You can see me sitting in front of the Enterprise Lab. The picture was taken a couple of months ago.
Import private key into Java Keystore
While trying to get OpenSSO to work with Shibboleth 2, I had to import a certificate and private key into a Java Keystore. This caused some sort of déjà vu. I had to do the same thing about two months ago while I was trying to get OpenSSO and Shib 1.3 talk together. So I googled this stuff once again just to find the source-files involved in this particular solution still lying around in my $HOME.
Now I’m writing it down, maybe I’ll need this one again sometime. Here is the article.
.net PDFViewer Component
Today I wanted to Integrate a PDFViewer component into my own .net (C++/CLI) application. In the beginning I hoped to find an opensource component for this. There are several opensource library’s for creating PDF’s with .net but none of them provided a PDFViewer component. There are several commercial solutions available but since they usually provided much more than I needed I was not really interested. On Linux or with other GUI toolkits (GTK, QT4 or Java) there are opensource alternatives available for the viewer but not for .net.
After a while I found a description that it is possible to integrate the Adobe Reader via ActiveX. Armin sent me a short C# example how to do it. Sadly I could not find the necessary dll’s. After some search for this dll’s I found the documentation page of Adobe where they provide examples for the usage of the Adobe Reader within a C# application. After compiling this application I found the needed dll’s in the output directories of this project and then I could set up my application just fine.
The only problem with the examples where that they where unnecessary complicated. I reduced the example to a minimum needed and created a small example application. The example including a short description can be found in the enterpriselab wiki:
Some more interesting links I found during my research:
OpenSSO SP with Shibboleth 1.3 IdP
I recently managed to get OpenSSO working as an SP together with a Shibboleth 1.3 IdP in aaitest. Beside figuring out how the names of the configureation fields map between OpenSSO and Shib, I also had to write a small OpenSSO plugin to read the username from the Shib Assertion and make it available to OpenSSO. This is because Shibboleth doesn’t send the username in the authentication statement (where OpenSSO expects it), but in the attributes section.
This scenario uses SAML 1.1 POST, my own Shib 1.3 IdP with attribute push enabled and some selfcompiled OpenSSO CVS version (but should also work with official builds and Suns Access Manaer). You can find a step-by-step guide for this setup here.
getopt vs. optparse
Last week I was getting the MessageBroker started for the DustBot project. I needed some code for logging, and starting the server. Since I wanted to have a simple way to specify command line parameters for the MessageBroker I thought about writing some getopt code to do this. This was the time I stumbled upon Poco. Poco is a C++ library that helps to build networking application. One such module provides easy networking to C++. In addition it also provides some helper classes to easily set up a deamon application including parsing the command line parameters.
To parse the command line parameters with Poco was much easier then with getopt and was done very quickly. At this point I thought why do I not have something like this in Python? After a quick search I found optparse a Python module that helps to parse the command line parameters in a much easier way then getopt. To check if it works as easy as it looked like I integrated it into the regexplace script I posted earlier (Change of multiple files). The new version is uploaded to the wiki and can be downloaded from here.
If you need to parse command line parameters with python I recommend the optparse module. Since it really works well and is much easier to use then getopt.
Vacation!
Finally I got a few days of vacation, I went to Saas Fee for skiing with some friends. The first day I was skiing, which was wonderful. The snow was smooth, the sun was shining and my skiing skills were not as rusty as I was afraid of. The second day I tried to learn snowboarding, which was quite a painful experience. I didn’t get hurt seriously, but i fell down quite a lot. I also tried to learn another half day of snowboarding and managed to do some curves right, however I still fell down too often. To really learn snowboarding it would take a week or so I guess.Check out the Gallery Pictures were taken by Guerkan