I recently developed a couple of plugins for Microsoft IE and Firefox/Mozilla Browsers. People these days (myself included) are getting more and more paranoid about software running on their machines. I want to know that any code running on my machine has not been tampered with in any way. In the case of Microsoft IE, it loudly complains if you try to load a plugin that is not digitally signed. We are only going to see more and more use of signed apps now that Microsoft is making it a requirement for 64 bit drivers in Windows 7.

In my travels I’ve gathered a fair amount of information about public key cryptography, document and code signing and specifically (and more usefully) how this is performed for Windows development. I’ll give a brief (for dummies style) intro to signing and a walk through of how to buy and sign code from start to finish. (at least as far as it worked for me) Its my hope that this might be the only article a developer needs to read if they want to produce  a signed executable for Windows.

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A word of advice to those looking for a new web host. Avoid gate.com. I have been using gate.com uneventfully for the last couple years. It was originally hostsave.com then got renamed/bought as gate.com at some point.  It seems like they have really changed direction lately.

The have done a major ‘upgrade’ which in effect was not an upgrade at all. They consolidated their servers and removed features they didn’t feel like supporting anymore. They at least did send a warning email a few days before the switch saying they were doing this. I have to admit part of the problem is that i didn’t read it. Though they didn’t say exactly when the switch was. Truly amateur performance on their part.

As you might expect my site fell apart on the day of the switch.

My first gripe is the bullshit/lie that this was an ‘upgrade’. Since as far as i can tell it was not any sort of upgrade from any customers point of view.

They forced reconfiguration of all mail accounts and eliminated ‘catch-all’ support. Because i quote “It just increases spam” and all other hosts seem to be dropping support for it. Firstly, I don’t care what other hosts are doing. Secondly its total crap. I have never gotten much spam on any of the unused addresses on my site. That should be my problem anyhow. What the heck do they care?!

The reason that the catch-all is such a need for me is that i frequently give out unique emails for different sites i subscribe to in order to track who is giving out my address to spammers. I don’t bother to track what addresses i give out. I have literally hundreds of aliases that would have to be tracked down and email forwarders created for.

gate.com sucks. Sorry, I have to add this to the text since most people doing a search for gripes on something do a search for “XX sucks”. how fun.

gate.com seems to be run by total amateurs.

For those interested i have now switched to dreamhost.com. They are faster and support WAY more features than gate.com. Truly no comparison. They have a rep for NOT doing the sort of crap that other hosts do in this department. Its a little hard to get used to their control panel. It has an odd format but provides a lot of power. The nicest feature is that you may host multiple sites on the same account. Very nice.

Links:

Affinitys review of Gate.com – http://www.webhostingstuff.com/review/GatecombyAffinity.html

http://www.hostingsthatsuck.com/gate-com-sucks/

http://darksiren.net/node/126

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/gatecom-c7326.html