Marc is working on a nice and *clean* web application description language (WADL) that can be used for non-SOAP web services as well.

For an introduction to RESTful web services with JAX-WS, please take a look at his recent post. It might be an interesting excercise to get this to work with Clemens' RESTful extension for WCF.

Here is a nice little tool for Firefox that helps in creating tags for blogs entries. It allows you to create master lists to choose your frequently used tags from. While it has a somewhat odd interface, it is still quite useful.

There are a couple of quite interesting developments in the office document formats discussion. One if them being that the Australian National Archive is now moving their entire content to ODF. This can be considered a major victory for ODF on the long road to broad government adoption.

A little mixed is the current situation at SC 34 of ISO regarding the formal standardization of ODF through ISO/ITU-T: since Microsoft recently joined the sub-committee working on this, there is the possibility that they are trying to stall the process, until their OpenXML formats make ECMA and thus go head to head with ODF.

Microsoft on the other side is now also sponsoring a community dedicated to working with their XML office formats. There is nothing about the binary formats (yet?), but it hosts a few interesting articles and links, including a high-level introduction to the packaging model.

Pat found this interesting article by Chuck. It is on a Java implementation of the InfoCard protocol.

Tags: InfoCard, Interoperability, Java, Identity

While XUL is definitively an interesting alternative to XAML for creating application through XML, Java now has its own: JAXX

If you are interested in UI design, using XML in new ways or XAML (the markup language for creating .NET applications in WPF), you might want to check out JAXX as well.

Tags: JAXX, Java, XML, XAML

The Sun Game Server is the first product released from Project Darkstar. It is a online gaming engine that scales massivly and comes with a rich set of client APIs. You can get the EA bits here: https://games.dev.java.net/.

Update: The final web site for Darkstar is going to be http://www.projectdarkstar.com - Thanks to Jeff Kesselman for pointing this out.

Tags: Online Gaming, Darkstar

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

Here is a really nice article on InfoCard. Not only does it cover the implementation and APIs, but also the message flow.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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