Interesting developments in Sakai land.

Was reading this interesting post on C/C++ declarations and was reassured that it was indeed, still second nature to think of pointer declarations in this way. It was the bit at the end of the article that made me sweat. Hope I don’t have to start using C# anytime soon.

Had a bit of a head scratcher today. Adding the notification plugin to my dev Elgg, once you posted the change form, it came up with a connection error. Turns out PHP wasn’t picking up the correct port, 8091 and was always reporting SERVER_PORT = 80. Had a trawl through the apache conf, no port 80 specified. Where was it getting it from? Then I remembered the virtual host file:

NameVirtualHost *:8091
<VirtualHost *:8091>
  ServerName sgarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk
  ...

turns out I have to do this to get the port working in PHP:

ServerName sgarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk:8091

After the grunge of installing mod_ruby on OS X, I thought I’d try it on linux:

./configure.rb --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs

this is a web server full of rpms so apr was found on the various system paths and I didn’t need to specify it. I did get a pretty bad error on make though:

...
recompile with -fPIC

turns out you have to compile ruby to enable sharing:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ruby-1.8.6 \
                  --enable-shared

so that’s it installed on apache.

One of the biggest problems I have with Ruby is it’s lack of Apache support. PHP is just so easy to use with Apache but as I also want to learn about Ruby I thought I’d take the hit and try and install mod_ruby. As ever with Ruby, it’s not easy. The site constantly disappears and it’s pot luck whether you get there:

Firefox can't find the server at www.modruby.net.

Apparently it’s also not very good with Apache 2.2 but seems to be not too bad for my newbie investigations. I always create a configure_ script when building something so I know how to do it again. For mod_ruby, this is my configure_mod_ruby script:

./configure.rb --with-apxs=/Users/alistair/apps/httpd-2.2.8/bin/apxs \
   --with-apr-includes=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/usr/include/apr-1 (more...)

I had word from the interweb that the Guanxi SP Engine was having a bit of trouble trusting Internet2 Shibboleth IdPs, throwing the error:

org.apache.xml.security.signature.XMLSignatureException:
The Reference for URI #_1f08ed98488ed7e4f602628fa9d194cb has no XMLSignatureInput

That’s a pretty garbled message but I’d previously come across this in the Engine to Guard comms: XMLBeans and DOM3. The problem is, the I2 IdP is signing the SAML Response using a “non standard” ID attribute, which is only supported in DOM3 and XMLBeans does not support DOM3 and there are no plans to do so. So the only way round it is to break out into DOM land. However, if you’re dealing with signature verification, toString() breaks everything, when injecting the SAMLResponseDocument into a DocumentBuilderFactory. The improved solution is to use an InputStream: (more…)

This is a superb blog, about driving the Mars rovers. The software is apparently written in Java and C++. Would love to see it!

Often the software development wheel turns full circle. For example, from COM to web services and the original Mac OS to Windows but going by the new JISC Developer Happiness Day, the spokes have fallen out and the wheel has flattened into a two dimensional landscape. Every now and then you have to take a look around you, see what’s happening in the field. In academia, Java has never been big. It’s too complicated for most hackers who are short of time and long on tasks. Scripting string and duct tape are the norm. People like Sakai have noticed this and are positioning Sakai 3 to allow non Java developers to contribute [PDF]. (more…)