Moving from Microsoft Office Live Web Hosting (1)

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) Frequently in the past I have written about tuning of Microsoft Office Live web hosting. This was a generous flexible tool offered by Microsoft essentially for small businesses to help them to have a decent hassle free presence on the web without cornering them to buy anything from the host. You even could remove that small font link and logo of the host at the bottom of created page. (I never removed it, as I believed that should be promoted; when one gets one should give.) Its editor was the best in terms of robustness and flexibility and design among any on-line editor I ever had experienced. One could bypass that editor by creating his own page and launching them from the "Documents Gallery" of his own. Not that you could produce one of those aggressive websites with different capabilities that is possible to run from a full blooded paid hosting, still enough to learn and keep the fire aflame. Besides tens of thousands of small businesses using that facility for income, there were ten folds of them used the hosting for personal non-profit applications such as educators, charities, different churches of different religions, artists, writers, political protagonists, anybody who wanted to have a voice on the Internet or had something to offer free to the public. This was a great altruism.  And one knows that altruism pays. When a computer enterprise promotes free presence of public on the Internet, at the end there'll be a queue of enterprises in some indirect manner in front of its own sales department. But should not forget the lesson of Sun Microsystem. Sun was a computer "Robin Hood," earning from big enterprises but lavishly spending for any geek (perhaps I mean cool) ideas around. It was a funky cafe, in the eyes of nerds to come and test their tastes. I frequently had received free Amazon vouchers, tee shirts, mugs from Sun just for writing a couple of lines as a comment, or a good bug report, without ever asking. There were supports for hundreds of projects without obligation to finish them. Free software, tools, and tutorials were available in every corner of Sun Microsystem, in galore. Return was good as Sun was enjoying having seven billion dollars just in cash in its backroom safe. But when enterprises started to fall, that cash was spent in few months without Sun having a cushion from backbone of more population. Oracle took over the Sun and accepted prudently many of the legacies of Sun Microsystem. Oracle has not any bad reputation as an aggressively business oriented company. Even I do not believe, in spite of many contrary ideas, that such a bad reputation exists for Microsoft. Essentially IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Intel, Google, and many other similar companies are based on a founder and a population of employees mostly from the nerds with deep tendency to fulfill a mathematical curiosity than earning the money. Still, I believe, Oracle should keep the name of Sun in a similar way to that of Ohm, Siemens, Volt, Watt, Ampere, and such reputable names. I fell a bit far from my original discourse. Now, Office Live is being shut down. At first, I was somehow bitter, hearing the news. However, now I understand why Microsoft has made such a decision. It was not possible for Microsoft, especially in present financial situation of the world to maintain an activity which is not part of its expertise and statement of mission. Add the fact that most of those customers are not deeply engaged in design of a website. Microsoft has offered a paid hosting as part of the Office 365 on-line suite. That Office 365 is a good and well designed product seamlessly coordinated with Microsoft Office, but its web hosting is far weaker and more basic than Office Live and for one who needs only web hosting is useless and expensive. Therefore, many of OL users are decided to move. Thank you Microsoft for hosting my site. I learned many things from you and received support of a paying customer, but now it is time to adventure in open space and stand on our own feet. How can we move? It is subject of the next post.
(Update : See also this post Web Hosting at Your Home (Revisited) )

W3C Validator Compliancy for Microsoft Office Live Web-Hosting and Facebook Buttons (2)

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) I needed to add few words to my previous comment when I was experiencing for compliance of my website. First, I said that I use Microsoft Office Live (OL) templates. That is a good practice. Design of OL templates are done by the very competitive professionals in the industry. Thus should not be retired easily. An example is implementing the idea of  "zones." That makes doing things easier. Or the site maps so neatly designed. Or the OL visitor reporting Java Scripts. I keep as much of them as possible. I use all the facilities provided by OL such as their css and js files. I learn lot from them. Still, if I would not create my web, based on pages loaded from Document Gallery and I had limited myself in using pages created solely by the Microsoft Office Live, then I could not use a panoply of editors and other tools that I have on my ease in my local computer, without being have to sign in and open the OL console. I create my page, on my own desktop, by adding an "_AA" to the beginning of the file name. That takes it to the top of the list of OL Document Gallery and when I delete it to put a new one I do not delete a working page inadvertently. I test the page and debug it completely. I add the validator codes to it to be able to test it frequently. W3C validator also helps in finding and removing errors of the page. I delete and upload again and again and when I become sure about all aspects of the page then I add its file name to the directory of my web site. I change its name to whatever it should be, and then I upload it. On the other hand I have implemented an Apache web server on an old laptop at my own home. That mirrors my OL website and is connected to the Internet by a DynDs free domain name (perhaps later I can convey my observations about how to set up such a facility at home). My OL site pages, both root and Document Gallery pages have dependencies to different css and js and asp files from Microsoft hosting servers. On my toy home server I try to reduce all those dependencies to nill. I do it in a very neat manner with a system analyst approach. For example I do not create new dependencies to new providers, say free cgi hosting or other freely offered servers or thirty days trials. It has one root page, and a document gallery (Documents folder), and an image gallery (Images folder). I can add my own css, js, cgi, name space, and experience with ajax. I try to make it robust and be validated with strict standards. It is said that web designers should not have qualm with W3C validator or other strict QC criteria, and it is a geek obsession to meet such strictness. As an example you frequently hear that an average Amazon page has 17000 error and warnings through a W3C validator gauging. This is not a relief. Computer is the product of very well organised people specially pioneer system analysts. If during the design we follow few easy steps then the entire Internet becomes more smooth and cheaper to experience for those who are only users and actually pay back the expenses of the producers and have not time for technical difficulties that might be the result of relegating the standards. After all, I backup my entire site on a DVD.  In this way my web site will be completely migrate-able in a snap of finger. It is like a duffel bag ready to be deployed anywhere. My next goal is to validate this blog spot.

