You know me, I don't like to complain

Doodle: Scheduling meetings:

I cannot stand scheduling meetings.

My office lives and dies by the Exchange server, and what stinks is that even if you cruise the participants calendars looking for an available timeslot, that doesn’t mean that those people are actually available.

Most of the time I find that I’m probably wide open on the calendar, but I have plenty of things to work on and therefore not available for Project Y. Sometimes this leads people to believe that I think Project Y is a colossal waste of my time. This is not necessarily the case. Quite frankly I, like most people, have plenty of other things to do besides sit in meetings.

So Doodle works great for that, you just mix and match and see when people are available. Additionally, you don’t have visibility into other organizations Free/Busy servers, so this allows you to schedule your big important meeting with Customer Z without playing “Outlook Invite” tag like a mental patient.

I love using Backpack from 37signals and often make use of its Mobile interface.

The problem I had is that my Nokia N90 kept asking me every single time Opera hit my Backpack to View Certificate or Continue when trying to use the SSL version of the service. I don’t like shuffling my data in the clear, but I also didn’t like having to constantly tell my browser it was okay, and to proceed.

So I viewed the certificate and saw that they were using Equifax as their CA. Piece of cake. If you want your handset to shaddup and trust Backpack (and Equifax), read on.

It just required a little bit of digging. Once I found the data on the CA and found their certificates online, it was a cinch.

Open this URL in your handset’s browser:

https://www.geotrust.com/resources/root_certificates/certificates/Equifax_Secure_Certificate_Authority_DER.cer

By all means use a service like Teleflip to zap it to you via SMS so you can snag the URL easily and open it with your mobile browser. I wouldn’t want to type that in. You may also be able to download it on your computer and send it over via Bluetooth to your handset, or put it on a storage card. (Mac users can just drag it onto the Bluetooth File Exchange icon, and click on their mobile phone, naturally.)

On my Nokia N90 S60 handset, all I had to do was view that URL, let Certificate Manager import it, and tell it that I will trust it for Internet-related shenanigans. If you want, go ahead and let Equifax sign code and whatever else you want to trust them for.

That made Opera (and the Nokia ‘Services’ browser) trust that my Backpack page was safe and honest-to-god reasonably secure from interception and eavesdropping.

Now, if 37signals will fix up their /mob UI to let you browse and create more than one task list per page like the sexy desktop flavor, we’ll be in business.

For those of you who were jealously coveting mine, you can find a ballistic nylon shirt pocket briefcase from Levenger now, on their online store