So, I’ve obviously failed in terms of trying to make more posts as I had said I would. But, I’m so busy with everything right now that I don’t have much time to sit down and make lengthy (and frequent postings). Heck, even some of the regular events that I’ve been trying to start up at work (such as the Weekly Digest) has turned out to be not so weekly because I haven’t been able to schedule them. However, it’s about time that I give an update on my life situation and then a short tech talk on a really cool idea that has been around, but I haven’t started using until now.

As I had mentioned I was going to do a little bit ago, I have converted my blog from Serendipity to Wordpress. I find it easier to use, easier to configure, etc. In any case, I apologize for the way it looks, but give me a bit of time and I’ll have a nice style applied to it.

Background

Well, as many of you have known, I’ve been working on projects that involve the dark side - that being Microsoft projects. Yes, this means I’ve been working on .Net applications in both Visual Basic and C#. The C# applications are kinda fun to work with, but I still maintain that VB is a ridiculous language, despite the fact that both VB and C# compile to the same intermediate code.

Well, it’s been nearly a full 2 months since my last entry. Obviously, I’ve been a bit busy. I’m sure my friends would like to hear about what I’ve been up to, so here’s a couple of month’s worth of information in one post.

…and I’m still alive and kicking. I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I’ve been extremely busy with homework and school, work itself, and family matters. The most recent family matter involved a distant cousin-in-law of mine and my wife’s grandmother. Certain personal effects (mainly most of them) of my grandmother’s were being held ransom by Melissa’s cousin and had to be picked up for fear of being thrown out. Where were they? Phoenix, AZ. After a weekend of driving round-the-clock to and from Phoenix, I was extremely tired and to say the least, tired of driving. However, we managed to obtain Melissa’s grandmother’s personal effects and she was quite pleased.

This was a problem I had while trying to send email from my local workstation through a web application. The script would execute fine, but I wouldn’t receive any email. Upon further investigation (which included walking through a debugging session to find out what was going wrong), I came across an exception when trying to use:

The truth is, it has. (That and somehow the Staind song It’s Been a While just started playing…what a coincidence).

So, in trying to figure out the LDAP issues that I had earlier, I needed to check the public key that was returned by the LDAP server when using SSL / TLS. The problem was that I had the damndest time trying to figure out the command necessary to open up and examine SSL certificates on non-standard ports (ie: anything but HTTPS, IMAPS, POP3 over SSL, etc.). Finally, I found on the Atlassian Confluence website the exact command I needed:

It never ceases to amaze me how many outside dependencies there are for PHP. When trying to get a PHP application to connect to an LDAP server over SSL, you have to have the following:

• OpenLDAP (at least branch 2.x.x)
• OpenSSL
• Reminder: Compile OpenLDAP with SSL support! Just in case you didn't do that already.

Well, it’s been a really long time since I last updated my blog and let everyone know what’s been going on in my life. In essence, I’ve been busy as usual, but have made progress by leaps and bounds in most things I’m actually involved in, and also have a new addition to our (Melissa and my) family (more to come later).