Time zones in XML Schema and Java

For interoperability reasons, it often makes sense for applications to transmit dates and times as xsd:dateTime strings, as this standard should serve all common cases.

XML Schema’s dateString type was inspired by the extended syntax of ISO 8601 : a sample string would be 2000-03-04T23:00:00.000+03:00 (March 4th, 2000, 11:00:00 PM in a time zone that’s 3 hours after UTC).

ISO 8601 also defines another (more compact) syntax : <code...

I’ve been used to great Eclipse plugins to deal with SVN-versionned projects for a long time.

Nowadays I’m using Mercurial (a.k.a. Hg) a lot and it became more handy to me to use Tortoise-like products, which integrate directly into the OS’ file manager.

I’ve come to use the following solutions for the different platforms I’m working with (on Ubuntu 12.04).

Mercurial for Nautilus

TortoiseHg works fine, but I had to add a script to have the corresponding “Actions” menu...

This article contains instructions to build PyCrypto 2.6 for Windows XP (32 bits).

The PyCrypto library provides Python with implementation for a lot of algorithms for cryptography. It’s very useful.

Ubuntu has it by default but if you want to have it for Python 3.2 on Windows, you must use Active Python, as there is no other binary release for Python 3.2 on the web.

In case you want to use...

This article focuses on Android and Java keystores, but it applies as well to any key that can be printed as plain text.

Before printing a private key, make sure that it is what you need : for instance you would rather print a revocation certificate for an OpenPGP key since you can still sign content with a new key. This is not the case for Android, which requires the same key for every release of an application.

Securing...