This is a really interesting site, all about bookcrossing, where you leave a book in a public place for someone else to read

Bookcrossing on the Scottish hills

Go to the Bookcrossing site

The Guanxi IdP has now passed the Eduserve Athens Shibboleth tests and UHI are now live through the gateway with a multilingual IdP, which should be good news for our Gaelic users.

Thanks to the attribute mapping capabilities of the IdP we can directly translate user attributes to Athens permission sets and also map certain attributes to eduPersonTargetedID, which is required for state persistence through the gateway, allowing users to have a more personalised Athens experience without sacrificing privacy.

The mapper also allows us to translate institutional attributes to the eduPerson set without having to install the eduPerson schema, so we can evaluate how best to progress with attribute stores and how they are viewed by the outside world.

It’s a major milestone for Guanxi and as for me, I’m off to find some cakes…

Now that the cvs has stopped oscillating and the new module structure is ready, which makes it a breeze to build Guanxi from source, I took some time to build in i18n and now the IdP’s UI is available in Gaelic. It’s controlled by what the browser says it will accept. If you set your browser to “Scottish Gaelic” then you’ll get the IdP UI and any errors in Gaelic.

The hardest part is, of course, translating the technical language to Gaelic but I’ve kept the user facing messages as simple as possible, with the really scary stuff staying in the logfiles.

Another plus though, is that you can now translate the IdP into whatever language you want by just getting hold of the message files, which are just Java .properties files and translating the content. Bung them back into the IdP and you have your own language version of Guanxi.

After doing a debug session, getting everything working and nice and tidy, I copied everything over to the production server, ready for testing the localisation and Athens access. Then I got this error:

src-resolve: Cannot resolve the name ‘xml:lang’ to a(n) ‘attribute declaration’ component

Eventually traced the problem to the DNS server that the machine was pointing to. It was broken. The machine couldn’t get to the outside world and references to the XML schema couldn’t be resolved. After having the DNS changed to something that worked, Guanxi came back.

Java

• Java tuning white paper
• Garbage Collector Ergonomics

eLearning

• Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility

“The purpose of a software is to meet the expected requirements” [1]
“most bugs come from misinterpreting requirements rather than poor coding.” [2]
“Pair programming is inefficient and wasteful when compared to individuals who don’t slack off” [3]
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes” – Oscar Wilde
“Do something for wildness and make the mountains glad” – John Muir
[1] http://www.technobuff.net/webapp/product/showTutorial.do?name=jrequire&tssar
[2] http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=36946#187176

[3] http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=the_death_of_agile

“The purpose of a software is to meet the expected requirements” [1]
“most bugs come from misinterpreting requirements rather than poor coding.” [2]

[1] http://www.technobuff.net/webapp/product/showTutorial.do?name=jrequire&tssar
[2] http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=36946#187176

Having purchased a .Mac subscription, I was most miffed when the iDisk refused to work. It was always working offline and always failed when syncing. It worked eventually on the G4 powerbook when I stopped it syncing in .Mac preferences. This removed the icon from the desktop but left an icon in the Finder. When you click on it, you get a new iDisk icon on the desktop with the name of your .Mac subscription, instead of “iDisk”.

This didn’t help with the G5 however. So, I had a root aboot in /var/log/system.log and saw these appear every time I tried to sync the iDisk:

webdavd[669]: (result == 0 ) failed with 1; No such file or directory; file: mount.tproj/mount_webdav.c; line: 239

I then had a root aboot in Google and came up with a webdav error due to wrong permissions. So, into /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, choose the startup disk and “Repair Permissions” under the “First Aid” tab.

Voila. It worked and now my iDisk is working.

A while back, I wrote a few classes to handle a limited set of the SAML2 Metadata functionality. Just enough to get the Guanxi SP internal web services working. Now, having discovered XMLBeans, I’ve managed to parse the SAML and Guanxi schemas using XMLBeans and can now use an object API to manipulate the SAML and Guanxi xml spaces.

XMLBeans is just the beez neez. It’s absolutely fantastic. It even handles raw X509 certificates embedded in the metadata. It also handles the Guanxi SAML2 Metadata extensions. When you hit an <Extensions> node in the SAML2 Metadata, it’s as easy as jumping quickly out of XMLBeans to org.w3c and back again to bridge from one schema to a new one. In this case, bridging from the SAML2 Metadata schema to the Guanxi extension schema. XMLBeans works beautifully.

Recreational

• Litir do Luchd-Ionnsachaidh. The Letter to Gaelic Learners subscribe
• Shakespeare on iPod subscribe
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