great step in our history?  Absolutely.  But the fact that we have to continually report on this “historic first” (and in a way inaccurately report it) really underscores how much America is still focused on skin color.  I’m happy that Obama is the Democratic Candidate, but we have a long way to go before we change our everyday-attitudes and make these headlines unnecessary.

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I’m doing some work with SAML that I’ll post later.  For now, I wanted to capture information on creating a self-signed cert.

Makecert.exe for .NET 2.0 is located here - E:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin

How to use makecert.exe to create a self-signed test certificate that can be used with IIS for SSL

Problem: Special options must be specified with makecert.exe, to create a self-signed certificate that can be used with IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Server).

Note: Microsoft recommends to install and use the “Certificate Server” to generate an SSL test certificate (Q216907), instead of using makecert.exe. But using makecert is simpler.

Solution:

The following command can be used to create and import a self-signed SSL test certificate: makecert -r -pe -n "CN=www.yourserver.com" -b 01/01/2000 -e 01/01/2036 -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1 -ss my -sr localMachine -sky exchange -sp "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider" -sy 12

To install this certificate in IIS 5.0, open the IIS “Web Site Properties”, “Directory Security”, “Server Certificate…”, “Assign an existing certificate” and select the new certificate from the list.

Note: Older versions of makecert.exe do not support the “-pe” option, which makes the private key exportable. If you have an old version of makecert.exe, you can omit the “-pe” option, but then the certificate cannot be exported including the private key.

(The October 2002 version of the Platform SDK (build 3718.1) contains a new version of makecert.exe (5.131) that supports the “-pe” option. The .NET Framework SDK 1.0 of 2002-03-19 contains an old version of makecert.exe that does not support the “-pe” option).

If the private key is exportable, you can export the certificate together with the private key into a PFX (PKCS #12) file as described in Q232136.

Note: SSL server certificates for IIS are stored in the “Personal” (”My”) certificate store of the “computer account” (”localMachine”). The “Certificates” snap-in of the Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe) must be used to manage these certificates. The normal certificate management window (accessible via “Internet Properties” / “Content” / “Certificates” or via “Control Panel” / “Users and Passwords” / “Advanced” / “Certificates”) cannot be used.

Note: To create a key with more than 512 bits, use the “-len” parameter of makecert.exe.

Author: Christian d’Heureuse (chdh@inventec.ch, www.source-code.biz)
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I’ve discovered hundreds of interesting people on Twitter.  I enjoy talking with them online and I’d love to subscribe to their blogs as well, but how can I do that?  Assuming each of my friends lists their blog in their Twitter profile, I’d have to click on several hundred links to find all of the blog feeds.  This is way too much work for a lazy son-of-a-gun like me.  So I’m asking for ideas.

We only get one Url field on Twitter.  Is it too difficult to add the blog feed to the end of your current Url in the form of a query parameter?

Example:

My Twitter Url points to my blog (http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley)

I have a Feedburner blog feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/swhitley)

Combine the two using this format:  

{current Twitter Url}?bf={blog feed url}

In my case, my new Twitter profile Url looks like this:

http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?bf=http://feeds.feedburner.com/swhitley

If someone clicks on the link, it will still take them to my blog.

If everyone did this, I’ve already setup MyTweeple to generate an OPML file that could be used to subscribe to all of the blog feeds.

What do you think?  Too hard for everyone to understand and implement?  Is there a better way?

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It’s a commonly held belief that everything we publish on the Internet is out there forever.  We’ve heard stories about people missing out on job opportunities because something less-than-savory was discovered on the Internet.  Even on Twitter, I question the wisdom of putting all my thoughts out into the cloud.  For one thing, people change over time.  The thoughts and, er, actions of our youth aren’t necessarily representative of the adults that we become.  Or perhaps I’m just having a bad day and I post something I regret later.  Am I really doomed to have that one moment in time captured and displayed forever?

If the gauge of available online information is Google, then I would say no, your daily thoughts will not be there to haunt you to infinity.  I recently searched Google for all of my posts on Twitter.  Of my 6,000 updates (I know, pathetic) on Twitter, I could only find about 800 posts on Google.  Many of those were duplicates or replies back to me.  I’ve looked on Twitter Search as well.  I’m lucky to find today’s posts, let alone something stupid I said several months ago.

Are all of my self-published gaffes and gems captured out there somewhere?  Probably.  I imagine someone has an archive somewhere, but as one sage so wisely said, “If it’s not in Google, it may as well not exist.”

While I always want to be careful with the things that I put out in the public arena, I may just breathe a little easier now. 

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