Up until now, this posting to the openldap-software mailing list by Apple employee Gary La Voy is by far the most complete description I’ve ever seen of the LDAP fields supported by Mail.app. I suppose this is all there is to know about LDAP and Address Book – unless of course more has been added in Leopard.

Just now, I stumbled across this Ethereal dump of Address Book’s query to an LDAP server which is extremely valuable. This O’Reilly page also has a useful summary if you’re just getting started, but it’s really the Ethereal dump that’s going to save you. (You can install Ethereal via MacPorts)

Here’s the complete dump of the LDAP Connection from Address Book:

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
    LDAP Message, Search Request
        Message Id: 2
        Message Type: Search Request (0x03)
        Message Length: 291
        Response In: 8
        Base DN: (null)
        Scope: Subtree (0x02)
        Dereference: Never (0x00)
        Size Limit: 0
        Time Limit: 30
        Attributes Only: False
        Filter: (|(givenname=carmo)(sn=carmo)(cn=carmo)(mail=carmo))
        Attribute: givenName
        Attribute: sn
        Attribute: cn
        Attribute: mail
        Attribute: telephoneNumber
        Attribute: facsimileTelephoneNumber
        Attribute: o
        Attribute: title
        Attribute: ou
        Attribute: buildingName
        Attribute: street
        Attribute: l
        Attribute: st
        Attribute: postalCode
        Attribute: c
        Attribute: jpegPhoto
        Attribute: mobile
        Attribute: co
        Attribute: pager
        Attribute: destinationIndicator
        Attribute: labeledURI
        Attribute: IMHandle

I just did some OpenLDAP debugging and got this list of attributes for Leopard 10.5.1:

givenName sn cn mail telephoneNumber facsimileTelephoneNumber o title ou buildingName street l st postalCode c jpegPhoto mobile co pager destinationIndicator labeledURI IMHandle

Once you get all of these popped into an LDAP directory entry, the result is something like this:

Note that IMHandle, buildingName, commonName, pager, ou and co fields do not get displayed on the contact card. Additionally, only one email address will be displayed (the first one) regardless of how many email addresses exist on the contact record. I’ve spent several hours trying to get IMHandle to work (apple-imhandle), but it never seems to populate. Apparently, I’m not the only one with this issue. Save yourself the trouble – don’t bother.

Apparently Mac OS X Server is required if you want to serve up Instant Messenger contact info.

UPDATE: This bug was fixed in the OS X 10.5.1 Software Update. Nice work Apple! I posted a while back about the difficulty of getting Address Book.app with SSL working on Mac OS X 10.4. Now that 10.5 is out in the wild, of course the situation is worse I’ve tried several times and I just get the infamous:

11/17/07 19:52:49 PM Address Book[3872] [localhost:10389] Binding to server did not complete successfully: ‘-1:Can’t contact LDAP server’

No responses to this issue yet: Leopard address book and LDAP – Mac – Apple:

It works fine if you disable SSL – but seeing as how the only authentication method available is “simple” (meaning your password goes over the wire in plain text), I hardly see that as a sane solution. On the bright side of the Apple Address book issue though, it seems that the genius that runs Address Book X LDAP has managed to get all of the various AddressBook.app attributes to packed into an LDAP server!

http://j2anywhere.com/j2anywhere/downloads/index.jsp

PTHPasteboard – mac software for download at iusethis:

A good friend of mine turned me on to Pth Pasteboard and I couldn’t be happier. At first, the idea of multiple pasteboard’s didn’t seem helpful to me, but after I started using it, I started realizing how frequently I was typing the same text over and over.

Another invaluable feature of Pth Pasteboard is Pasteboard Persistence – copying to your pasteboard becomes the same as saving! Unfortunately my 17″ MBP has never been as stable as my trusty old 12″ PowerBook was – every few weeks I’ll get a crash, but it’s amazing how frequently the data that I was so worried about loosing pops up on the pasteboard on the side of my screen!

