http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/

Nuff said. I might have to hack together a plugin, but throw it on the pile of things to do.

Happy Birthday to me. 24 years ago today I was delivered by Caeserian section, which explains the arrogance and the desire to take over the world

wow, what an interesting combination, but one brought about by necessity.

Windows – To get under the radar of the villanous IT department at work
Mediawiki – The best all round wiki software IMHO
XAMPP – Saves a lot of time doing configuration, has SSL support (which we’ll need)
LDAP – To authenticate against Active Directory. The whole Single Sign-On thing. If you’ve got a user database, why create a whole new one in your wiki and force your users to remember multiple passwords?

OK, setup windows and get it onto your domain. Setup XAMPP and Mediawiki. I installed XAMPP directly to c:\xampp, and moved the default contents of c:\xampp\htdocs into c:\xampp\htdocs\xampp_default. Then I installed Mediawiki into c:\xampp\htdocs. At this point you should have a working wiki, and you may like to apply a rewrite rule to make your wiki links look tidier.

Now go and grab the latest version of the LDAP Authentication plugin and pop it into c:\xampp\htdocs\includes

Now here’s the important part. The PHP manual is vague regarding setting up LDAP capability on Windows based systems, saying simply:

Note to Win32 Users: In order to enable this module on a Windows environment, you must copy several files from the DLL folder of the PHP/Win32 binary package to the SYSTEM folder of your windows machine. (Ex: C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32, or C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM). For PHP < = 4.2.0 copy libsasl.dll, for PHP >= 4.3.0 copy libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll to your SYSTEM folder.

So go ahead and grab libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll and throw them into your c:\windows\system folder, and throw some copies into c:\windows\system32 for good measure. Why not? If we’re going to get our OS messy, let’s go all the way.

There is a bunch of disjointed information in the the LDAP plugin’s discussion page, so here’s the important stuff

:You must look at your php.ini. There are an entry like ”;extension=php_ldap.dll”. Search on your system for the php_ldap.dll copying the file in the /windows root/system32/ and remove the ;. SO that in php.ini the line shows like ”extension=php_ldap.dll”.

So hell, go ahead and do that too. I’m personally not sure that you should be or have to copy these .dll’s to your system/system32 directories – because php.ini declares an extension folder to reference, and the .dll’s reside there by default. However it can’t hurt to copy these .dll’s into your sysdir.

Now, the tricky part is modifying php.ini. php.ini resides in a few locations in a XAMPP install, and you’d be inclined to modify the one in c:\xampp\php however here’s where I was struggling. I couldn’t figure out why, after all my work, LDAP still wasnt showing up in phpinfo.php (more on that… right now)

Create yourself a file named phpinfo.php with the following code in it:

< ?php
phpinfo();
?>

and place it somewhere within htdocs. So as to avoid Mediawiki jumping in ( http://yourwikiaddress/wiki/phpinfo.php = a wiki page not found ) I popped it into c:\xampp\htdocs\xampp_default and fired it up ( http://yourwikiaddress/xampp_default/phpinfo.php )

You can see that the php.ini file being referenced is not c:\xampp\php\php.ini but indeed it is c:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini and so that is the one you should be modifying. Modify it and restart Apache, and run phpinfo.php again. Do a find for LDAP and you should get something like this:

Do a search for SSL while you’re at it to ensure that SSL is going. By default AD does not allow anonymous searches etc so you’ll probably have to setup some trust via SSL.

Then, finally, follow the instructions given by Eric Santiago here and here
and you should be up and running.

It’s actually all easier done than said. But for reference, here’s the relevant part of my LocalSettings.php:

$wgDiff3 = “”;

# Restrict edit to logged in users only
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = true;
# Define that all pages can be read when not logged in
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = true;

# Prevent new registrations as we auth against AD as below
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

# Authenticate against Active Directory
require_once( ‘LdapAuthentication.php’ );
$wgAuth = new LdapAuthenticationPlugin();
$wgLDAPDomainNames = array( “DOMAIN-NAME” );
$wgLDAPServerNames = array( “DOMAIN-NAME”=>”wgtn-ad-serv.dns.tld akl-ad-serv.dns.tld” );
$wgLDAPUseSSL = false; # It works, but I have a ldap.conf file
$wgLDAPUseLocal = false;
$wgLDAPAddLDAPUsers = false;
$wgLDAPUpdateLDAP = false;
$wgLDAPMailPassword = false;
$wgLDAPRetrievePrefs = true;
$wgMinimalPasswordLength = 1;
$wgLDAPSearchStrings = array( “DOMAIN-NAME”=>”DOMAIN-NAME\\USER-NAME” );

# When you make changes to this configuration file, this will make
# sure that cached pages are cleared.
$configdate = gmdate( ‘YmdHis’, @filemtime( __FILE__ ) );
$wgCacheEpoch = max( $wgCacheEpoch, $configdate );

?>

We’ll get around to the SSL functionality when I figure out how to do it for a Windows based server. In the meantime, you can check out some more customisation/installation instructions here:
http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/05/12/1539231.shtml?tid=74&tid=13

Earlier this year I had a flu jab, based on the successes of the last two flu jabs I’ve had (all subsidised by work – which makes sense, it’s a preventative investment for their assets), and that went fine, I havent been hit by the flu in years as a consequence. The occasional sniffle, but nothing major.

