End of 2008

Well, I haven’t blogged in a long time, and now school’s about to start again, so I’d better get to it.

Another year has come and gone, and I must say that it was a very eventful one. Far too much for me to cover right now. Not sure if I have the motivation to do it, anyway. Let me think of a few big events off the top of my head.

In Summer ’08, I created an iPhone app called Brain Tuner which reached the ranking of #2 in the App Store. It’s still in the Top 100 somewhere, maybe around the 60’s by now. I believe the Top 100 lists reset daily (or are 24-hour rolling lists), so it’s good to keep up. And it doesn’t mean it was necessarily the #2 most-downloaded app at the time it was #2. But it was really cool to see this happen, because prior to this summer I had no experience programming for Mac, coding in Obj-C, or using Cocoa APIs. Now I rather like them, though Mac OS X itself is still a bother.

Let me record a few more recent events. Yesterday there was a small earthquake in San Bernardino, and I felt it in Walnut. Though the rest of my family says they didn’t feel anything, I’m certain I did, and I saw the ornaments on the Christmas tree shake, too. Nothing big, but an earthquake nonetheless. One can view a report of the earthquake from the US Geological Survey.

I’ve been working on an iPhone app called Whiteboard, which you’ll hopefully see in the App Store shortly.

Today I wrestled a bit with .htaccess and .htpasswd files. I learned a number of things, too. One, WebSVN has no built-in authentication. You need to password-protect it yourself using .htaccess. Two, if you try to SSH and get “bad message”, it’s probably because SSH is not enabled for the account. It expects an SFTP connection, so it will “work” — at least you’ll be able to enter your password and it’ll give an error if your password is wrong. But if the password is right, you’ll simply see nothing at all.

At DreamHost my path appears to have “.andora” in it, as in /home/.andora/username. But you can actually leave that out, and just say /home/username. Convenient, I guess. But make sure you do have the right path. Web files don’t go in username, they go in username/username.com (if username.com is your domain and you elected to use the first part of the domain name as your username). So when entering the path of your .htpasswd file in your .htaccess file, don’t forget the something.com like I did. That wasted some 10 minutes of my life.

Also note that this is a fine way to redirect non-https (insecure) URLs to https (secured by SSL) ones.

SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLRequireSSL
SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq “example.com”
ErrorDocument 403 https://example.com

And you can even substitute some other secure URL in place of the https://… line.