Monthly Archives: February 2005

Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast

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This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast
here in Utah.  I guess it’s kind of a variation on a Geek Dinner
that Scoble does.  I really have come to enjoy them … there is a
lot of good conversation and thinking.  It seems that we just
wander in conversation about technology and it’s social implications
… going from one tangent to the next … sharing the cool stuff that
we’ve stumbled on over the last weeks,

This morning we covered a lot of ground as usual … there were a couple of good things that I took away from the conversation.

  • Phil pointed out 43Things.com … a very cool site of collective visualization.  It displays the top things that people are saying
    they want to do with in their lives.  It’ll be interesting to see
    how the most popular ones change over time.  It might just be a
    good indicator of some fo the true aspects of human behavior.
  • I brought up my interest in the Windows Peer to Peer Networking
    project.  I heard about this recently, in depth, at the VSLive!
    conference that I attended, and I realize that Microsoft is serious
    about getting this out in volume with the next version of
    Windows.  The Windows Peer to Peer SDK
    is out there now to experiment with … and it only going get
    bigger.  I believe that this is going to revolutionize the way
    that people share and access information … it is going to drastically
    impact DNS.
  • We also talked about firewalls, and issues with installation and
    configuration of operating systems.  Someone commented that there
    were few simple tools to allow you to manage iptables … so that an
    average human could understand what they are doing.  One of the
    Ekstroms (Sorry … I remembered the joke about usually having more
    Ekstroms there, and I forgot the first name!) suggested looking at KMyFirewall … I’m going to grab a copy and take a look!
  • I also asked for suggestions on a GPL blogging application, as an
    alternative to MoveableType.  I really like MovableType, how I
    want “free as in beer.”  I think that Phill offered up WordPress,
    which is the old B2.  Wow … this really looks nice!  I
    downloaded it and am going to install in on one of my new servers.
  • I also told people about my new Utah Forums web site … http://UtahForums.org  I am slowly developing a place to aggregate many of the tech and entrepreneurial events going on in Utah.

I keep thinking that Phil is right … we’ve got to turn some of these into a podcast.  They are a pretty fun conversation.

Sam and his language

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I have posted far too little about my son Sam, and his progress and
development.  It is an amazing process to watch and be a part
of.  Lately, Sam has really taken off with grammer and
sentences.  They are crude, but he is learning to communicate
effectively.

I keep working with him on the pronunciation, there are still a lot of
letters that he leaves out.  It’s fun to have him come up and
start talking to me … he is so committed to telling me something, and
quite often I just don’t know what he is saying.  At the same
time, there are some things that he knows and says crystal clear.

Last night we were playing in the garage.  I hung some nylon
webbing from the ceiling, and I showed him how to grab it up high and
swing from it.  I then showed him how to sit in it and
swing.  It was interesting to watch him learning how to put the
loop behind his back to sit in it … he couldn’t quite get it each
time … but try and try again … he started to get the concept. 
They he said “Daddy … you turn.  I sit.”  He wanted me to
get up off the steps, and go swing.  We switched places, and I
swung for a bit.  Then he said “Daddy … me turn.  You
sit.”  What a kick.

He knows that we are going to see the ocean … we’re due to leave for
Hawaii this Friday.  This will be his second trip … and I’m sure
a lot of fun!

More dynamic collage applications

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My friend Todd Dailey just sent me a link to more applications similar to 10×10.
I have to warn that this one is very cool, however there are sometimes
images with nudity that some people would find offensive. It’s
not that it is designed to include these images … it’s just designed
not to discriminate.

As long as you are ok with a wide range of possible images, then you can go and look at WebCollage … an application developed by Jamie Zawinski.
Unlike 10×10 where the images are grabbed from news services,
WebCollage grabs images by doing random searches on various search
engines, and then finding the images on the resulting pages.
These images are then combined into a collage that updates about once a
minute.

Unlike visual collages, there are also the written collages … like DadaDodo. This project is creating text based on other text, in a format that is designed to “Exterminate All Rational Thought”. To see a sample you can click here.
I see this as a variation, at a lower level, to the concepts of
“multidisciplinary exposure” … something alluded to in the recent
book Medici Effect – Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and
Cultures.

Lastly, Jamie also refers to DriftNet … something I really want to install and play with! A version of EtherPeg for UNIX/Linux.

Ten By Ten

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I always like various ways that information is rendered
graphically.  I am a very visual person, and love to see images
that reflect and represent information.

Quite a while ago, I loved hearing about the use of EtherPeg
and its use at various conferences.  EtherPeg would monitor the
local network, and detect the images from the web pages that people
were looking at.  In real time, EtherPeg would display these
images on the screen as a constantly evolving collage of of activity.

Now there is Ten By Ten (or 10×10?)
which is a very cool way to view the current events of our society …
based on the RSS news feeds of some top sources of current-event
news.  If you go and view the site, you’ll see a 10×10 grid of
images that have been grabbed form the various news services, based on
the popularity of the words detected in news.  Move your mouse
over the images, and you’ll see the list of words … click on an image
and see the articles that contributed to that word and image making the
“top 100” for the hour.

