r509 v0.6 is out. There were 39 commits encompassing the following changes from 0.5 to 0.6.

* Gemfile updated to set proper versions of supporting gems for doc generation
* Fixes to load_yaml in Config
* OCSP handling extensively refactored and most of the logic moved into the r509 OCSP responder project.
* Cert#subject_component no longer improperly upcases elements
* SAN is now supported in self-signed certificates
* Cert#san_names returns an empty array if no san_names exist
* Cert#fingerprint is now an available method
* Cert#subject_names returns a concatenation (de-duped) of CN and SANs
* General refactoring in several areas to improve code quality
* Csr now takes :san_names in constructor instead of :domains. This is more consistent
* Files renamed to lowercase to match Ruby conventions
* Cert#in_validity_range? method added
* Fixed some order dependent tests

The majority of work went into improving the OCSP codebase, which was moved into the r509-ocsp-responder project, but that’s a subject for another blog entry!

I haven’t talked about r509 here in awhile, but since v0.5 just got tagged I thought I’d plug it again. r509 is a wrapper for the OpenSSL libraries in Ruby. It’s designed to allow you to do a wide variety of certificate authority related operations (issuance, revocation, CRL generation, OCSP responses, et cetera). There are also some ancillary gems that are under active development (r509-ca-http, r509-ocsp-responder, r509-validity-redis) which will gain more documentation as these projects progress.

Check it out, file issues, fork, and contribute!

Over at Viking Hammer my coworker Sean Schulte has written up a great article dissecting an issue we ran into regarding the way Ruby’s OpenSSL::X509::Name#to_a currently builds its array. He discusses the problem, the two solutions we came up with, and shares code examples. Go check it out!

Here’s a pair of scripts for automatically running Ruby rspec tests, refusing to commit if they fail, and pulling in the results into the commit msg. If you want to use them place them in your project’s .git/hooks directory as executable scripts.

These scripts assume you have rspec writing to rspec_results.html. To do this by default add a .rspec file in your project dir with “-f doc -f h -o rspec_results.html” inside.

pre-commit

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'pty'
html_path = "rspec_results.html"  
#PTY.spawn trick from
#http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1154846/continuously-read-from-stdout-of-external-process-in-ruby
begin
	PTY.spawn( "rake spec" ) do |stdin, stdout, pid|
	begin
		stdin.each { |line| print line }
	rescue Errno::EIO
		end
	end
rescue PTY::ChildExited
	puts "The child process exited!"
end
 
# find out how many errors were found  
html = open(html_path).read  
examples = html.match(/(\d+) examples/)[0].to_i rescue 0  
failures = html.match(/(\d+) failures/)[0].to_i rescue 0  
if failures == 0 then
	failures = html.match(/(\d+) failure/)[0].to_i rescue 0  
end
pending = html.match(/(\d+) pending/)[0].to_i rescue 0  
 
if failures.zero?  
  puts "0 failed! #{examples} run, #{pending} pending"  
  puts "View rspec results at #{File.expand_path(html_path)}"  
  sleep 1
  exit 0
else  
  puts "\aDID NOT COMMIT YOUR FILES!"  
  puts "View rspec results at #{File.expand_path(html_path)}"  
  puts  
  puts "#{failures} failed! #{examples} run, #{pending} pending"  
  `open #{html_path}`
  exit 1  
end

prepare-commit-msg

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
html_path = "rspec_results.html"
# find out how many errors were found  
html = open(html_path).read
examples = html.match(/(\d+) examples/)[0].to_i rescue 0
failures = html.match(/(\d+) failures/)[0].to_i rescue 0
if failures == 0 then
        failures = html.match(/(\d+) failure/)[0].to_i rescue 0
end
pending = html.match(/(\d+) pending/)[0].to_i rescue 0
 
 
message_file = ARGV[0]
message = File.read(message_file)
index = message.index('# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting')
message.insert(index-1, "\n\n#{failures} failed! #{examples} run, #{pending} pending")
open(message_file,'w') { |f|
        f.puts(message)
}

turntable.fm is a fun place to discover new music and play it for your friends, but it’s frustrating to use at work since you have to switch to the tab to see what song is playing and who’s saying what. I wrote a Fluid userscript that you can use to growl songs and chat lines to solve this problem. It also prevents idle timeouts from occuring in turntable if you don’t interact with it for awhile.

var debug = false;
 
var sendChat = false;
 
logger('loading userscript');
 
function bindDOM() {
    logger('binding');
    $('.messages').bind('DOMNodeInserted',parseChat);
    $(window).blur(function() {
        sendChat = true;
    });
    $(window).focus(function() {
        sendChat = false;
    });
}
 
function parseChat(event) {
    var message = event.target;
    var author = $(message).find('.speaker').text();
    var body = $(message).find('.text').text();
    if (body.indexOf('started playing') == 1) {
        var artist = body.match(/by (.*)/)[1];
        var song = body.match(/"(.+)"/)[1];
        logger('growling now');
        logger(artist);
        logger(song);
        showGrowl(artist,song);
    } else {
        body = body.substr(2);
        if (sendChat) {
            showGrowl(author,body);
        }
    }
}
 
function showGrowl(title,description) {
    window.fluid.showGrowlNotification({
        title: title, 
        description: description, 
        priority: 1, 
        sticky: false,
        identifier: "sh.langui.turntable"
    });
}
 
function idlePreventer() {
    logger('invoking idle preventer');
    $('.addSongsButton').click();
    $('.cancelButton').click();
}
 
function logger(data) {
    if(debug) {
        console.log(data);
    }
}
 
setTimeout(bindDOM,5000);
setInterval(idlePreventer,300000);

You’ll need a licensed version of Fluid to use this userscript.

Apple released a new iOS today to fix a bug I reported. More info here. I’ll also be giving a talk with Nick Percoco about this and other SSL issues in mobile OSes at DEFCON 19. Hope to see you there!

Lion hides the user home directory by default. You can navigate to it with cmd-shift-G easily, but if you happen to want it to be visible all the time just run this command in a Terminal.app window.

chflags nohidden ~/Library

Thanks to Matt Pennig for the command.

We’ve recently started integrating MongoDB more extensively into our systems at work and found ourselves wanting some basic monitoring during dev to see what the DB was doing. A friend suggested Mongo Live, which fit the bill but was only compatible with Chrome. Since I switch frequently between Safari and Chrome I decided to port it.

Fortunately the extension for Chrome required only minimal changes to get it working in Safari. The most significant change is that the Safari extension uses a toolbar button to activate. The fork is available on Github and supports Chrome and Safari. Hopefully someone finds it helpful!

I’ve posted an article about the current state of X.509 revocation on the internet over at the Spiderlabs blog. Check out Defective By Design? – Certificate Revocation Behavior In Modern Browsers!

Doing device level copies with dd is a reasonably common Linux task, but not something OS X users typically do. However, if you find yourself needing to write an image file¹ to a microSD card or some other media then here’s a simple guide to using it.

First, you’ll want to see the device labels.

diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            249.7 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 GB     disk2
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 THUMB_DRIVE             2.0 GB     disk2s1

The output from above shows that we have a mounted 2GB USB flash drive named “THUMB_DRIVE” that has been given the identifier /dev/disk2. To write to it we need to unmount it, but ejecting it in the normal Mac way won’t work here.

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

There we go! Now we just need to write our image file.

dd if=inputfile.img of=/dev/disk2

The shell will appear to hang, but you can check disk activity to see that it’s writing. Once the command returns you’re done!