W3C Validator Compliancy for Microsoft Office Live Web-Hosting and Facebook Buttons (1)

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) I already had some of my experiences with Microsoft Office Live (OL) web hosting, which came useful for some of the visitors of this Blog. Recently my daughter had a look at my website with her FireFox browser and noticed that some pages of my site was not much readable from non-IE browsers. That gave me the idea that I should make my site standard based on the WWW authority criteria. I already had used the generic ASP template of OL, but with the loading of my designed pages from Documents Gallery of OL rather than the root directory. That makes the custom design more practicable. I can keep a couple of pages or even only one page in the root and the remaining pages of my site in the OL Document Gallery. (Even if you had an Apache server as your own personal host you would do that. This makes migration and other tweaking easier, too) Yet, using a note-pad for design meant no way of controlling it for the errors and we know that browsers are robust entities that interpret and run any design without much taking heed to errors or informing us about them. To control the errors I needed an intelligent IDE for design of pages. There are few free IDE's available, including Microsoft Visual Express Studio (now version 2010). I preferred to use NetBeans (NB) IDE latest version. Both IDE's have intelligent interfaces with capability to suggesting a list of possible codes and showing errors. NB shows mis-spelled words too. Hence, I opened one of pages with that IDE. Lo, and behold! All the lines were underlined with red as the error laden codes. Tables were not nested properly, tags were not furbished with correct way of tag-ending. Tags were used in wrong positions. Some tags and attributes were deprecated. A mixture of capital and lower cases were used for some tags. But the most important I found was the "Standard" that you declare at the top of the document from the W3C source. Some people have got the wrong idea that if you declare, say, two standards as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, it is helpful for interpretation by browsers. They say if you forget "/" at some tags like <img> then the page complies. This is not a correct way of practice. Hence, I decided to select one that looks easier to follow. I typed <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >. I knew that there is no compromise on capitalisation. For example, if I write "/tr/" in place of "/TR/" an error occurs. That forces me to change <html> beginning tag to <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">. Having typed that, all the error points changed and their number reduced but new errors came out. <br> without ending "/" is not allowed. I used the "Edit -> Replace" command of IDE to do that job for me. Another simple change is that no tag or attribute or its value is allowed to remain capital. You cannot type <TABLE> or FONT-SIZE. They should be <table> and font-size, respectively.  The funny thing happened when I used "Replace" command to change table row tags from capital "TR" to lower case "tr" Suddenly number of errors rocketed up. Yes, the before mentioned file path, "/TR/" in the topmost declaration for using transitional XHTML also had been changed to lower case. Using the "Replace" command should be acompanied with caution to prevent damaging capitalisation of the content of the page already written. If I want to change all the paragraph tags and their end tags from capital to lower case with one command and with no qualm about the content I should say (to include end tags, as well) replace "P>" with "p> " Then no capital P at the beginning of a sentence will be changed. (Peter will not come as peter!) I changed all the deprecated attributes to correct ones, as well, without being worried about any mistake. I changed obsolete "name" attributes to "id" attributes. I followed the rules of W3C in using the correct literal adjectives instead of using those which looks correct to a coder's mind. For instance nowrap="true" should be replaced by nowrap="nowrap". Align attribute for image tag is "middle" but in other places it should be "center". I could not use <li> </li>without nesting them in <ul></ul>. I used the automatic intelligent tabs of the IDE to gradually correct my tables nesting structures by checking the returning columns of line-feeds until each table and each row and each column of it become closed at the right position symmetric to opening tags. Once you put the "id" of a data column in a row of a table it is not necessary to repeat it in other columns (one of the common errors of my OL template). I continued until my file opened in the NB IDE didn't show any error or any warning. I deleted the old file from the Microsoft Office Live Document Gallery and uploaded the new file then I went to W3C site and checked my newly uploaded page. Congratulation page appeared for my web page. Now, gradually I am refurbing other pages. There are some tag extensions out there not in coordination with W3C bodies. One of them is the <fb:like> for facebook's "Like" button. or tags for embedding objects. If your page fails only for using tags like that but in terms of everything else is correct, use the W3C emblem. The visitor can check and appreciate that you have been meticulous in your design, but only failed for a widely used tag not yet been standardised. At the same time time put pressure on developers of Facebook, Creative Commons and some other important web entities to standardize their codes with neater extensions by offering them through RFC or other means to decision making committees of www. (I haven't checked, yet, if I can nest them as CDATA inside a script tag as work-around to pass the validator check, but I'll do and inform you later.)
Update 17/Feb/11: I worked it out now.
Change your <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> tag to <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb=http://developers.facebook.com/schema/> to accommodate for Facebook extension. Then at the place that you wanted to plug the Facebook button in add the following Java Script:

