The UnSub

Ars Technica covered a very nice detailed how-to to install SSL/TLS cert from StartSSL in OSX server. I shall not rehashed their steps to obtain the certificate. For me, I am keen to use StartSSL’s free Class 1 cert with Nginx server and it is not covered in their help/support pages.

Notes on Generating CSR

Assuming your server private key is server.key and you are inside the directory storing the key. The Openssl command will look something like this:

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

As you key in the necessary fields for your CSR, you MUST OMIT the EMAIL ADDRESS field. ie. LEAVE it BLANK & press ENTER.

Otherwise, when you request the certificate at StartSSL, you will end up making a Class 2 certificate request which require validation of email and it will cost you money.

Installing the Cert in Nginx

Let’s say everything went smoothly, after pasting the CSR into the webpage and clicking continue, you will see the Certificate contents in the webpage. There is a link to CLASS 1 CA Intermediate cert file. You must download that file into your server.

In order for Nginx to use the free cert, you have bundle the Intermediate CA cert and the new cert together into a single file:

cat class1.ca.pem newcert.pem > bundleforyrdomain.pem

The naming of each file will differ from your server but the ORDER is IMPORTANT! The CA Intermediate file must first in new file. After which, adjust your existing nginx.conf, restart nginx should NOT yield any error. Your new free cert is in!

When my Singtel Mio bundle contract was about to expire, I wondered if I could get a new toy to replace my not-so-smart phone Samsung i600 (aka Blackjack). And since everyone is holding an iPhone these days, I thought why not try something else like an Android phone:

HTC Hero (GSM version)

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone like most Apple products, are well-designed. I am an Apple convert, user of OSX and IPod touch and I love them. Having used a QWERTY keyboard on my Samsung for quite a while and being a heavy SMS user, I am pretty certain it may be painful to get use to a virtual keyboard on an iPhone. Even on my iPod touch, I prefer punching the screen on the icons than the virtual keyboard.

If I were to use Samsung i600 as a yardstick, then an out-of-the-box HTC Hero would get full marks since the older Windows Mobile phones really suck big time in terms of usability and battery life. My software development career started off with Windows CE programming all the way to Windows Mobile 5 platform. Honestly, I despise Windows Mobile. Then again, I digressed.

Back to HTC Hero, I bought this new toy with a re-contract & discounted 1GB data package @ $9.90SGD/month.  Afterall, a smartphone without a data-plan is kinda pointless and authenticating on Wireless@SG is very much like having sex with prostitutes without condom.

There are probably plenty of HTC Hero reviews out there. I won’t review the phone per se, just listing some of the ways to make better use of this phone. Using the phone well is important, as I’d to take it to Bangkok (again) with my wife and sister-in-law for their shopping spree.

Battery life

First thing first; if you were to NOT adjust any settings out-of-the-box for a Hero phone, the juice will probably dry out in less than a day with a couple of hours of surfing, listening to songs (via Bluetooth A2DP), texting and occasional phone calls. You could save more energy by following guidelines to turn-off software services as described in detail here which more or less doubles the life at the expense of NOT using data!

Alternatively, change the battery. There’s a nasty joke that goes like Steve Job can change his liver but he doesn’t allow you to change your iPhone/iPod battery. Well in a way, that is one of the reasons why I didn’t buy an iPhone. The original HTC Hero battery packs a 1350mAh rating, but if you were to search eBay for “1700mah Spare Battery for HTC Hero“, you should find batteries produced by Andida from Hong Kong. HTC Hero shares the same battery as Dopod T5353 in case you wonder why the label on the battery pack doesn’t show HTC Hero.

I ordered it before my Bangkok trip and good-thing that it came in time. For most of the time, I was on Thailand’s DTAC Edge network and it is pretty fast and stable throughout my 5 day stay. A full charge on this Andida battery will last me the entire day of surfing, MSN IM, GPS Google Map and a little WikiTude (camera turned on). Doing that with the original battery will last me like half a day or even less to hit < 20%.

Nice Free Software

I seriously didn’t think that I could last 4 straight days of shopping in Bangkok (considering the number of staircases to climb) if it weren’t for the phone and the good network. It was only $249 Baht for 7 days (under daily package) unlimited EDGE data! The built-in software like browsers, SMS and other Google bundles are nice but the trend nowadays is dumping more applications into phones and even paying for them.

