Did you also sign in to the shiny new chrome browser for your beloved iPad only to be greeted by the above crappy confusing error message, suspect your google apps account might be the culprit?… fear not. The solution is simple.

Don’t do what some forums suggest and blank all your sync info in your account… that would be madness … you just need to sign out of your account on other computers which is simple enough to do from the footer of you gmail page by clicking details and then sign out on other computers.

Then when you try to sign in on chrome for iOS you will find all your sync content on the iPad along with the speech recognition that removes the need to type your searches.. Great!

I had a quick bash at this last year with OpenVPN, and couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, so last night logged a ticket with my windows hosting company to install the VPN modules to windows 2008 server and had a play this morning setting it up.

After following these great instructions step by step I had my iPad connecting via my new VPN but no internet access, after some playing around that centered around enabling NAT on the service everything works a treat now :), so browsing on public WiFi can now be done in confidence!.

So it’s 10pm, and I think I finally cracked it… thanks to this tutorial http://www.brianlegg.com/post/2011/05/09/Implementing-your-own-RoleProvider-and-MembershipProvider-in-MVC-3.aspx I suspect I have tied an MVC3 application to a small set of credential fields in an existing database table on SQL Server.. I need to get away from the bloat of the default SQL membership and role provider structures..

The next issue will be working out if the hash between the existing web based application that uses the table I have integrated with now and the hash of my one are compatible… I will leave that until tomorrow.

On a separate note a great presentation I saw on my iPad this week was from here http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DEV333
where Adam Tuliper discusses web application security including some nice open source addons to make MVC less vulnerable to XSS attacks and SQL injection amongst other things. One thing that stood out as nice and simple, but essential was how easy he makes it to encrypt a section of web.config, see the screenshot from the video below. Essentially the first statement encrypts, and the second one will decrypt on the same machine, (the machine identifier is used in the algorithm so can’t be decrypted on another machine (unless you are uber cracker))..

Later this week… integrating a 3D secure payment provider to my MVC3 application… interesting days!

Thought I would take the plunge and go for the iOS 5 update on my iPad 2, the main thing I was worried about getting wiped as part of the dreaded sync (I started using iTunes on a PC at my old job….).

I found a program for windows called iExplorer, which seemed to bring up the iBooks directory and I could copy and paste all my 48 treasured programming PDFs over to windows in the way you would expect to do by default… except the file names had all been mangled into unreadable names but still the PDFs are intact.

Then I run the update in iTunes…. and what a shock, 45 minutes later its all done and dusted… all my apps still there.. all my iBooks PDFs still there… games with progress still intact… such as asphalt 6 adrenaline….

Bloody delighted… couldn’t have been smoother in the end!

This is a little test to see if my iPad will successfully post to my blog!.

Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….