Until recently, I’ve been hit with one of the latest strains of Flu, which included spewing from both ends, fever, cold sweats, weakness, dry cough, phlegm, watery eyes and a snot niagra nose. I’ve regained my strength and my extremities no longer feel groggy, and for the most part it’s become a headcold while on its slow retreat from my rampant immune system.

The downside is, however, that I’ve had to take a week off work. Legislation says you need a doctor’s certificate to claim more than three days sickness, but for me this is where it gets silly – I never asked my employer to give me sick leave, they assumed that when I called in sick that such a request was implied. I on the other hand assumed that I’d deal with all that when I got back. So when they asked me if I was going to see a doctor, I stumbled for words. Was I prepared to have a hoarse-voiced disagreement with my boss?

As far as I’m concerned, I was happy for my sick days to be unpaid leave. And while I do see the point of getting a doctor’s certificate, I’m not too keen, personally, on wasting a GP’s time for an overglorified case of sniffles. GP’s are too busy keeping the young and the old alive, who am I to bug them because I’m using a lot of tissues?

My flatmate, Karmen, has also picked up the flu, and her employer insisted that she be at work today. And Karmen works in hospo!

The major point of taking days off work for sickness is not to get a free day off work, it’s to prevent you from passing your sickness on to colleagues. The loss of me for a week will not financially affect my employer, the loss of the half dozen people in my direct team because I was coughing and sneezing near them for a day is another story.

Anyway, I have the right balance of Sinutab and Vicks Vapodrops to get by.

80′s party tomorrow night at Murphy’s Law, followed by a flatwarming, I guess I’ll have to get some pictures of me in my Don Johnson/Rod Stewart getup

update: I woke up Sunday morning with a swollen face, difficulty breathing and swallowing and a fever. After paying $70 to see an afterhours GP, I have an unspecified viral infection – the symptoms were too varied to pin it down, but think mumps or glandular fever. The fever is now gone and some of the swelling is gone, but I’m still having difficulty with food and I feel quite groggy and weak

Well, it’s nice that Emmy listened to the input of the BSD community hidden among the grizzles of the Linux community (with useful feedback from yours truely) and subsequently Adobe has rewritten the legalese to enable the BSD community once more:

FreeBSD users, this one’s for you: We have updated the EULA for this release. The first key change is that it is a combined “player” EULA, so it also refers to terms related to Adobe Reader. Second change – and one that I hope will be welcomed by many of you – is that we did away with the concept of “authorized OS” …but this means you should review the Restrictions listed in Section 3a. These changes mean that IF you as an end-user want to install on a platform that we don’t officially support in the system requirements AND you can get it to work AND you understand that we won’t provide technical support for your efforts — you can freely install the player without being in violation of the EULA. This does not impact the free distribution license, which still lists “authorized OS”.

Adobe have also dedicated some resource to the Linux plugin, and the head of this resource has a blog, the aptly named Penguin.SWF. There is some disturbing stuff though, namely that the next plugin will be heavily ALSA based to (finally) resolve a/v sync issues. And from what I can gather, there will be no ALSA on BSD.

It seems that the pleas that a higher level API like GStreamer, XIPH or Phonon, or at least the ability to configure your sound interface of choice went mostly ignored. This means that using Linux-Flash9 on *BSD will probably be problematic, as the plugin will be looking for a non-existent audio framework. There is hope though, in the form of 4Front’s SALSA (Simple-ALSA), which acts as a sort of emulation layer between ALSA apps and the OSS framework.

I personally think that Adobe should release sourcecode to its otherwise abandoned Flash development branches, namely Flash6 and Flash7 – be it under an abandonware licence or whatever – to assist the GNASH project with its progress. Adobe could go a step further and have a BSD-style duality; an Open Source community developing an Unsupported Open Source version of the plugin, with the best of the code being submitted to a Supported Closed Source plugin.

Half of me is laughing at the misfortune of the pretentious owner of this great car, the other half of me feels sorry for the pretentious-but-with-good-taste owner of this great car

Can’t be… I recently wandered into a DSE near work looking for a screen protector for my precious and was met with this just inside the door:

The DSE peons were confused when I took a photo while grinning manically, maybe they havent seen the o rly? owl before. If you’re still scratching your head, the internet oracle has your answer, as always.

I never did find a screen protector… hmmm