The O-Factor

Our company doesn’t have many mobile users (people with laptops), and due to the sensitive nature of the business we’re in, and in an effort to mitigate the potential for data leakage, we’re gradually making the switch to using Citrix technology.

Once we’re logged into our Citrix gateway, we can launch a published application such as Remote Desktop Connection to then RDP into our workstations at the office.

While the process for connecting to Citrix is straightforward for both Windows and Mac clients, there are some additional steps that Mac users must take in order to successfully connect to the company network.

While the process is relatively straightforward and is simply a matter of installing the ICA client, authenticating to the access gateway, and running RDP, Mac users will have to first manually import the CA root certificate from where the server’s SSL certificate originated into the ICA client. Otherwise, you’ll get an Error 183 from the ICA Client indicating that:

SSL Error 0: You have chosen not to trust “”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate.
Error Number: 183

Here are some general steps that need to taken in order for the connection to be successful:

1. When accessing the access gateway, an warning appears stating that the certificate cannot be trust. Go ahead and trust (accept) the security certificate.
2. Open Keychain Access, and double-click the certificate of the access gateway to inspect it.
3. Scroll towards the bottom and look for a hyperlink to the CA’s certificate with a .crt extension.
4. The certificate will then be your downloads folder.
5. Make sure the certificate has a .crt extension. If not, change it to this extension.
6. Go to the Applications folder and find the folder for the Citrix ICA Client.
7. Inside this folder, create another folder called “keystore”.
8. Inside the keystore folder, make another one called “cacerts”
9. Move the certificate file that was downloaded into the “cacerts” subdirectory.
10. Close your browser, restart it, log-in to the access gateway and attempt to access one of the published applications.
11. The ICA client will start and should present the chosen application without any errors.

Let me know how your Citrix experiences on the Mac are. I admit, it’s kind of weird to see a Windows-type window overlayed on top of OS X.

Steveo thought I should write something as I haven’t updated the blog recently.

A few weeks ago, I started a new job working for a Hedge Fund in the Financial District and it’s been a VERY different change of pace in terms of the commitment made to the position and the hours worked. I’ve always enjoyed new challenges, and this has definitely been one of them.

The hours are long, demanding, and has required something of me that I was never really concerned about before.

And that is the need to develop a routine, or regularity in one’s life.

Throughout high school and college (and even prior to high school), I never followed a routine, which in retrospect, probably did more harm than it did good. Sleeping in a lot Freshman year of college probably wasn’t the best way to enjoy the college experience.

But so far, the job’s been great and I’ve learned a lot in 2 weeks. It boggles my mind to see Quants and traders looking at 8 LCD screens with numbers blinking green and red in real-time, while continuously looking at graphs with their multiple trend lines. Adding to that is watching like a hawk the latest news and developments on their Bloomberg terminal (a $1,500/mo. service PER user!) to plot their trading strategies.

While the day starts at 7a and ends at 6 or 7p, the fast-paced nature of the business makes time go really fast, which is definitely a good thing.

I laughed my ass off after seeing this one!

But after watching some of his films, reading his bio, and watching YouTube, I can say unequivocally that I’m a fan of Jet Li, who will be co-starring with Jackie Chan in The Forbidden Kingdom, debuting tonight.

Here’s a head’s up for anyone using signatures in Safari.

If you have a signature that’s automatically appended to your e-mail defined in Gmail, and try to either change or remove it completely, the changes won’t be saved. This can be tested by creating a new e-mail and noticing that the signature in the blank e-mail hasn’t changed at all. This was observed in Safari 3.1.1.

Alternatively, Firefox appears to handle the signature changes correctly.

1 PM at the Wall Street Borders (100 Broadway).

Just read this on LRC. Details can be found here.

I’ll admit, I like reading up on Operating Systems, even if they don’t exist anymore. What a gold mine YouTube is! Was I surprised to find some vintage video of BeOS and the company’s official demo. It’s not as good as Jobs’ NeXTSTEP videos, but they’re up there. You even get to see Jean Louis Gassée in the video and an invitation to visit Be for public demos every Friday afternoon.

After watching the videos, I couldn’t help myself and downloaded a VM of Haiku, a BeOS derivative. It was pretty cool and came in at a lean 250MB.

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This post is dedicated to my old Santa Rosa MacBook Pro and its serial number. It will forever be crawled and indexed by the search engines. Perhaps someday, someone will be curious enough to type the serial number into Google and see if it turns up anything. I’m actually betting that it happens.

Edit: You know, this is probably the only time that I’ve ever been melancholy with getting a new Mac. And it’s only because I should have never had to get another one in the first place had a I been more vigilant with my stuff. Oh well, you live, you learn.

Not a good day. My backpack got stolen while I was having lunch at Chipotle across from the Arts & Humanities Library on 42nd St. And yes, my MacBook Pro was in there too along with my Jawbone headset, and some gift cards that I didn’t get a chance to use from my birthday last year.

It was sitting on the floor directly to my left, so I wasn’t able to feel the bag being there or look at it while eating at the highchair table. I didn’t realize it until I threw out the trash, which was directly behind me, and than reality struck.

As is the typical thing to do, I ran outside frantically running back and forth, while fooling myself into thinking that I’d actually be able see someone walk off with it. I even tried to think like the thief and ran across the street to Bryant Park while almost getting ran over by an Escalade. My thinking was, the thief was probably curious as to what was inside the bag, and wanted to quickly know what was inside it. I was hoping that maybe he just took the laptop and ditched everything else, including the bag, but no luck.

With no other computer, I reluctantly headed up to the 5th Avenue Apple Store and after some thought, picked up another MacBook Pro. I had the high-end previous generation model and found that new, lower-end model matched 99% of the specs. Put 2k on the Amex and out the door I went.

Luckily, I have a backup of everything from a few days so there will be no need to start from scratch. But still, not a good day at all when I thought it was going to be.

Before leaving, I had even thought about just leaving the laptop at home because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be in Manhattan for.

I should’ve paid the extra $100 on my renters insurance to cover mobile equipment theft. But I’m going to call the insurance company tomorrow and get that additional coverage.

Hopefully, the restore will go well and everything should be up and running by tomorrow.

With no bag for the computer, I also picked up an Incase sleeve with a shoulder strap and a Marware protection pack as I had it my old computer.

So the moral of the story is that if you love your laptop and take it with you wherever you go:

1. Get insurance.
2. Perform regular, frequent backups.
3. Keep your eye on it at all times.

There’s nothing unique about Flash-based video these days as YouTube was the first site to eliminate all the video plug-in headache by letting the Flash plug-in run all the video for the end-user. And newer sites such as justin.tv are pretty cool too because they’re leveraging Flash’s interactive A/V capabilities to run a broadcast.

bloggingheads.tv may seem to some as just another interactive Flash video site, but I think it’s wickedly brilliant. Putting names to faces, and going tit for tat on a variety of issues all on video just adds an amazing layer of realism that simply can’t be extracted from frisked e-mails or message board postings.

Sidenote of the day: If you’re a fan of Unsolved Mysteries, you’ll love the fact that there’s a bunch of them available on YouTube. Man, what a creepy show!

Now Sen. Mike Gravel has some very admirable positions, but I’m still confused as to why he decided to join the Libertarian Party. Aside from issues of war and peace, I can’t see how the rest of his positions are compatible with the party. It’s safe to say that he’s a statist to some degree.