Change attributes according to your requirements and taste. Please note that CDATA is commented out. My "Downloads Page" with "Facebook" button, now have passed the W3C Validator check successfully.

Dysprosium: Messiah's "Codes For Us" PDF Software Package Under Way

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) This is an obsolete content. Some updates can be find at the bottom of this post. Now I have fulfilled part of my promises for a free PDF software suite, without overly bloating it. Under different stress tests I have done , there appears a couple of issues. For example, some rare happening exception would not report them in a relevant dialogue. As the software, in contrast to some other software, keeps the original file untouched, these exceptions have not a damaging edge. But, in principle, they should be reported. Other important issue is when PDF files exceed a size of 0.5 GB. One needs to have enough resources in their computer to handle them. All other applications should be closed. I have tested merging of two 450 MB files with 4GB of RAM and effective CPU speed of 4.5 GHz that takes almost (less than) ten minutes. We could push the software to the limit of PDF standard of total merged file of 3.6 GB (700,000 simple pages). I used both Windows 7, 64bits and the current Windows 8/8.1, 64bits. I had a quad core CPU 2.5GHz clock speed. I put 4GB out of 8GB of physical memory available for Java (this is only used only a couple of minutes when you are using large PDF files; it does not reduce your memory at other times). Hence, if  an exception of "failed map" were thrown by very large files, it is likely due to lack of hardware resources thrown by native operating system, rather than my PDF merging software. We are on the course to be assured on those targets in first release candidate of  "Dysprosium" in this current year. There are buttons in different places disabled for now. Their functions are under construction. Software will always remain free. "Free as we have in freedom and as we have in free beer;" quote from now a lost link on the Internet. We humbly become happy if we understand our work is of some benefit to other people and they are using it in ease. We have this powerful means and the related tools of communication thanks to millions of hours of free works offered by hard-working individuals all around the world.
(Dysprosium is registered to be used as the name for Messiah's "Codes For Us" PDF Software Package.)

Update, May 2016 : Dysprosium (Dolce edition) has been released (please click) based on iText from mid of April 2014 and smoothly on a nightly basis added more features and now I have deprecated many scattered pieces of PDF utilities I already released. There are so many features that I cannot write complete instructions for all of them. From other previous pieces only Signature manager has been remained to be integrated. I sorted out PDF viewer problem somehow satisfactorily.)

(updated : 26/May/2016) I have had over 60,000 downloads from 187 countries. All around the world, only 1 country in South America (French Guiana) and 1 countries in Asia (Democratic North Korea ) have not used Dysprosium Software, yet. The remaing countries not downloaded to this date (less than 10) are from the central Africa and perhaps some very small Island countries.

(Deprecated Paragraph : People contacted me regarding not fulfilling promises in creating an integrated software for different pieces of dysprosium in on single -and perhaps bloated- suite. My friend Grant Hardy is too busy with electronics and doesn't come around. Phoenix  is also has committed himself in different web developments. I have been left alone and I am too old and feeble, but have progressed in some areas. For example, I have created a Complex Polynomial Calculator; download here. I postpone my promises towards end of this year. We had some joy with majority of algorithms in recovering lost owner's passwords. Well, I succeeded in a relatively fast password cracker but won't publish it. People who have lost their password might like to use other things available out there. We fulfilled all my promise at this date 26/May/2016.)

