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Well I’m excited that my first QEVP iPhone app made it in the App Store.  It’s the adaptation of my popular Quick English Vietnamese Phrases.  It’s paid version for only $.99. I’m trying to recoup the money I spent on an used but expensive iMac and the hefty developer fee.  I must say if it wasn’t for the Google search engine and all the blogs and articles on how to write iPhone app out there, this app won’t be existed.  It’s a very rewarding learning experience for me.  I got to learn how to use the MAC, Unix commands, Xcode, CoCoa, Object-C and other ‘fun’ stuff.  It wasn’t easy but I think anyone can do it if you just put your mind to it.

I love to get input from other iPhone developer out there on my first app.  Or if you are also writing your first iPhone app and have some questions or need some pointers, just leave me a comment.

You can find QEVP app here or just enter “qevp” in the search box in iTunes or the iPhone’s App Store.

It’s really  frustrated that I own a nice iPhone that can do VPN and Microsoft Exchange email but the IT people where I work won’t bother to support it.  They just say it is not secure enough.  What the heck.  I mean I already use Cisco VPN client to log in my workplace’s network using my notebook.  So what is the different between VPN in using the notebook versus the iPhone.  It’s the same Cisco VPN client that the iPhone also supports.

Anyway, I have it figure out and the key is the PCF profile files and little known trick. For Windows, the PCF files should locate underneath where you install the Cisco VPN Client.  Mine is under C:\Program Files\Cisco Systems\VPN Client\Profiles.  Now there could be more than one PCF files so only use the one that apply to you.   Open it up as a text file and basically copy the values over to the iPhone VPN setup screen.

First,  go to the iPhone VPN:

Settings, General, Network, VPN, Add VPN Configuration.   On top, click on IPSec.  The screen now displays a Cisco logo and these fields: Description, Server, Account, Group Name, Secret.

Now here are the PCF’s fields that you want to copy over to the iPhone setup screen:

Description: enter anything that you want here,  UserName is for Account, Host=Server, GroupName=Group Name, Secret=???.

The Secret field is the reason  I think why most of you end up here in this blog.  Copy all the hex values you see after enc_GroupPwd in the PCF file and go to this Website to decode it.  This is the whole secret that the IT people don’t want me to know.  After you got the decrypted code enter it on the  Secret field.  And there you have it.  You now should be able to VPN in yours work’s network.

My work has the browser interface to Microsoft Exchange email so I can use iPhone Safari to read emails after VPN is connected.  I still can’t use the iPhone’s email reader directly for some reason.  I think the IT just basically reject anything come in from iPhone.  But who care, I can use the browser version and that is all I care.

I think a lot of people now a day are run into this problem: keeping up with various user and passwords. I don’t know about you but I always forgot the user and password on those rarely use accounts. What make it worse is some of login system keep forcing you to update the password. So there are website and companies that making product to address this issue. But I can’t find any really good free solution out there.  There is so called single-sign-on solution that help you get around this.  But you have to purchase special key token and it cost you money. Why would I want to pay more money just to keep track of my logins.  There are website that also help you keep track and log in but then another set of user/password to remember as well.
So what is my solution? I think it’s not perfect but at least it’s free and easy to maintain. I just use my Yahoo’s email account, which I use very often, and compose an email contains account URL, users, and passwords and just save it to Draft folder. Whenever I need to look up log in information for those rarely use account, I just open the email and look up the info. For added security, I don’t spell out the password in the file but just include hints or short phrases that help me recall the passwords. This way the one main password I have to remember is just my email account, which is not an issue because I use it pretty much everyday.
What is yours solution? Please comment and tell me what is yours solution to this passwords headache.

Testing out this Chess JavaScript