I was trying to renew my Thawte Personal Email Certificates this week because they expire very soon. Unfortunately I was having zero luck requesting a new certificate via Thawte's certificate management website.

Whenever I reached the stage to choose a Cryptographic Service Provider, the VBScript that is supposed to fill the drop down list would fail with a generic "424 Object required" error and the process would go no further. I tried several PCs but all my machines at home and work are Vista with IE7 and Thawte's list of supported software does not list Vista or IE7.

I downloaded the Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC image from Microsoft and was able to complete the certificate renewal then export the private key to a file and move it out of the virtual machine and install it on my workstation.

I tried IE7 on Vista 32-bit, 64-bit, non-admin, Administrator, Protected Mode On and Off, and tried adding the Thawte website to my trusted sites. None of this helped. I eventually decided to download the IE7 version of the App Compat VPC to see if Vista or IE7 is the problem.

I found that apart from a security warning, which helped me to track down the ultimate reason, the Thawte website works fine with IE7 on Windows XP. The reason is that the XEnroll.dll certificate enrolment control was replaced in Vista for a more secure CertEnroll.dll.

As usual, I'm disgusted that it has been eleven months since Vista went RTM and Thawte still haven't addressed this issue. It's even worse because the Betas and Release Candidates of Vista were around for even longer and these distributions exist so third party software and service providers can test their systems to be ready soon after launch.

In October I started thinking about organising a dinner to bring Adelaide's .NET developers together. I'd never done something like that before and I wasn't sure about the best way to manage it.

Luckily, I remembered meeting Jonathon Kresner at the Wagga Wagga Code Camp in March. Jon had told me he was developing a website in .NET to organise parties. I decided to send him an email and ask how it was going.

Coincidentally, Jon had reached the final beta testing stages of his website, Preparty.com, and when I explained that I was interested in organising a dinner for .NET developers, he was kind enough to grant me a login if I don't mind assisting with the testing.

Preparty.com basically provides you with everything you need to organise a party of any kind (dinner, music gig, or wedding reception) from beginning to end with a smooth user experience.

You start by finding an appropriate venue by choosing from many popular places already registered on Preparty, or by entering details of your own. You then enter the names and email addresses of all your guests and complete the details of your event such as date and time, theme, and other relevant information.

Preparty then handles the creation and sending of e-Invitations with all the details and even a map of the venue location and follows up with a place to track RSVPs, You can even organise entertainment via Preparty and send SMS reminders to your guests as the event draws near. And when it's all over you can invite guests to upload photos from the event to create a slideshow.

I exercised almost all the features of the Preparty website and only found a couple of usability issues that Jon corrected very quickly. For a website supposedly in beta testing, it was very stable.

Preparty is free to register but charges a very affordable rate to purchase email and sms credits. I know now that the website is out of beta and has been released to the public I'll be looking to Preparty.com to organise all my future events and I recommend you take a look too.

Frustrated by the lack of up-to-date data for my TomTom, I started poking around the web for various sorts of local information. I discovered that the Department for Transport has a page listing current roadwork sites. Unfortunately, it is only available in HTML form.

Upon inspecting the source however, I discovered patterns in the data suggesting it is automatically driven from by internal database. I asked myself, what is the quickest, easiest, most hackish way I can suck this information into a map? The answer was Google Mapplets.

The result, is an XML Google Gadget that is hosted on my website but runs in the context of the Google Maps site and screen scrapes the DTEI's HTML using JavaScript. Worse Than Failure would be proud.

If you'd like to try it yourself, the gadget xml file is here. You should be able to open Google Maps, click the My Maps tab and choose Add Content where you will be taken to the directory. Choose the Add By URL and paste the link to my xml file.

I might tidy up the abomination that is my JavaScript code if anyone cares enough and submit the gadget to the public Google directory. I am also considering implementing the gadget in Popfly but I am waiting on being able to sign-in to that site.

A few months ago I upgraded this web site from the DasBlog 1.8 installed by my ISP to the latest version at the time, 1.9.6. It was remarkably easy to merge my web.config and site.config files and upload all the new binaries.

Yesterday Scott Hanselman announced DasBlog 1.9.7 had been released. Last night I tried to upgrade again, following a very similar procedure as I did the last time. Being a point release, I expected even less effort and was happy to find that very little merging was required with the config files.

Unfortunately, once I had uploaded the new files to my site I found I could no longer log in. I refreshed the browser several times, edited and uploaded the siteSecurity.config file several times and tried the default file with the admin/admin credentials. Nothing would let me login and all I had was a SecurityFailure message in the event log.

