Recently in Technology Category

I recently reenabled S/MIME signing in my Outlook client. (S/MIME is a way to place a digital signature on an email message so the receipients can verify the sender.) When I tested sending mails back and forth to myself through my various clients, I had no problem. However, when I started sending email to other receipients, they all had issues opening the mail - most with the error message "Your digital ID name could not be found by the underlying security system."

This error is normally associated with difficulty opening encrypted mail. Since I wasn't using encryption, I couldn't fathom why this was happening. Many Google searches and Microsoft Knowledge Base articles later, I still hadn't found a solution. I finally had an "Ah-hah!" moment and found the problem. So, in the hope that someone will be spared some of my pain, here's my problem and solution.

I configured Outlook 2007 to use SHA512 for the signature algorithm. Unfortunately, this is not as widely supported as one might hope. Even on another Outlook 2007 installation at work, SHA512 couldn't be opened. Changing the signature algorithm back to SHA1 let everyone start seeing my emails again.

The "Your digital ID name could not be found by the underlying security system" error message is grossly misleading in this case! The system should really be reporting something like "The security system does not support the algorithm used to sign this message." I don't normally bash Microsoft, but in this case... you dropped the ball guys! Since SHA1 has started to show some signs of weakness, I'm hopefully that SHA512 will be more widely supported in the future. But until then, keep your S/MIME certificates set to SHA1 and AES256!

Apple is known for they're aesetics and marketing for their products, so I'm always disappointed with they go with something that looks good, but sucks. In this case, I mean the earbuds which come with iPods. My girlfriend and I were watching a movie on my iPod Touch during our flight out of Montgomery. She was using her Apple supplied earbuds (retail $40) and I was using a pair of Phillips foam earbuds (retail $10).

She was getting frustrated by how low I was keeping the volume, until she finally took one of my earbuds. Then she suddenly realized that the reason I was keeping the volume so low was that I could hear everything just fine. Her earbuds were so bad at blocking the ambient noise in the plane that she was basically stuck reading the subtitles to follow the plot.

The iPod got a lot of press a year or so ago for the poor quality of their earbuds, and they deserved every bit of it. Considering the premium that is paid for Apple products, it's disappointing that they have to include one of the poorest quality accessories I've ever seen with a high-quality product.

I've been hosting with Beachcomber Creations (BCC) for the last seven years. It started out as a cheap solution to my desire to post various things online hosting my domain. Over the last couple of years though, BCC has slowly accumulated strikes in my experiences with them. Then in the last year they've finally driven me away.

First, they made a change to my mail server configuration without prior notice, resulting in all of my email bouncing for a weekend before I found the error and fixed the configuration. Then, for a second time, they moved my account to a new server and lost 6 days worth of my email. When I contacted them to get the mail moved to the new server, they took the stance that it wasn't their responsibility, and sent me some info on how to access the old server and move the data myself.

Quite frankly, this isn't the level of service that I'm willing to put with. As someone who works in IT infrastructure, I would never tell a paying client that it was their responsibility to deal with the data loss from an unannounced server migration. So, I've restructured my hosting solutions.

First, I've migrated all of my email domains to Google Apps. Probably a long time coming, this lets me continue to use IMAP for Outlook, but also integrate chat and calendaring with my friends who already use Google.

I've also migrated this blog and my other web content to GoDaddy hosting. I'm looking forward to an improved hosting experience with a provider that is a large-scale and well-managed environment.

While the vast majority of the site content should now be migrated and looking more-or-less the same, you may encounter some broken links. I'll try to get things cleaned up and maybe migrate to a newer site design if I get time.

I upgraded to Office 2007 when I swapped the hard drive in my laptop for an upgraded one. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the Office 2007 suite. One thing that was driving me crazy though was that clicking the calendar or task tabs in Outlook 2007 would make Outlook hang for several seconds - up to 45 seconds or a minute sometimes! This was so frustrating, because Outlook 2003 had no problem switching tabs very quickly. So tonight I finally broke down and set out to research the issue. I stumbled upon a forum post that solved the problem. To summarize, the solution:

1. In Outlook, go to "Tools"
2. Select "Trust Center"
3. In Trust Center, click "Add-Ins"
4. At The Bottom Make Sure That "Com Add-Ins" is selected and Click "Go"
5. You must uncheck, as many of the add-ins as possible. There may be some Microsoft programs that it will not let you uncheck. That's OK. Uncheck as many items as possible.
6. After you are done, you must close Outlook 2007 completely and restart Outlook.