Month: October 2007

ICANN is testing out URLs in 11 languages other than those that supports the roman characters, such as Chinese, Tamil, Arabic, Korean and Japanese. To do this, 11 new TLDs (top level domains) and secondary domains representing http://example.test have been created and inserted into the DNS servers. Interestingly, as the Arabic and Hebrew languages are read left-to-right, the URL will be reversed.

Try http://例子.测试. It can actually be resolved.

You can find the plan at http://www.icann.org/topics/idn/idn-evaluation-plan-v2-9-2-14aug07.pdf

Although the link is talking about a vulnerability when more than 32 imports are used, I’m actually having issues with a web page that actually needs more than 32 css imports. The page works fine in Firefox 2 but fails in IE 7. The article also didn’t explicitly mention IE 7, but rather older MS browsers. Even if the vulnerability may not be there, the limit of 32 stylesheet imports may still be imposed.

http://www.juniper.net/security/auto/vulnerabilities/vuln3394.html

I’m still trying to find formal documentation to support this fact, I can’t seem to find it in MSDN (as usual). Don’t ask me why I have > 32 imports. Some things are beyond my control.

Needed a SMTP server for testing our application today, and after evaluating a few options (company smtp, various free/open source solutions) it turned out that James worked best.

James was able to run as a standalone SMTP/POP3/NNTP server or Windows Service all at the same time, and highly configurable with its XML file. I was able to get it running quickly with its installation instructions. However the site documentation wasn’t so explicit on SSL configuration; its instructions assumed a lot about the user knowing about JSSE, keystores, SSL and the such. (Well, they probably are thinking someone who didn’t know these shouldn’t be setting up a secure mail server)

http://james.apache.org/server/2.3.0/usingTLS.html
http://wiki.apache.org/james/UsingSSL

These are two good references to getting it setup. In short, do the following:

1. Use java keytool to create a keystore containing the key pair for SSL.
2. Edit {james}\apps\james\SAR-INF\config.xml
3. Uncomment the ssl section of the section, replacing the values of file, password, and key-password with those of your keystore.
4. Edit your SMTP server section and uncomment the useTLS element. Change the port number if preferred.
5. Copy {jre}\lib\ext\sunjce_provider.jar file into the {james}\lib directory.
6. Restart James.
7. Test using a mail client. For a self-signed cert you may need to configure your mail client to accept the certificate.

Remember always to check your log file for error messages. It saved me loads of time from guessing what’s actually wrong. Also important is to copy {jre}\lib\ext\sunjce_provider.jar file into the {james}\lib directory. Yes, this is the step I missed that was causing a NoSuchAlgorithmException which I found in the log file.

The IE checkbox has a margin/padding around it that cannot be removed even by setting both of them to zero. You can observe it by checking it and looking at the dotted line surrounding it. Firefox doesn’t have this issue.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/css/3282586.htm

This forum gives the solution as setting its height and width to 13. I tried 12, and the checkbox was shrunk…