CaCert – Open Source Certificates

CaCert provides a free service as a Root Certificate Authority (CA).

To use the service for generating free SSL certificates, you first need to join the community and sign-up for an account.

After you’ve activated the account, login,  go to the ‘Server Certificates’ section off the main menu, click on ‘New’ and follow the instructions.

Before you use the certificates on a web site, install the CACert root certificate in your browser. Use the ‘Class 1′ Root certificate in PEM format.  In Firefox, just click on the PEM link, and accept the security exception. This is the only time you should need to do this. Thereafter, any certificate signed by CaCert will be accepted as a legal certificate.

Note that you would have to do this with any CA root certificate, if a number of them did not come pre-installed in your browser. To see all of your certificates in Firefox, go to Preferences > Advanced > Encryption > View Certificates > Authorities and Preferences > Advanced > Encryption > View Certificates > Servers .

See also Installing an SSL Certificate on Apache 2 and How to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for related information.

Ruby 1.8.7, Snow Leopard, readline and openssl

Had a lot of trouble getting Ruby 1.8.7 (p160), readline and openssl to combine to let ruby compile on Snow Leopard.

Solution:

readline-6.0
./configure –prefix=/opt/ruby187rubygems135
make
sudo make install

For ruby:

./configure –prefix=/opt/ruby187rubygems135 –disable-pthread –enable-shared –with-readline-dir=/opt/ruby187rubygems135
make
sudo make install

Note that specifying something like ‘-with-openssl=/usr’ breaks the compile. Leaving the SSL option off works.

MySQL Create Database

To create a database using the MySQL command-line

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p

create database abc;

Open Flash Chart Plugin

Installing the Pullmonkey Open Flash Chart II for Ruby on Rails (Pullmonkey)

• script/plugin install git://github.com/pullmonkey/open_flash_chart.git
• Copy swfobject.js from the plugin’s assets/ directory (will make this happen at install time later) to your RAILS_ROOT/public/javascripts directory
• Copy open-flash-chart.swf from the plugin’s assets/ director to your RAILS_ROOT/public/ directory

Done!