Deciphering QR codes

Lately I have been seeing lots these small black and white like barcodes on many sites and in different places, so today I chosen to decipher these codes.

If you do a lot of your browsing on a mobile device I can guess you have already seen the thousands and thousands of the small squared boxes on many of the mobile sites. And most recently seen them on T-shirts, posters and also banners in many places including hangout joints!

These small boxes known as Quick response (Qr) codes are taking over the mobile world, almost all technology bloggers have them on their sites and even the established websites like Wikipedia, BBC, Google are all using them for their mobile sites.

The technique behind these Qr codes is that one has a Qr reader installed on their mobile device which then decodes the information in the Qr code, which could be a url, plain text or any other alpha numeric information stored in the code!

                                                           

So if you have a device running android any version or the Iphone OS go straight to the respective App markets and download a Qr reader / scanner, there are lots of them install one on your device and your good to go. Try this....

There is this site (http://tinyurl.com/5dd59g) where you can have your Qr code created, visit and make your own Qr code then go ahead and share it with others!

Well so next time you see a Qr code don't freak just pull out your phone and scan or read the Qr code and enjoy the benefit of accessing information in a supper fast way. 

Peace

Friday 29th, April 2011 while the rest of the world (At least 2 billion viewers) were watching the British royal wedding back home, Kampala was in a state of lock down, life seemed to have stopped for a while and the streets were littered with debris, burnt tires and were akin to those on the  war front.

Peace for us all

But If you had been following the events on the news over the last couple of weeks over the #walktowork protests, the arrest of Dr. KB, the governments' response to all that was happening then this would not be surprising at all.

Given the brutal action movie like arrest of #Besigye and his aides for the oba what time.

Ugandans of all walks of life took to the streets to protest this, remember in physics, we learnt that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the police forgot this and went ahead and brutally used tear gas, sprayed pepper, fired at fellow Ugandans in the name of dispersing the rioters!

The police was joined by the army and military police and the clashes were horrible, however what was most noticeable was how these police chaps were really trained to spank fellow Ugandans!!

Because the Ugandan media had no balls to broadcast what was going on in their country but instead opted for the Royal wedding, twitter today became my companion from the different tweets I was able to know what was happening around me! And since today I couldn't do much or influence any of the happenings which I wish I could, all I can do is rant here and hope that people can know that the only constant is life is change!

Good night...

Ssl certificate blues

The Exchange server certificate for this organisation, I work for expired in the first weeks of me joining the organistion and I was tasked with always advising users to click on the "Continue to this website" warning so they could use Outlook web access.

I received a number of calls depending on the different browsers that users used, with Firefox having the scariest message "This Connection is Untrusted" and warning users to stay away from this particular page unless they understood the security risk!

This went on until a security certificate from thawte was purchased. Tasked to install the certificate using the instructions provided I got more confused but a support guy from Thawte told me that once a CSR is generated with powershell, the certificate should also be installed via powershell and if generated with Microsoft IIS so it should be installed, this was new to me but non the less I followed his advice and had a new CSR generated with IIS.

The whole certificate install process is pretty simple task as I had done a google search prior to starting on this whole process which I thought would be done in a couple of minutes and since I had trouble following the instructions on Thawte's website I opted to instead install the certificate with help from their support staff through live chat , which made the process really easy... I later noticed that Go-daddy and other vendors had much easier instructions one could follow for the whole certificate installation process. However,with the support staff below are the steps we followed and were able to create a new CSR and also install a new Certificate on the server.

1. Create a temporary website in IIS
2. Generate a CSR using the wizard on the temporary website
3. Send the CSR to the particular vendor you wish to buy the certificate from.
4. Once you receive the Certificate install it on the temporary website in IIS.
5. Then install the intermediate Certificates using Microsoft Management Console (MMC). In the Intermediate Certification Authorities under certificates import the different certificates you wish to install.
6. Then go back to IIS on the default website you wish to use the certificate on, using the wizard replace the current certificate with the new you got (Installed on the temp site). Please view the details just to be sure its the right certificate.
7. Restart IIS on the server, this will shut down the website temporarily.
8. Then depending on the particular vendor of the certificate you could check your website and see if the annoying message has left and also if you have the https:// section of your website in green!

I finally had the thawte certificate installed and working fine although the installation guide on their website is really annoying, the live chat support staff are a blessing!