In the throws of learning ::.

Wow, hard to believe I haven't posted in a couple of months. He he, oops. Well, not tons to report right now other than I have cracked down on myself and am learning PHP. It is a nice addition to my Web Development toolbox.
There is NO better way to learn than hands-on. That said, I wanted to describe the project that I am working on. Where I work we do A LOT with x509.v3 SSL keys. If anyone has ever had any experience with these, you know what I am refering to. Well, when you double click on an SSL key that has a "cer" or "der" extension, a window opens up that displays the information about the certificate. In the "Details" tab of that window, you will find a number of different variables that contain all of the information about that certificate.
Well, one of those values is the "Serial Number", which is unique to every SSL key. When viewing the serial number, you will notice that it is in hexadecimal format (ie: 3F D2 67 something to that effect, but longer). In the log that is produced by our SSL client software though, the serial number for the public SSL key is displayed as a decimal number ( ie: 1403823095 notice, no letters, just numbers).
As you can see, you cannot just compare the two unless you know how to convert them or have something to convert them for you to their alternate format(s). This is where the Internet comes into play. Gotta love the veritable wealth of infomation that resides online these days. I did a search for decimal to hex conversion and came up with this, a site that tells you the algorithm for converting both directions.
So, basically, I am working on a web page that will convert the numbers both directions. Obviously this is something that will be able to convert ANY hex to dec or dec to hex as it is universal. So, stay tuned and once I finish it I will post a link to the page.

Happy Mother's Day weekend everyone!