Once you’ve been using Pasteboard for a while, you’ll also find the text filters to be quite useful – especially for fixing up junk text that you copied from an email and need to forward on. Note, Pasteboard used to look a bit fugly, but the author recently added Anti-Aliasing – blends into the system quite well.

Give it a shot – I think you’ll really enjoy this one!

Early this morning, Eion Robb, the author of the Skype plugin for Adium fixed the UTF-8 encoding issue. I think the Skype for Adium plugin is ready for prime time!

Get Skype in your Adium! Download the plugin here. Installation is as simple as double clicking on the file once downloaded, then go to File / Add Account / Skype API. Click “Yes” a few times and you’re good to go!

Check out the Skype API Plugin page at: http://myjobspace.co.nz/images/pidgin/

And send Eion Robb a donation, or at least some thanks for getting this excellent plugin put together!

I’ve been using the infamous Basecamp for a few months and I’m moderately satisfied. Business applications are notoriously difficult to do well since everyone’s needs are so different. If you were to develop a Project Management app that had all of the functionality that was wanted by everyone, you would have the equivalent of an ERP system – something that does everything, but requires a never-ending stream of customization, consultants, and training. Moreover, the result isn’t something that anyone loves to use.

Throwing that caution to the wind, I’ve gone ahead and investigated a few other project management solutions:

• Basecamp – BasecampHQ.com
• Go Plan – goplan.info
• Wrike – www.wrike.com

Unfortunately, neither GoPlan or Wrike quite do it for me… I jotted the following note to the Wrike team as I prepared to return to my Basecamp task list.

During signup, I was not aware that you do not support Safari, which is the primary browser for myself and my team. During signup, I noticed that you wrote several times about “Time Tracking”, but I was very disappointed to see that at the actual Task level, there was no support for logging the hours spent by a given employee on a given task, and then download that information into a CSV file to create billing documents and status reports. The use of the “Rich Text” input in the description area is interesting, but that Javascript control does not support Input Methods such for Chinese or Japanese, while a simple text box works just fine. I would personally greatly prefer the use of Textile or Markup.

I tried. I’m a basecamp client and I’m quite frustrated with the lack of email support and the relatively week project management ability of basecamp. I have a GoPlan paid account in case they ever get it right, but their current lack of support for “Time Tracking” (log hours per task by employee, download to .csv file for reporting) it’s a no-go.

Overall, I think the WRIKE site still needs quite a bit of polishing. I like some of the functionality, but Basecamp and GoPlan are both way ahead in terms of Usability and the overall Look & Feel. Everything about WRIKE feels a bit homespun. The color scheme. The typography. Layout design. This textbox is needlessly small, and the one on your Contact Us page is ridiculously so. Last up, you’ve got to replace that Introductory video, the voiceover, the photos selected, the example content, and the horribly pixelated logo at the end is just wrong… Anti-aliasing has been around since the 80′s.

Please don’t take the above the wrong way – I’m only pointing these things out because I care and would like to see somebody create a better tool than Basecamp. Knock ‘em dead!

Best-

-Erwin

If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting a long time for this – Skype and Adium together – in one.

Skype and Adium are still a long way from fully integrated, but if you download the Skype Plugin for Adium, you can take your first steps in that direction. The result, one less window on your desktop! The only downside, is that it still doesn’t support chinese input. You can display chinese messages and the names of Chinese contacts, but if you type anything in chinese into the Adium Skype window, you’ll see yet another example of not-quite-UTF-8 compliant software in action

I guess my hobby of that Internationalization book is even more in need than I though…

If you have clients, vendors or colleagues in multiple timezones around the world, like me, you may find the World Clock Deluxe utility to be invaluable. I formerly used JetClock, a replacement for the standard Mac OS X menu clock, but the memory leak in the latest version made it too troublesome to continue using. Instead, I upgraded to the excellent World Clock which lets me quickly check the time extremely conveniently:

I’ve found that sticking the Clock to my “Desktop” is extremely convenient, much more than using a Dashboard widget – which can often take several seconds to load. Instead, setting the “Level” of the World Clock to Desktop, hitting the expose command to show my desktop also conveniently lets me review the current time in all relevant areas.