Encryption Tablet

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) Now the encryption tablet (version SB3) is out. You can use it to create a keystore and public private keys with different key algorithms, key sizes and signature algorithms. Also it is possible to create a secrete key from the keystore. Utility can be used to create PFX (PKCS#12) files from the available public-private key pair files. You might use the software for creation  PEM files from the PFX file, or convert the PEM file to a DER file. Other features of the software includes printing the Finger Print of the certificate to a text file (.fp file can be read with a notepad). You can create a request CSR file for getting a certificate and then importing the certificate to the keystore. Another desireable feature is "JAR Signing," using any of the certificates you might have imported or created in the key-store with the known alias and passwords of yours. There are other features, as well, to utilize. At this date (09/March/14) help page is mostly ready, but under development. Please download from here (deprecated).

(09/March/2014: reported issue resolved. Although it is decades we have the poor "DOS" behind, still it shows itself here and there. Yes, it is recommended to install in a folder with no blank character in its name; perhaps, not even in parent path. Its own default unzipped folder is the best.)

(09/March/14: Now a visual help page is available here for converting PFX to PEM and to DER format part of the (deprecated version) software. Please have a look for further assistance.)

(09/March/14: An improved version  uploaded this weekend. All bugs fixed; very stable. Interface as shown below. Visual help click here.)

 

 

 

How to Digitally Sign a PDF Document?

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) Now this basic signature manager is ready in Codes For Us PDF Merging utility, R6 series (here). It is yet far from being complete. You notice that to use it one needs a PFX (PKCS#12) to have ready somewhere either self-signed or CA signed. I have a humble tweak GUI to create that PFX at home using self signature, available in download area. My 'uber-geek' friend Grant Hardy (who is a microwave engineer and has implemented Messiah's Calendar [he sleeps on a Smith's Chart at nights]) has promised to give a hand to meet our promised milestone around the Christmas, for further features to be accompanied (e.g., a password remover is ready now done by him, a password unlocker he is also interested as a matter of algorithm tests, not by using a brute force). With this Signature Manager one cannot put her seal emblem on the digital signature. It is just a standard digital signature of PDF documents as it is defined. The Water-mark utility provided by Codes For Us might meet that demand, if one is interested. But people are interested to have emblem next, or as under-layer to their digital signature, too. Hence, I try to add that feature, later to the manager (04/Jan/11: Now the feature is added)). I hope you enjoy this version for now.
Update 04/January/11: Now notarize PDF with external timestamp, seal emblem under-layer, and few other features are included. Codes For Us PDF Merging utility, 01/March/11, beta_6_7 (here).
Update 05/March/11: Now with a visual help page (here).

How to Make a PFX (PKCS #12) File for Encryption for Free?

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) There are many situations that you use Java to create public and private keys to be exported as PCKS#12 encryption file for certification. (Please also read "How to Digitally Sign a PDF Document?" here.) Perhaps, there are commercial software for this end. An Internet search for this subject shows that doing that in free open software normally is not easy without much tweaking. This package of mine (Download here) is a self sufficient (and tweak-able, for interested people) light package for that. We know that PFX format for certification is the only format that supports export of a private key together with its  certification. This make this format more important than the other formats.  One can create public and private keys using Java Key Tools, but exporting them in form of PFX file format is not an easy job to do, if you like to do it free. I gathered available free tools to do it on Windows 7 (and other Windows down to Win98), without need to install anything else and in a self sufficient way. Regretfully, I have many professionally-hobbyist software on my computer and have not much clue that if some of them is being evoked (should be some Microsoft Visual C++ library, look into the C drive Windows folder and then in the "winsxs" for an x86_microsoft.vc90 something files) in handling my small package. I included a copy of "Redistribution," in case you need, but I believe the interested people already should have those libraries somewhere in their windows. If you received the message as, "Windows cannot do the specified job." Or something like that then you need to install that Redistribution from the "Software" folder available inside my package. The arranged package should be able to work with all the Windows(R) operating systems after Win98. To utilize the command line version of my software, you need to unpack the zipped folder (I use the open source free 7-zip utility as the best to pack and unpack zipped file folders). In the unzipped folder there is a batch file "pfx_util.bat". You can double click on this file and then follow instructions. There is also a help text file for further clarification. Please go here to download and for visual help here (18/November/10) Simple GUI version of the software is available now. You can use either of command line version or GUI "jar" file version (an improved version is on the way) (11/01/11: Now it is out).
Sorry! If you have downloaded before mid-night (00 GMT) 06/April/11, please download again. An important user reported issue fixed.
New! (06/April/11) Simple Encryption Tablet, very stable, very simple to use,  here. For a step-by-step Visual "How to?" here
New! (15/March/11) Command line version improved, here. For a Visual "How to?" here
Please Note! Having Java Key Store is not necessary. These are working independent.

To make a PFX simply use "File Format" tab left panel: get your private and public keys enter a password of your choice for the created PFX and click on the build button.

If you like, you may use Java Key Store to produce public/private key pairs.