Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Google Earth - Revolution for Germany
Yahoo! (well, actually more: Goooogle!) Google Earth finally has some decent resolution for my most favorite regon on the planet: Cologne, Germany and surrounding areas. My parents house is extremly crisp - you can see the citrus plant on their porch ;-).

Tags: Google Earth

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:03:55 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Monday, March 27, 2006
Article on InfoCard
Here is a really nice article on InfoCard. Not only does it cover the implementation and APIs, but also the message flow.

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Monday, March 27, 2006 1:33:03 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Steve Ballmer on Linux and IPR
Here is an interesting interview with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. In it, he muses about the potential claims that Microsoft might make against the Linux user and development community.

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Monday, March 27, 2006 12:43:35 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Restricting Access to Pages on MediaWiki
In order to limit access for specific pages on MediaWiki (e.g. for developing internal ideas etc.) you might find this add-on to MediaWiki interesting. It add a 'restrict' functionality to each article, similar to the 'protect' mechanism. Its access control is not very fancy (if you are in a group called 'restrict' you can view and edit all restricted pages), but it is useful in general.

Tags: MediaWiki

Monday, March 27, 2006 11:39:08 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
GSS-SAML revisited
Now that I have less time than ususal, it might be a good time to restart some of my GSS-SAML efforts. If you are interested, I suggest you subscribe to saml-mechanism@washington.edu and/or check the archives.

To get something for the Montreal IETF meeting, I will coordinate writing a draft. Please let me know if you are interested.

Tags: GSS-SAML, SAML

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Monday, March 27, 2006 11:26:03 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Thursday, March 23, 2006
'Tiered Internet' - or - Extortion, the legal way
This is just plain sickening: FCC Comissioner Martin expressed understanding for the plans of the large telcos like AT&T to extort Internet web sites and services. While some arguments brought forth might be valid, in the end the consumers actually pay the ISP and telcos to get access to all internet sites with any traffic they (the customers) like. As far as I am concerned, creating a 'multi-tiered' internet is getting dangerously close to limiting free speech. To me this is a great example of over-regulation and monopolies harming individuals rights.

Tags: Regulation, FCC, Internet

Thursday, March 23, 2006 1:22:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Encrypting Drives Securely
I recently started to play around with a useful tool called TrueCrypt. It allows to create an encrypted diskfile, that can be mounted on most major operating systems by giving the proper password.

This comes in REALLY handy, when you have a USB key chain drive to spare: I have been using it to store a lot of my personal information like passport and credit card numbers, but also scans of certificates, degrees etc.

Given the fact that you can employ a triple encryption using AES, Twofish and Serpent, along with RIPEMD-160 or Whirlpool for hashing. The code is open source.

Tags: Security, TrueCrypt, Encryption

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Thursday, March 23, 2006 10:40:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
DIX, SXIP and SAML
I am currently working on getting a better grip on why DIX should matter at all, particularly with SAML around. Granted, DOX offers a few neat features, but I cannot see why SAML should not be able to support most of them either by profiling SAML 2 or adding a few details. My fear is that the DIX folks will re-invent SAML, only this time within the IETF.

I have created a page on my wiki (that contains only this blog entry so far) where I will collect some thoughts and ideas.

Tags: DIX, SXIP, SAML

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Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:19:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Monday, March 20, 2006
Getting PHP to work under IIS
I've spent almost half a night getting PHP to install on my Windows 2003 Server under IIS. Granted: towards the end I was simply too tired to recognize that I DID change a crucial setting (cgi.force_redirect = 0), but forgot to uncomment the line ...

Well, in the end it worked, but I was a little surprised to see that ISAPI support for PHP is quite limited; at least I could not - tired as I was - figure out how to make the dl() function work in an ISAPI configured IIS server. Since the basic installation script for my application (MediaWiki) really wanted to load extensions (MySQL for that matter), I was ultimately convinced that I had to walk the CGI way...

Now THAT is also quite interesting, since other than the ISAPI filter, the CGI implementation of PHP refused to cooperate. In the end, there were three steeting that made it work (and pretty smoothly, so far):

  1. Set the cgi.force_redirect = 0. Be smart and DO NOT forget to uncomment it.
  2. Set the  cgi.rfc2616_headers = 1 
  3. If you still experience problems with the CGI Application e.g. by getting an error like 
     The specified CGI application misbehaved by not
     returning a complete set of HTTP headers.
    try to increase the CGI timeout setting in the IIS Metabase (using the Metabase Explorer from the IIS resource kit). You can fint it under LM\W3SVC, the default is 300 msec, I was quite successful with 1000 msec.
Tags: PHP, IIS, Windows, ISAPI, CGI

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Monday, March 20, 2006 10:10:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Stanford

Today I got the confirmation that I am now enrolled in the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) as a NDO student for Management Science and Engineering. This is quite exciting for me – it is the first time since 1997 that I am affiliated with a university and the very first time that I am actually enrolled in a U.S. university.

The program is delivered through online courses, which allows me to participate even though I am continuing to work. After four 4 credit courses I will be awarded a professional certificate from Stanford. At the same time these credits can also be applied to advanced graduate degrees, such as a masters degree in Management Science and Engineering. It was this flexibility the really convinced me to give this a try.

At this time, I am scheduled to take one course per quarter. You can actually access my web site now also through http://www.stanford.edu/people/beuchelt/. I am looking forward to this new challenge and post my experience here.

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Monday, March 20, 2006 9:15:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Friday, March 17, 2006
VMWare tools for Solaris
Uncovered by Pat Patterson:

VMware Tools for Solaris 10 host OS

This will allow you to get all the fancy integration for Solaris 10, that until now only Windows and Linux host OSes can offer.

Tags: VMWare, Solaris

Friday, March 17, 2006 7:18:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Sniffing SSL & TLS
As far as I am concerned, Ethereal is one of the nicest gifts to the open source community. It is a fully blown network protocol analyzer which can be extended to accomodate virtually any protocol you can come up with.

One of the things that have been bugging me however, was that Ethereal was - for the longest time - not able to interpret SSL and TLS protected traffic in a meaningful way (yes, you could see the SSL traffic, but it was encrypted and therefore useless).

There has been a plugin/patch for Ethereal now available for some time, and it seems that it is finally in a useful state. Paolo Abeni has been working on this and the code can be obtained here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssl-decrypt

Tags: Ethereal, SSL, Decryption

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Friday, March 17, 2006 3:57:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Preparing the Holodeck ..
And now for somthing completely different:

The Japanese AIST has created the first truly three-dimensional pictures ever. Is this the beginning of the Holodeck? ;-)

Wednesday, March 01, 2006 9:56:16 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [1]  | 
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Eliptic Curve Cryptography hits the market
As far as I am concerned, this has been long due: ECC will now be included in the Sun Web Server, starting with Web Server 7.0. This should help drive adoption of ECC to a new level.



Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:37:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0]  | 

Copyright by Gerald Beuchelt.