If you place on order at thawte.com for a SSL certificate that uses less than 4 characters (for the CN/Common Name field), you will NOT be permitted to process your certificate.

The process you should use is:

1. http://www.thawte.com/digital-certificate-resellers/reseller-partners/index.html
2. Enter in the user name: ZAVERISI-1 and Password: Password123
3. Please click on “click here” under the “Enroll for Certificates”
4. Select the duration of your choice
5. enter in the CSR and the rest of the contact information (please leave the billing contact details as is)

According to Thawte’s technical support team, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature…

This feature was added as a security block in our system to prevent customers from obtaining wildcards to cover all domains of a particular domain registrar, for example, *.com or *.net.

The way around this is for the customer to simply add an x after his 3 letter domain when enrolling. So the customer must get the wildcard for *.redx.com. This will allow the enrollment to complete. Once the order is in the system it is merely a case of contacting CS and asking them to remove the x after the domain. The wildcard will then be issued to the correct customer domain of *.red.com.

So, if you’re over at sun.com, ibm.com, x.com (bought paypal, then bought by ebay), msn, cia.gov, etc. Well, be careful when you’re buying your wildcard certificates.

We wouldn’t want to see Verisign’s gross margin’s eroded by implementing features like this properly, for example with a list of valid top level domains for each country.

You might be aware that 1 in 8 American’s lives in California, yet the rest of the American west is still rather unoccupied. It would be very interesting to hold up this chart and a similar one for China and compare the two. Shanghai is around 3 x the size of New York City, and there are more than 100 cities with over 1,000,000 residents.

According to Google, Manhattan’s population density is 66,940/mi². In 1910, Manhattan reached a peak population density of 120,250/mi²

My hometown (Downtown Shanghai) has an average population density of 88,140/mi². Here in City Center (Huangpu District), it’s probably well above 100,000 considering the population here is noticeably higher… On the bright side, move to China and you’ll never be alone

See the clickable Flash version at TIME’s “Where we Live” article.

Shanghai Population Density Numbers (Chinese only)

Shanghai Population Density FAR outstrips Tokyo, Paris and New York (Chinese Only)

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The Digital Doomesday Book created in the UK in 1986 is already nearly unreadable, because there are no systems that are able to access the media created by the system. Meanwhile, the original Doomesday book created in 1086 by Norman monks is still in good conditon. See the Gaurdian story…

There is an opportunity to create a service, somewhat similar to data recovery, to move the data from these systems into new formats. This business would need to constantly be in search of the OLDEST equipment, ever reaching further back in time. The further back, the more the value that can be added, as things go from passe to antique.

You could start with: • 1.44MB Floppy Disks • 3.5 MB Large Floppy Disk • Iomega ZIP Drives (100MB and 250MB formats) • MS DOS, Win 3.11, Win 95 • VCR Drives

With this equipment acquired you could access most anything created post 1990. At that point you work backward to locate ever older storage/conversion equipment. You could get 9 MB Tapes. Scour garage sales in Silicon Valley looking for working yet inexpensive equipment.

Not only would drives be required, but complete working systems where the recovery engineer can sit down and inspect the data with the original program intended to operate the system.

Sounds like a friend of mine’s ideas for a Mac Museum could turn into yet another business…

You may have heard the story that when Coca-Cola first came to China and translated their name into Chinese, they used something that translated as “Bite The Wax Tadpole”. I thought that could mean that they use “壳口蝌曜“, but they originally picked the even more funny “蝌蝌啃蜡” which does literally translate as Bite the Tadpole.

