Spiffy Webapps From 37signals

I suppose these would be “Web 2.0″ apps?  Either way, the webapps from 37signals seem pretty cool.

They currently offer:

• Basecamp - Project management and collaboration - Collaborate with your team and clients. Schedules, tasks, files, messages, and more.
• Highrise - Online contact manager and simple CRM - Keep track of who your business talks to, what was said, and what to do next.
• Backpack - Intranet, group calendar, organizer – Share info, schedules, documents, and to-dos across your company, group, or organization.
• Campfire - Real-time group chat for business - It’s like instant messaging, but optimized for groups. Especially great for remote teams.

All are online webapps with lots of AJAX and other goodies … subscription model with various levels.

Campfire looks interesting, but we are currently using Skype until we get our Jabber server happy again.

Backpack looks like something we could use, especially since our entire team is diversely located … well, *I’m* diversely located, and the rest are in one region.  :)

Highrise may be of interest to our Sales folks … I’m having them look at it now.

Basecamp could be very useful if we fire off some of the larger development projects we are considering.

In any case, the company has been around for a bit and seems to be improving their offerings, so keep an eye on them.

DISCLAIMER:  I have *no* affiliation with 37signals, and I’m not even a customer at this time, but it does look interesting and worth further investigation and discussion within our team.

How to make fetchmail happy with the server’s SSL cert

Have you tried running fetchmail against a POP3S server and gotten these messages over and over?

fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to get local issuer certificate
fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: certificate not trusted
fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to verify the first certificate

Congratulations, you are not alone. Looking around, I see a lot of people having this problem and the answers are usually not as clear as they could be. Let’s see if I can make it less clear, too.

1. Make sure a recent openssl is installed and your fetchmail is linked against it, etc, etc
2. Run “openssl s_client -connect pop.gmail.com:995 -showcerts” (hit enter after the output to exit)
   Cut and paste the stuff between the “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” and “—–END CERTIFICATE—–” lines (inclusive) into a file pop.gmail.com.pem
   Review the rest of the output for the “issuer=” line (in this case, “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority”)
   Go here and grab the “Base-64 encoded X.509″ version of the cert for “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority”
   Rename that file with a “.pem” extension
   Make a certs directory somewhere (i.e. /usr/local/etc/fetchmail/certs) and put both files in it
   Run “c_rehash /usr/local/etc/fetchmail/certs”
   Add this to your .fetchmailrc under the “poll” section for this server: “sslcertck sslcertpath /usr/local/etc/fetchmail/certs”
   Run “fetchmail -v” and see if the warnings are gone!

   You will need to do this for each server that you poll with SSL (both the server and its issuer’s PEM).

On Safari

OK, I don’t know what’s going on with Firefox (currently at 2.0.0.4), but it has been sucking ass lately … and I’m a huge Mozilla fan.

Symptoms include:

• Rapidly climbing to >1GB RAM utilization
• Sucking up a full CPU … sometimes randomly
• Generally hanging all the time

I’m hoping it’s something to do with the Web 2.0 type stuff that I’m encountering more sites using (namely Google, Google Apps, etc) … that combined with some good old fashioned memory leaks in the browser and the add-ons I use.

A lot of the sites now have auto-refresh, plus those that don’t that I need refreshing, I do through Tab Mix Plus. I’m sure all of this reloading of pages is amplifying the memory leaks.

In conversation, aside from “Get a Mac”, someone commented that I should give Apple’s Safari Beta 3 for Windoze a shot … so I just grabbed and installed it.

So far, it appears to be a real Windoze app because now I must reboot. See you later!