Remember

Remember remember
The fifth of November
The gun powder treason and plot.

I know of no reason
why the gun powder treason
should ever be forgot.

Religion, Politics and Stupidity

This image I found somewhere on the 'net pretty much sums up my views on Religion (more accuratly Theism) and Politics.

WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0 Beta Released

We released the WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0 Beta, just a few minutes ago. It is really good to see things that were developed independently, fit in nicely to produce a larger solution.

Please give it a try and send us your feedback.

Here goes the traditional release note...

WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0-beta Released
========================================

WSO2 Identity Solution team is pleased to announce the release of WSO2
Identity Solution 1.0-beta.

Release artifacts can be downloaded from :
http://dist.wso2.org/products/solutions/identity/1.0-beta/

WSO2 Identity Solution provides the following components to enable
CardSpace authentication for web applications.

* An Identity Provider
The identity provider includes an application to issue information
cards and a security token service. Security token service can be
deployed to issue tokens to trusted users. An identity selector will
obtain tokens from the Identity Provider and authenticate the users to a
Web applications with those tokens.

* A set of Relying Party components
Relying party components include an Apache HTTPD module and a Servlet
filter. The HTTPD module can be used with any Web application that is
hosted with Apache HTTPD irrespective of the implementation language.
The Servlet filter component is intended for Java based Web containers.

Key Features in this Release

* Identity provider
- Supports connecting to a JDBC or an LDAP user store
- Issues information cards based on username-token credential and
self issued credential
- Allows adding custom claims and mapping them to user attributes
in the user store
- Revocation of issued information cards
- Manage trusted relying parties
* Apache HTTPD relying party module - mod_cspace
* Java Servlet Filter relying party component

Reporting Problems
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at
https://wso2.org/jira/browse/IDENTITY

Contact us
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WSO2 Identity Solution developers can be contacted via mailing lists:
* For Users: identity-user@wso2.org
* For Developers:identity-dev@wso2.org
For details on subscriptions see
http://www.wso2.org/projects/solutions/identity#mail

Thank you for your interest in WSO2 Identity Solution

WSO2 Identity Solution Team

Lecture of a lifetime - Achieving your childhood dreams

I got this (sad, funny, entertaining, moving, motivating, you name it...) video clip from a friend. Randy Pausch a CMU professor dying of pancreatic cancer delivering his last lecture. If you find it good, watch the whole 2hour lecture here.

Best thing about this lecture is its finale. I think I never have seen (or attended) a lecture with such intense ending that made me think over and over again. I wouldn't say that this lecture changed my life though it for sure made a huge impact. At the very least, it made me think seriously, whether I do what I always wanted to do?

Talking about childhood dreams, I don't think it'd be easy to achieve my childhood dreams, except for a few. Mine are not as specific as Randy's, they usually are more generic in nature. However, it is not the time to reveal them yet (huh! topsy krets). Hopefully, I would someday be able to blog (or do the equivalent of blogging then) on my childhood dreams and how successful I was in achieving them.

The whole lecture was full of food for thoughts, but one clue in particular on achieving childhood dreams:

Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.

What's my blog rated?

Browsing around randomly - well, I was using google, so it was not entirely random - I found this funny web site which claims to provide a "Film Rating" for any blog.

Huh! my blog is rated PG-13. For 10x use of "crap" (can't help it when the blog it self is named "Random Crap") and 1x use of t i t.... What? Where did I say that? I searched through the whole blog, couldn't find where that is. Probably in html format only.... so I opened up a page source window and searched for the three letters followed by a space. Hmm, strange, I still can't find it. Could it be that their analysis is faulty somehow?

Anyway it's nice to have such a badge on your blog. Looks cool...

PG-13? who writes for children under 13? CRAP once more!!! Gimme an R.


Update (25/09/20007): As Yasith pointed out in his comment, after this post, my blog is rated R (isn't that great?):



For once I thought it would be a hard thing to achieve such an honor. Oh! it's just 13 craps and one word which happened to truncate in a totally unintended way, over which I have no control. Shame on blogger ;)

Go Offline with Google Reader

It has been a long time since I gave up my offline RSS reader. I loved the google reader interface and it's usability since it was in public beta. Only disadvantage about using it was that I had to be online to read any RSS feed, which hard was a problem for me.

I have been extremely busy these days due to an extended us trip and some deadlines to be met. Thus did not log in to the google reader for the last few weeks, until this evening after finishing my work. The first thing got my attention was a link in the top right hand corner which said offline. That was something I saw there for the first time. I was thinking may be they have written a stand-alone application to complement the web UI. Anyhow, I just clicked on it to check what it is and there I got the surprise of the month for sure.

Now you can save the latest 2000 items to your machine so that you can read them offline. 2000 is a decent amount I guess. This feature has been introduced to google reader only a week ago on the 31st May. It uses the recently released google gears, a browser plugin which enables writing offline web applications. It should rather be called a toolkit than a browser plugin. The official google reader blog says:

To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Here is my google reader gone offline, yay!

Axis2/C 1.0 Released

Apache Axis2/C 1.0 was released a few days ago. Well that was last Sunday, the 6th. The release was delayed by a few weeks due to improvements and fixes suggested.

Wow! what an achievement, of course I am happy to be (however vanishingly small) a part of the great amount of human hours used in this exercise.

In the meantime, Apache Rampart/C project, the WS-Security implementation for Axis2/C has plans to release 0.90 by the end of this week. We found a small memory issue with our xml canonicalization (xml-c14n) implementation yesterday, and it is fixed now. You can test the release artifacts from here.