Last weekend I made a quick trip to NYC and back. Megan J. is going to Cardoza School of Law and needed her stuff hauled out. Being the nice guy that I am — and not one to turn down a free travel opportunity, I volunteered my time and parents van (thanks mom and dad) to make the trip.

The van got packed, as we hummed the Tetris song, Wednesday night. Thurday morning Larry, Nicole, Megan, and I departed at the official “crack of dawn” - 5:15. With a stop at IHOP where they were out of Belgium waffle mix and we hit the road by a hair past 6:00am.

Out trip out was pretty uneventful. After passing about 200 BMW bikes heading west I I saw one broken down. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to help a fellow biker and curious where they were all going, I made a U-Turn. We got it going with a McDonalds cup and Duct Tape… and I found they were heading for Lima where 5-6K bikes were expected.

The trip was filled with “are we there yet?” and a “quality” audio book.

Driving into Manhattan wasn’t too bad. Getting a little off course in Jersey City allowed for some site seeing. Shooting under the river in the Holland Tunnel and navigating around the island had as at her King and 6’th Ave apartment by 8:00. Plenty of time to unload. Did I mention it is on the third floor(41 steps?) We got some good Ben and Jerry’s to reward ourselves for all the hard work and chilled in Washington Square until being informed the park closed at 12:00.

Friday and Saturday had us hitting the sites in NYC: Central Park, Museum of Natural History, Staten Island, Times Square, and the WTC site. I don’t have time to detail all and you can probably find better pictures than I took. Some of my pics are over here.

Central Park was really cool. Nestled in the middle of the busy city was a park with real trees and people enjoying the beautify day. There was a DJ mixing Techno, and drum circle, and a band playing Salsa with couples dancing. A short walk out of the park had us back into a sea of humanity in Times Square.

All in all it was a great trip. It was a lot of fun hanging out with friends. Larry and I did a good job of talking about things we considered “interesting” and the girls did a good job making fun of us. Now, to find time to head back for a second visit…

Just for fun, I just made a list of all the states I have been to in the last 13 months: North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Caroline, Georgia, W. Virginia, Virginia
Indiana, Ohio, Ontario, Quebec, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, California.

My friend Topher just pointed out yet another new service from Google. This is an adaptation of google maps but for the moon. They claim

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor.

I think they just know something we all don’t. I suspect google is going to roll out a transportaion service to the moon. This service will make it easier to find your way around once you get there.

oh, Please make sure to zoom in all the way.

Thursday night ride,
originally uploaded by endofnow.

Good group of bikes

***Warning Geek Post ahead. Primarily intended for Google and the other poor souls who are going through the (cough) I just went through!***

I need to have SSL for both IIS and Tomcat on the same physical server but running on different ports. Two techs at Thawte said it couldn’t be done without purchasing a separate certificate. I disagreed. Google and random shots in the dark got it working.

How to:

Export Cert from IIS as a .pfx file

Add the Certificate Snap-in

1. On the computer containing the certificate you want, select Start, then Run, and then type mmc to open the Microsoft Management Console.
2. On the Console menu, click Add/Remove Snap-in…
3. Click Add button. This will open the Add Standalone Snap-in box.
4. Select Certificates from the list and then click Add.
5. Select Computer account and then click Next.
6. Select Local computer and click Finished.
7.Click Close on the Add Standalone Snap-in box.
8.Click OK on the Add/Remove Snap-in box.

Export the certificate from IIS 5

1. Under the Tree tab in the Microsoft Management Console expand Certificates.
2. Select the Personal folder and then the certificate you want to export.
3. On the Action menu select All Tasks>Export…
4. Click Next.
5. Select Yes, export the private key and click Next.
6. Select Personal Information Exchange – PKCS #12 (.PFX) and then click Next.
7. Enter the password you used when you created the certificate and click Next. This will create a .pfx file.

Point Tomcat to the new Cert

1. Open %TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml in XML or text editor
2. Uncomment the SSL Connector is not already.
3. Add the folloing attributes:
keystoreFile=”c:\PATH TO CERT.pfx” keystorePass=”PASSWORD HERE”
keystoreType=”PKCS12″

Restart Tomcat. Point browser to https://localhost:8443. If it doesn’t load look in the log files to identify the problem.

This solution is simple. I don’t know why it isn’t better documented. Most of the resources I found had me using OpenSSL to convert the cert to .p12 or .pem files. I couldn’t get those working. I started working backwards and just tried using the .pfx file and it worked. Make note the type attribute is keystoreType. One piece of documentation called it something else. That didn’t help my situation. This works with Tomcat 5.5.9. I don’t know about other versions.