Wednesday Aug 12, 2009

Meteor Shower

With support of my wife, we inspired our body to go with us. We hit the trail around 9PM. The sun had set completely, but it was not dark. Street lights were so bright at night. We didn't need to take out flashlights.

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Thursday Jul 23, 2009

Change Amadmin Password

Someone might want to change the super user amadmin's password of Access Manager (AM) 7.0 or 7.1 for various reasons. Be careful. It is tricky. If you try to change it directly on Directory Server (DS), you would find that you can not login as amadmin any more.

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Wednesday Jul 08, 2009

Firecookie, Firebug and Firefox

Updated my firefox to 3.5 yesterday, suddenly found cookie is no longer manageable on privacy tab. As I have to work on web applications, losing the ability of viewing and removing cookies is a big deal for me.

What to do? search the web as always. I found firecookie implemented by Jan Odvarko. You can go to mozilla site to add it. Note, it only works along with firebug. Good luck!

Monday Jun 29, 2009

Museum Free Days at SF Bay

Free 1st Sunday
Asian Art Museum - 200 Larkin st., San Francisco

Free 1st Tuesday
Cartoon Art Museum - 655 Mission St., San Francisco
de Young Museum - 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., San Francisco
Legion of Honor - 34th Ave & Clement St., San Francisco
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - 151 Third St., San Francisco

Free 1st Wednesday
Exploratorium - 3601 Lyon St., San Francisco
Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 McReynolds Rd. Sausalito, CA 94965

Free 1st Thursday
Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive - 2626 Bancroft Way, 2621 Durant Ave, Berkeley
Burlingame Pez Museum - 214 California Dr., Burlingame

Free 2nd Sunday
Oakland Museum of California - 1000 Oak St., Oakland

Free 3rd Wednesday
California Academy of Sciences - 55 Music Concourse Dr., San Francisco

Tuesday Jun 09, 2009

Stop asadm to ask for master password

Sun Java Application Server 9.x or glassfish command asadm asks for master password during execution. At SJAS 8.x era, asadm only asked for one password, AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD, and you can save "AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=" into a file and supply this file as the value of parameter "--passwordfile". Now newer version asks for master password. It might be a security improvement, but it is inconvenient for developers.

Someone told me to set envt variable AS_ADMIN_MASTERPASSWORD. This does not help. However, the solution is simple. You can use the same password file, but add one more line "AS_ADMIN_MASTERPASSWORD=". Actually you can even use a --savemasterpassword flag when executing asadm command with subcommand create-domain, create-node-agent, and change-master-password. An encrypted master-password file will be created under the home directory. And this will stop prompting for master password.

Friday May 29, 2009

Mac OS Update Leads to Reinstall

Mac OS X 10.5.7 update caused an OS reinstall, actually should call it archive install ...

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Wednesday May 20, 2009

OpenSSO 8.0 update1 Release

The first official patch of OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 - update1 - had been released. It is placed on sunsolve since last Friday May 15. The patch ID is 141655-01.

The release notes of OpenSSO 8.0 had been published on wikis.sun.com. Unlike Access Manager 7.x/6.x, OpenSSO 8.0 has no platform dependent packages, but a single war. The way of installing the patch is also changed a lot. The installation instruction is a must read. But one step is similar to old releases though, you need to run updateschema.sh script (updateschema.bat for windows) at the end.

Thursday Apr 23, 2009

The complete list of the 1,300 top U.S. high schools

2008年全美高中排名(新闻周刊)

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Saturday Apr 11, 2009

ldapsearch on Mac OS

MacBook comes with a ldapsearch command under /usr/bin. However I could not use it to search on either Sun Directory Server 5.x/6.x or OpenDS 1.x. I used the exact same command that worked fine on Solaris/Linux box. What was wrong?

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Thursday Apr 09, 2009

Access Manager SM Cache

We all know that configuration of Access Manager (AM, called OpenSSO for 8.0 release) is very sophisticated. It is nice to have fine granular control of this product. But some configuration property names are confusing and even the comments are not clear enough. Here I just want to share what I learned recently on those properties controlling the cache SM (Service Management).

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Saturday Mar 21, 2009

Java Class Version Problem

Class com.iplanet.services.naming.WebtopNaming has unsupported major or minor version numbers, which are greater than those found in the Java Runtime Environment version 1.5.0_15

What do you think about the above error? The first reaction would be WebtopNaming class must be compiled by JDK1.6 or later.

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Tuesday Mar 17, 2009

unable to find valid certification path to requested target

When working on a client that works with an SSL enabled server running in https protocol, you could get error 'unable to find valid certification path to requested target' if the server certificate is not issued by certification authority, but a self signed or issued by a private CMS.

Don't panic. All you need to do is to add the server certificate to your trusted Java key store if your client is written in Java. You might be wondering how as if you can not access the machine where the server is installed. There is a simple program can help you. Please download the Java program and run

% java InstallCert _web_site_hostname_

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Monday Mar 16, 2009

Kids Gamble

.....
As usual it didn't take too long for kids get their pocket empty. Tiger come to me excitedly, and asked for 2 more quarters. Other kids told me that he was going to win a Nintendo DS. The game is simple. With two quarters, One got 3 chances to push a button to stop the spinning tick. The base wheel marked with numbers from -3 to +3. +3 means your position goes up 3 levels, -3 of course lows you down 3 levels. The game does not reset for a new game. So Tiger is at 5th level, one short from winning. That is why kids were so exhilarated.
.....

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Monday Mar 09, 2009

Tooth Fairy

Eric lost tooth again. This time he lost two at the same day. That was not a surprise. What he surprised us is that he kept quiet until late in the night. He told us that he didn't want to announce it initially, because he wanted to test whether Tooth Fairy is real. His old brother had known the truth of Tooth Fairy already a few years ago. But he was not sure.

He eventually told his mom because he didn't want to lost the chance of getting a few dollars under his pillow. He is a smart boy, isn't he!

Another interesting story, Is the Tooth Fairy Real?, is worth to read.

Tuesday Jan 13, 2009

Sun Alert 249106

In Access Manager 7.1 patch2 release, due to a security bug fix, super admin user amadmin can no longer authentication to AM through LDAP auth module, the default one out of box. With 7.1p2 installed, amadmin user can only login to "DataStore" auth module. If you deploy AM7.1 in legacy mode, you would have to follow the instructions in the Sun Alert 249106 to enable DataStore auth module.