Browsers

There are however free 3rd party browsers like Steel and Dolphin which are cool. Personally I prefer the latter since the Steel browser has some issues with saving log-in cookies. Dolphin browser is more polished and 1-finger friendly. Compared with Safari built-in iPod/iPhone, I believe it equals or even better in terms of auto-font size adjustments, gestures to move between tabs and rendering speed. If you are a new user to Android, just search the software names mentioned using Android market application in your phone.

Google Map & Wikitude

Google Map is built into almost all Android phone, I have never taken fancy of it on the desktop but on the phone, it is useful when you are abroad with data-plan. I started firing the GPS once I got on the taxi on my way to the hotel and it tracked really well. On water, I navigated with GPS + Google Map to know when to get off the Chao Praya River Express at the right pier! Even as I was on foot amongst the Bangkok cityscape, I managed to use GMap to walk to a restaurant recommended by my wife’s colleague. With Wikitude, one can see some interesting recommendations by fellow users. All you had to do was point the phone around you with the camera running and recommended point-of-interests will pop up in your camera view.

Twitteride & Fring

I always considered Twitter as my monologue platform while MSN is still the place I hang out if I engage in a conversation with closer friends. There is of course Twitteroid which I tried for a couple days before abandoning it for Twitteride. Twitteroid has smaller buttons compared to Twitteride which is finger friendly and simpler. Fring is capable of VOIP and Instant Messaging. It is one of the more stable MSN client on Android.

Others, Handcent, Advance Task Killer, NetCounter

The thing I love best about Hero HTC is that it gives you more options, particularly a very intelligent T9 keypad and the auto-suggest works really well! The native SMS application is good enough for most users. The 2 most popular 3rd party SMS applications seem to be ChompSMS and Handcent. Personally, I prefer Handcent because it is simpler and slightly more stable. But the single definitive feature I like about 3rd party SMS application is the SMS counter that is displayed on threaded conversation interfaces which you can change theme if you like.

There are times that Handcent and ChompSMS may crash the HTC Sense User Interface. Something quite irritating. Sometimes I wonder if it is because I use tool like Advance Task Killer to kill of some of the application processes to free up more memory and lower the battery consumption. Bear in mind that multi-tasking means more applications running,  the more processes running = more memory and battery needed.

The crashes usually happen with Handcent / ChompSMS quick reply interface. I recently discovered that by switching to Handcent’s quick reply interface to lite mode & turning off the background blurring seem to stop the crashing.

Counting SMS sent is one thing, the other thing you might want to count is the amount of data transferred since most data-plan are limited, in my case 1GB worth of traffic monthly. I am using NetCounter although there are many who swear by 3G Watchdog.

Wrapping it up

For someone who tweets more often than he blogs, this is quite alot of text. To wrap it up, I bought this case off eBay, it fitted snuggedly and feels good holding at $6USD (~$8SGD). It even came with a free screen protector that was clearer than my matt/anti-fingerprint protector for $15SGD! if you ever buy a HTC Hero, don’t waste your money buying body and screen protectors from local stores. You will be ripped off.

Been busy spamming Twitter that I hardly blog these days. Then again, we had been busy with another important agenda; getting our own flat. After the renovation and settling in, we finally got a chance to get away to Bangkok over the weekend.

Going overseas DIY style definitely gives more freedom when planning one’s itinerary. We chose to get to Bangkok comfortably with SIA flights which were just about $50-60 more than the competitive budget airlines, thanks to the down-turn of economy. Park Plaza Sukhumvit Bangkok Hotel stay was definitely money well spent.

Corner Suite

Cute little towel elephant

We were really please with the hotel, from the ease of booking, friendly & eloquent staff and quality of the room. Getting from airport to hotel in a down-pouring evening wasn’t that pleasing. A typical jam look something like this:

Getting stuck is not fun

It was a good thing that our hotel was just few minutes walk from BTS station Asoke.

BTS is your friend

Like many tourists from all over the world, one of her agenda was to visit some of their temples. This happened to be in the middle of very modern and huge shopping centers.

Temple between modern district buildings

How can we forget Singaporean’s favorite past-time, that is to walk/shop till you drop in mega-shopping centers. it felt more tiring than our Europe honeymoon trip as there were plenty of stair-cases to climb. It explains why most Thais are rather slim, just my type of country.

Just outside a shop called Loft

Found a very useful gadget at Loft:

Quik pod

A Quik pod is extensible tool that allows tourists like us to take photos without the need to ask strangers for help. We explored an assortment of shopping centers, Chachutchak and suan lum night bazaar conveniently with a BTS day-pass which is about SGD$6.

After our brief night market survey, we somehow ended up at A&W restaurant!

Root Beer!!

It was really a lovely short-trip and we are definitely going back again!