Here’s the Chinese Reference: http://www.89mc.com/resource/cases/20070411/News200704112646.shtml

And in case you’ve ever heard the story about how the Chevy Nova was originally received in the Spanish market as the Chevy “No Go”, you should review the Urban Legends page that proves quite the opposite. So there you go, Coca-Cola can replace GM as the typical example of what can go wrong in i18n and l10n.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

EastSouthWestNorth: Hong Kong: Ten Years After The Return To China: Here’s an article (translated into english) written by a left wing Hong Kong resident who’s expected to be expelled from HK when Beijing took control, and now writes off Beijing basically friendly and honest management of HK as a political demonstration for the rest of the world.

It’s hard to know, but for those familiar with the recent history of China, this may be an more interesting and revealing question to ask yourself:

If control of Taiwan had been turned over to the Mainland (CCP) government when Nixon granted official recognition to the CCP (rather than Taiwan’s KMT), what would the 90′s/2000′s administration of Hong Kong look like?

In other words, it’s easy to second guess any benevolent action on the part of the mainland, especially when regarding HK, as a way of wooing Taiwanese to cede control of their homeland to the mainland.

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A few months back, I purchased an iPhone. No, not the cool new Apple iPhone but a Cisco/Linksys iPhone so make Skype calls without a computer. Living in China, I use Skype frequently and appreciate the convenience of being able to talk without being tethered to my computer. I’ll probably buy a second iPhone shortly and use it at my office.

Unfortunately, the iPhone interferes with all of your text messages on Skype. Skype does not deal gracefully with one user being logged in at multiple computers, and it deals especially badly with this situation when one of those computers is a Skype phone. So, for the last 2 months I’ve only been able to receive a small fraction of the Skype text messages (not SMS) that have been sent to me.

To work around this problem, I came up with what I thought to be a simple solution. Just setup another Skype account and use it exclusively with your Skype iPhone(s). Due to EBay/Skype’s business rules, this is much more difficult than I could have ever expected.

The first time I tried to place an order, I used the Visa that I use to pay for my primary Skype account. Skype rejected that order. Skype has a business rule that a Credit Card may only be used to fund a single Skype account, though multiple credit cards may be used to fund the same Skype account. You just can’t then reused that Credit Card to open an additional Skype account. OK, not exactly reasonable, but what choice do I have?

The second time I tried to place an order, I though to myself, why not just use my PayPal account as it will draft directly from my bank account and hopefully bypass this credit card restriction? Problem, even though Skype promotes PayPal payments on their website, they do not allow an order to be submitted via PayPal’s default “bank draft” method, and even though both of these are EBay companies, the two don’t bother to work together to make it possible to pay for Skype via the default PayPal payment method.

The third time I tried, I finally caved in and decided to use another credit card. Unfortunately, it was rejected because that payment method wasn’t available “available in your country“. I tried a 4th time, a 5th time…. 10 more times I tried and the payment method failed because it wasn’t available in my country.

As somebody who’s run a large E-Commence business (Oakley Direct), I zeroed in on what was happening – risk management. Skype must get a lot of fraudulent payments with stolen credit cards placed by people in Mainland China, so rather than trying to figure out a way to cash in on a growing market and an ever appreciating currency (rather than the ever deflating dollar), they’ve decided to prevent all credit card payments coming from China, at least if there is an address verification. This sort of idea is like a Car Alarm. It might make some of the criminals look for the next easier target, but I doubt it. The same way that I’m basically stuck with Skype because it’s the only product that meets my international telephony needs, I assume that all of the hl33t hax0r’s running around in China are as well. And in a nation with 5 times the population of the USA, a chronic 10%+ unemployment rate, and 50%+ of the population under-employed, plus a shortage of girls (and therefore girlfriends), China is bound to stay the haxor breeding ground that it is, at least for the near term.

On the other hand, let’s see what happens if Allibaba or Tencent (QQ) decides to compete with Skype for the domestic market. Skype will probably find themselves in the position that EBay already experiences in China. Low ROI. Low market penetration.

To bypass EBay/Skype’s questionable “business logic”, I simply used a “proxy server” in the United States and placed the order with one of my (previously rejected) Credit Cards. The order was instantly approved. All information was the same. Only my IP address changed, even though it didn’t really. It’s just that Skype accepted the Proxy’s IP as my own.