It is projects like this that blend technology, society, and art … in
a way that I really appreciate.  It is both an experiment in
science, and a piece of art being molded by society.

IIS and Tomcat … no end of problems.

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Ok … I give.  Uncle.  I am through working on this for now, it is far too much wasting of time.

I have been trying, since Friday, to get IIS working with either Apache
(on the same box) or Tomcat (via the JK connectors).  I am able to
get Apache using port 81 to work, however now I have to deal with the
non-standard port issues.  So I found this nifty
isapi_redirect.dll that is supposed to allow me to connect IIS to
Tomcat directly!  No Apache required …

Yeah … right!

I have now spent almost eight additional hours working on this, and
have got nowhere.  The code, installation, and configuration are
simply poorly documented and do not work as described.  On top of
this, no matter what I do, I am unable to get *any* form of logging out
of the isapi_redirector.  I have been hand-hacking the registry,
and it seems to be working … to a point.  The IIS web logs
indicate that the defined URIs are being sent to the .dll … however
all I get are 404 not found errors.

I have now tried both the JK and JK2 versions of this thing … and
they both behave in a similar manner.  I’m stuck for now, and hope
that some day I am able to uncover the deep mystery of why this stupid
thing just won’t work.

I’m somewhat comforted by the posts that I have found all over the web
that seem to express the same feelings … no support, poor
documentation, inconsistenf operation.  It’s too bad … it would
be a nice solution for me!

Samba on Linux

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I sat through a pretty cool presentation on using Samba on Linux.  It was being given by the Utah Valley Linux Users Group, and was a good overview of getting things going.  There were a number of key points to consider in this situation.

One of the conversations was about security.  They talked about
accessing Windows shares over SSH and that it’s not easy.  I did a
quick on Google and found that there was a good How-To page called using SSH Tunneling to access Windows share that even referenced a free non-commercial SSH client that enables this.

I’m going to take a look at this and see what I can do to enable SSH on
the Samba server that I am configuring.  This would make things
much better.

Bald eagles in Utah

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It’s not just that they are here in Utah, we just had one in our back yard!

While I was sitting here writing the last post, my wife jumped up and
pointed out the eagle that just landed in our backyard.  We
watched it while it fed on something it had caught … it spent some
time eating and sitting, and then took off and flew back towards the
lake.

In the last year, we’ve had a quite a list of animals visit us … a
bear, dear, fox, and eagles.  All of this makes it nice to live in
Utah!

Apache and IIS on Windows Server 2003, Part 2

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I made some progress, and learned more about installing both of these
applications on Windows Server 2003.  First, if you use the
command “netstat -an” you can see the ports that are in use.  I
actually knew about netstat, however it was the “-an” option that
revealed the core information.

That piece of information was that both Apache and IIS both claim port
80 – in its entirety – across all IP addresses … no matter what the
settings in the various configuration files lead you to believe. 
Upon reading the documentation about Apache on Windows,  there is a note that is not completely clear:

Because Apache cannot share the same port with another TCP/IP
application, you may need to stop, uninstall or reconfigure certain other
services before running Apache. These conflicting services include other WWW
servers and some firewall implementations.

I would not have believe that this is the case even on different IP addresses. 
But this is the case.  So there is no way (that I can find) to
install both of these products, on different IP addresses, on the same
machine.  Done.

Ok, so then what is the solution?  I have now found two ways to
resolve my situation.  First, I experimented with creating a
virtual server in IIS that is simply a redirect to Apache on a
different port.  So I installed Apache on port 10.0.0.5:81, and
then configured IIS on 10.0.0.5:80 with a redirect to
10.0.0.5:81.  This worked!

The second solution is even better for my purposes.  I was
actually installing this to get a “JAM” application … Java, Apache,
MySQL … installed.  The actual configuration is for Apache to be
the web server, it uses mod_jk to connect to Tomcat, and the Tomcat is the Java container.  The Java application is what accesses MySQL through JDBC.

As I was reading on the configuration of  Tomcat I found that
there is an IIS version of mod_jk!  The mod_jk
isapi_redirector.dll will allow me to directly connect IIS to Tomcat
without requiring Apache … duh!  I should have figured that
someone would have written such a connector.

I’ll update the progress on Monday or Tuesday … I downloaded the
components, but ran out of time to get this new method installed and
working.

Some Microsoft docs on Identity

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I know that these are some older documents, however I had not seen these docs on Microsoft Identity and Access Management
before.  I found them linked from another web site I was
reading.  There is some interesting stuff .  From their site:

This series of papers provides numerous identity and access management
concepts, techniques, and solutions for use in heterogeneous IT
environments.

Identity and access management combines processes, technologies, and
policies to manage digital identities and specify how they are used to access
resources.

I’m reading through the package for some background.