bitfluent

Tethering over Celcom 3G on the iPhone 3.0

Open this link in MobileSafari - my_celcom.mobileconfig and install the profile. Alternatively, you can download this file and mail it to yourself and open it up in the iPhone Mail.app.

Credits go to http://help.benm.at/help.php. I downloaded the settings for SG telcos from that site to see which parts were customizable and pretty much found you just need to change the APN to use celcom3g.

Also, for you people on DiGi: DiGi.mobileconfig courtesy of Snuffykl from LYN.

EDIT: I’m on the RM68/month unlimited data plan. Is it the cheapest unlimited 3G plan around?

EDIT: I can confirm that tethering and MMS does not work on the iPhone 2G (1st-gen) right now. It will probably require jailbreaking which should be out on Friday, 19th June.

EDIT: “Does not work” means the MMS and tether options are nowhere to be found in Settings.

Are You Coming To #barcampkl?

#barcampkl is happening this weekend, 4-5th April 2009, at Inti College Subang. Some pretty interesting talks have been scheduled ahead of time although the organizers have promised to implement a “real” unconference where the talks are voted at the opening of each day.

So, are you coming? Register here.

Secure and Signed AuthSub Requests in Ruby

I pulled the trigger in my last blog post about solving Google AuthSub’s warning. It solved only half the problem - the not-showing-the-warning half. I was too quick to assume it would work since Google returned a token. Actually performing GET on the contacts feed would yield me a 401 Unauthorized.

So, what did I get wrong? A few things.

Firstly, I didn’t have to set the sig in the request authorization URL. A simple secure=1 would have been sufficient. I confused this concept with other request schemes like Facebook’s which signs the request and appends the sig to the URL parameters.

Secondly, for secure AuthSub requests, you need to set special signed headers. Regular non-secure AuthSub requests only need a short header.

However, if you want secure requests, you need to sign the request. It’ll look something like this.

I thought I nailed it but it still returned me 401 Unauthorized. I downloaded the Python GData client to compare the sig values and indeed the sig I generated was off.

So the final piece of the puzzle is how do I correctly generate the signature. google-authsub (and my contacts commit) got it wrong. This is what it was doing:

After much googling, I found the answer. Immad Akhund posted the solution on the Google Data Protocol mailing list in June 2008. The correct way to sign data is to use the OpenSSL::PKey::RSA#sign method and remove the newlines after Base64 encoding.

So, there you have it. I’ve pushed a new commit to the contacts library with all the fixes. I’ll be forking google-authsub and pushing fixes there too in hopes that another person wouldn’t need to spend a day figuring it out like I did.

Solving "This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests"

I recently ran into an ominous warning on the Google Contacts Access Request landing page.

After some googling, the solution is to register the requesting domain and upload a self-signed X.509 certificate.

Once completed, I retried the request and got a slightly less threatening warning.

The solution was to add two additional parameters to the request: secure=1 and a signature. Fortunately, I found how to generate the signature in the google-authsub gem. A few minutes later, I added support for signing AuthSub requests to Mislav’s contacts library and got the results I wanted. Commit.

Update: I got it wrong about appending the signature to the parameter. I posted a follow up on how to correctly perform signed AuthSub requests in Ruby.

Sharing Contracts

I love it when companies that provide professional services share the contracts they use when dealing with clients. Many people consider contracts to be part of their secret sauce and competitive advantage over their competition so it’s understandable that these documents are not discussed much (plus they also cost money having to go through legal counsel).

However, Obie Fernandez of HashRocket and Andy Clarke of Stuff and Nonsense have been awesome by sharing the contracts they use in their daily business:

• Master Services Agreement Part 1
• Master Services Agreement Part 2
• Contract Killer (via @cheeaun)
• Flavert Media Lab’s Contract (thanks @tekong!)

I’d love to collect more of these kinds of write-ups. Do you have some? Twitter me!

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Full List of 1,339 Rails Contributors

One of the biggest plus points of using git for open source projects is the preservation of the original author of the patch. Here’s how it looks like when displayed in GitHub:

In the Subversion days, patches into Rails were attributed by adding an arbitrary combination of the author’s name/email/nick at the end of the commit messages. Makes it kind of hard to keep track of the number of distinct contributors over the lifetime of the project.

Fortunately, Xavier Noria whipped up a script to parse the legacy commit messages to extract the number of commits per author using these rules:

1. First extract authors from commit message
2. If empty, check changelogs via git show id
3. If empty, author is the committer

The full list is below (you probably can’t see it if you are reading this via Google Reader)

Tumblr Client On The iPhone

On the Beauty of Rubinius' Design (I Wish I Had Rails.new)

In Rubinius, you can spawn off a brand new complete VM by simply calling Rubinius.new. It’ll behave exactly as though it was invoked directly from an rbx binary sitting in your $PATH, complete with STDIN/STDOUT (which you can override). I believe this is one of the basis of how Rubinius’ multi-VM architecture works.

Anyway, I bring this up because I really, really wish Rails was architected in a similar fashion. I am building a CMS on top of Rails and would love to get my hands on a Rails.new if there ever was one. Here’s why.

In a CMS setting, very little of what Rails offers out of the box is usable. You don’t have access to Rails routes so from the very beginning, you don’t have Rails automatically invoking the right controller, the right action and rendering the right view. This doesn’t make sense anyway - you don’t expect your CMS users to start writing controller code in your web editor, do you? (Unless you are Heroku.)

On a slight tangent, the assumption when writing a CMS is that when you ship, you would have written every conceivable controller and model there is (views don’t fall into this because users are generally familiar with the concept of customizable templates). One strategy to extend your “frozen code base” is via the use of widgets and third-party apps (like Facebook) so that you can create seemingly new pages served by custom controllers.

So how do you design a CMS? I’ve been prototyping something for the past week and came up for a breather to check out how other people have solved it. I am delightfully surprised to find out that Radiant does it very close to what I have. In particular, Radiant has one single controller that accepts all requests (lets ignore the entire admin portion for the time being). Based on the path array (provided by the globbed route), it decides what to do / where to dispatch. It takes care of locating the page that corresponds to the URL (it uses a Page model), rendering it and returning the result to the user. It is interesting to note that Radiant directly manipulates the request and response objects, something that Rails developers almost never had to reach for in a regular app. On the other hand, I am exploring the use of serializing the templates to disk and simply calling render :template on it.

Wait a minute. Holy cow, we just built (a simplified) Rails on top of Rails!

What I’d love to see here instead is a Rails.new method just like Rubinius. Boom, a full blown MVC at your fingertips. Configure it right and there you have your very own CMS with minimal work. Or maybe there is. Lazyweb?