This took an hour or so and I eventually gave up and completely restored the backup I made before attempting the upgrade. Guess I'll have to configure IIS locally and experiment until it works.

On a better note, Scott says this is the final release for ASP.NET 1.1 and another release due very soon will be completely ASP.NET 2.0 and support Medium Trust. I was annoyed last time I downloaded the source and discovered that I would need to install VS2003 to work with it but finally I'll be able to contribute to the project.

Gavin Joyce announced a few months ago that the DotNetKicks community website will be going open source. Gavin has since created a DotNetKicks project on Google Code with some placeholders and has asked for people interested in contributing to join. One thing that isn't clear is whether the engine will be open source for others to build their own sites or if all the updates will get deployed back to DotNetKicks.com.

Regardless, I already have one idea in mind. In a moment of complete clumsiness, while trying to quickly submit a post to DotNetKicks before going to bed, I associated the wrong Title and Description with the wrong Url. Unfortunately, even though I had submitted the item, I was unable to correct the Title or Description and I was unable to delete the submission altogether and start again. I unkicked the post back to zero kicks but that didn't help.

My suggestion therefore, is that the submitter of an article should be able to delete that submission. Perhaps, to be safe, it could be restricted to only allow deletion if no one else has kicked it.

Until then, I'll just have to live with looking stupid for my story on DotNetKicks which, strangely, someone other than me has kicked anyway.

I bought a LinkSys WAG54Gv2 ADSL wireless modem a couple of years ago. It had a good price and listed many features but I've suffered with unreliable WiFi since and eventually added a standalone access point to my home network.

The local broadband community has a lot of complaints about the LinkSys modem too and the original v1 wasn't any better. For a company advertised as "A Division of Cisco", I was hoping for much more and I wasn't the only one.

As a result I usually steer friends toward something like the D-Link DSL-G604T, a modem that I've installed many times with reliable results. Recently though, a close friend, finally moving from dial-up to broadband, purchased a LinkSys WAG54Gv3 against my advice. I guess the price, the Cisco brand association and the feature list were more convincing than my protests.

Last night I helped install the new modem and configure a Notebook, a Wii, and an iPaq (sounds like the beginning of a joke) to connect to it wirelessly. A fourth player, a wired HP desktop PC, was used to initially configure the modem and couldn't have been easier. WiFi however, as it turned out, actually was a joke.

On all three devices, IP addresses were not being issued by the modem if WEP encryption was enabled but WAP and also no-encryption were fine. The fact that I tried WEP first is entirely another blog post but can be summarised as such: better than no encryption, combined with MAC filter, LinkSys overheat with WAP, and minimal possible damage from an attack.

DHCP over WiFi has been a recurring issue in my experience and it is very disappointing. It is incredibly fundamental and there seems to be an amazing lack of thought put into getting this functionality right. The WAG54Gv3 is new to the market and doesn't have too much feedback yet, but so far it looks like it could be LinkSys' third strike.

I've said before that buying the more expensive product in the first place would probably solve all this messing around, but where should the line be drawn? An entry level Cisco 857 ADSL modem router will easily set you back AU$700, that's double the price of almost every other option.

Just a quick update today. I read in my ISP's newsletter about a new group promoting quality broadband in Australia, T4. It's good to see some big names behind the movement.

In Australia, I'm among the lucky minority with access to an ADSL2 Internet connection. While ADSL2 can potentially provide 24000Kbps downstream and 1000Kbps upstream, due to my line quality and the distance from the exchange I'm currently only getting 5568/864. However, I am paying $69.95 per month for the privilege and if I download more than 40gb my connection is slowed to 64Kbps for the remainder of the month. Compared to Scott Hanselman's guaranteed 15000Kbps/2000Kbps Internet connection for only US$50.00 per month my broadband is rather poor and from what I can gather Hanselman doesn't have a download limit.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I'm among the lucky minority. Many users only have access to ADSL1 1500/256 connections and pay more than I do. Even more users, including some of my company's clients, can't get any better than dial-up or 64Kbps ISDN connections. These connections are unbearable to use VPNs or Remote Desktop to perform upgrades or maintenance.

Admittedly the sparse nature of the Australian population introduces some technical barriers and additional costs that Japan, the United States, and other better connected countries don't have to deal with, but groups like T4 and G9 have shown they are not insurmountable and will not cost as much as Telstra will have us believe.