Technorati Tags: China

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Jarmark.org » AppConfig: If you’ve got a RAILS configuration on your hands, give AppConfig a shot to store all of your local configuration requirements. It integrates seamlessly with the master rails configuration files (environment.rb). You can install it by just running:

script/plugin install http://svn.jarmark.org/rails/app_config

Unfortunately, the actual Parameter names are NOT Unicode safe, that is to say, only A-Z, a-z and 0-9 can be used as the Parameter name, but parameter values are unicode safe, so they’ll work just fine for those chinese characters of yours… Just don’t go trying:

logger.error( AppConfig.汉子 ) logger.error( AppConfig[:汉子] ) logger.error( AppConfig.param(‘汉子‘) ) logger.error( AppConfig.param(:汉子) )

As none of those will work Fortunately, the output of these will work just fine.

(In config/environment.rb)

Rails::Initializer.run do |config| # My Killer App Specific Settings… config.app_config.MY_PARAM = ‘在这里用UTF-8是很方便！‘ end

(In your app/controller/some_controller.rb)

logger.error( AppConfig. MY_PARAM) logger.error( AppConfig[:MY_PARAM] ) logger.error( AppConfig.param(‘MY_PARAM’) ) logger.error( AppConfig.param(:MY_PARAM) )

By the way, don’t forget to set: KCODE=’UTF8′ inside of your config/environment.rb… Otherwise, you’re unicode will be all messed up.

If you’re doing development of software in China, you’ll almost certainly know you’re way around encodings. If you don’t, you better learn quick

If you’re using subversion to manage your software version control, then you’ll probably also want to use Trac access an easy to navigate, visual, color view of your source code repository. Additionally, you’ll probably want to use svn-mailer to send out notification messages to the entire development team about each new change as it comes up. Well, if on your Ubuntu box you just do an:

$ sudo aptitude install svnmailer

You’ll be unpleasantly surprised that you’re messages get mutilated… Additionally, Trac URLs is only supported in svn-mailer 1.10 and later. You might install the svnmailer package just to take care of any dependancies, but you’ll want to download the source version and install it too (at least until later 2007 when I would expect the svnmailer package to be in the Ubuntu base distribution).

wget http://storage.perlig.de/svnmailer/svnmailer-1.1.0-dev-r1373.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf svnmailer-*.bz2
cd svnmailer-* && sudo python setup.py install

Next, you’ll want to create an svnmailer.conf file that looks something like this:

[general]
smtp_host = localhost:25
config_charset = utf-8

[defaults]
commit_subject_prefix = [svn] commit:
apply_charset_property = yes
show_applied_charset = yes
from_addr = svn@example.org
to_addr = epsilon@example.org delta@example.org gamma@example.org
browser_base_url = Trac http://example.org/trac/example/browser/
mail_transfer_encoding = 8bit

Note that if you specify a mail_transfer_encoding other than 8bit, you’re messages will almost certainly get mangled… But try it if you like. Note that if you we’re seeing the equals sign (=) being replaced with =3D=3D=3D=3D… in your svn-mailer files, setting the mailer_transfer_encoding to 8bit will also fix that!

Next, you’ll want to cd inside of the root of a copy of your svn checkout and run:

svn pedit svnmailer:content-charset .

(Note the “.” at the end of this line) Next, a window of vim or some other editor should come up, in which you probably want to type:

* = utf-8

That’s it. Save and quit out of your editor, then svn ci the root directory of your checkout. Afterward, you should see that from svn-mailer’s prospective you’re files are by default encoded with UTF-8. You can change the encoding for any subdirectory, while will be inherited by descendants if you need to use some other encoding. You can also write the encoding for a specific file with:

svn pset svnmailer:content-charset utf-8 somefile

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p>That’s it. You can read more about the svnmailer character set options in the apply_charset_property section of the svnmailer documentation.

Technorati Tags: China, Encoding Issue, 乱码