do it. think it. blog it! ... a twisted world

Tuesday Jun 10, 2008

Writer: Anonymous

My mother used to ask me what the most important part of the body is.
Through the years I would take a guess at what I thought was the correct Answer.

When I was younger, I thought sound was very important to us as humans, so I said, "My ears, Mommy."

She said, "No. Many people are deaf. But you keep thinking about it and I will ask you again soon."

Several years passed before she asked me again. Since making my first attempt, I had contemplated the correct answer.

So this time I told her, "Mommy, sight is very important to everybody, so it must be our eyes."

She looked at me and told me, "You are learning fast, but the answer is not correct because there are many people who are blind."

Stumped again, I continued my quest for knowledge and over the years, Mother asked me a couple more times and always her answer was, "No. But you are getting smarter every year, my child."

Then one year, my grandfather died. Everybody was hurt. Everybody was crying. Even my father cried. I remember that especially because it was only the second time I saw him cry.

My Mom looked at me when it was our turn to say our final good-bye to my Grandfather. She asked me, "Do you know the most important body part yet, my dear?" I was shocked when she asked me this now. I always thought this was a game between her and me.

She saw the confusion on my face and told me, "This question is very important. It shows that you have really lived in your life. For every body part you gave me in the past, I have told you were wrong and I have given you an example why.

But today is the day you need to learn this important lesson."

She looked down at me as only a mother can. I saw her eyes well up with tears. She said, "My dear, the most important body part is your shoulder."

I asked, "Is it because it holds up my head?"

She replied, "No, it is because it can hold the head of a friend or a loved one when they cry. Everybody needs a shoulder to cry on sometime in life, my dear. I only hope that you have enough love and friends that you will always have a shoulder to cry on when you need it."

Then and there I knew the most important body part is not a selfish one.

It is made for others and not for yourself. It is sympathetic to the pain of others.

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did . But people will NEVER forget how you made them feel.

The origin of this letter is unknown, but it brings a blessing to everyone who passes it on. Good friends are like stars...You don't always see them, but you always know they are there.

I'll take this opportunity to thank you for being there for me whenever I needed you...THANKS A LOT...

Friday Jan 18, 2008

In my effort to have a non vendor specific JavaCard reader application/applet. Here's something else I discovered. Well, this may sound silly The SmartCard/JavaCard reader neds to either be built into your desktops/laptops or you may need to use a external reader. You are free to buy a reader from any vendor and in the process of doing so, you would also receive the necessary PC/SC drivers from the vendor.

but to make life simpler, here's a small list of vendors that you may procure your smartcard reader from.

  1. Schlumberger
  2. Gemplus
  3. SCM Microsystems
  4. Towitoko
  5. Omnikey
  6. Advanced Card Systems
  7. Athena Smartcard Systems
  8. Intertex IX
  9. Ankari (American Biometrics)
  10. Orga

There may be some of you who may not want to go through he process of buying a reader and a smartcard but would still be interedted in testing the applet/application without shelling out any moolah. Well, I have something for those folks too. I suggest you use the Smart Card Simulator. TSCS is a program for Windows 32 simulating a terminal and a smart card. Neither a smart card nor a smart card terminal is necessary. Just install the software on your PC and start working with smart cards. With this software you can see ¨into¨ the smart card, create files, send commands and receive the response from the smart card.

The Smart Card Simulator offers you a wide variety of possibilities to learn and work with a smart card. It can be used to understand and to learn the principles of a smart card, design and test a smart card application, calculate typical execution times etc.

null

Tuesday Dec 05, 2006

Ja VA

Saturday Nov 18, 2006

I'm not gonna write much on this, But let existing articles that exist out there speak for itself.......

  1. Student shot with Taser by UCPD officers [ Link 1 ]
  2. Call for Probe of UCLA Muslim Student Taser Incident [ Link 2 ]
  3. A third incident, a new video [ Link 3 ]
  4. Please call UCLA about student being taser-ed  [ Link 4 ]
  5. UCLA Police repeatedly taser muslim student  [ Link 5 ]

 Here's the youtube video: (warning: this aint very graphic, but the students screams are horrifying)

Here's what the UCLA Police Department had to say about this incident. [ pdf Link ]

Wednesday Nov 15, 2006

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.
source : AP

are we kidding !!! 

patrix has a nice writeup on this issue. So head on over to iPatrix for a read. 

Tuesday Nov 14, 2006

Hi folks, I'm back to blogdom...

yes after moving away from b.s.c to my own wordpress hosted service which I really got to enjoy for a while, a OS reinstall on my server caused me to loose all data on the server, all blog posts and more importanly "valuable data". But however, like someone had told me before... shit happens, we gotto move on....

I've tried revamping my lost data, but was not successfull in doing so.. and have lost hope in being able to revamp it...

I'm back blogging on b.s.c and hey !! there's not gonna be an OS reinstall here... so stay tuned.. and please update your bookmarks...

note: I would be refraining from blogging about "certain" subject matters from here on forward....

Monday Oct 02, 2006

oh god.. as if things werent bad enough… yet another school shooting, this time at a one room amish school in rural Lancaster, Pennsylvania. WHo in the world would have thought that the amish scool would fall victim to this ongoing violence. USATODAY reported that 6 kids were dead. I just cannot understand whats going on with these school shootings increasing in number. The shooter was among the dead too according to an AP report.

The shooter was among the dead, and a number of people were injured, said state police Cpl. Ralph Striebig.

“There are a number of people dead,” Striebig said. “The exact number I do not know yet.”

The county coroner said at least six people were killed in the shooting.

Police surrounded the one-room school late Monday morning, and the Lancaster County 911 website reported that dozens of emergency units were dispatched to a “medical emergency” at 10:45 a.m.

Two hours later, about three dozen people in traditional Amish clothing, hats and bonnets stood near the small school building speaking to one another and to authorities. At least two ambulances had left the scene, and at least one person was taken on a stretcher to a medical helicopter.


The Amish school is in Bart, in southeastern Lancaster County, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) west of Philadelphia. Amish children attend schools until 8th grade (according to the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau’s Web page) There are about 25,000 Amish in Lancaster County (Raber’s 2004 Almanac).

In a rural amish county with such a small population and children who go to school upto the 8th grade, I wonder who’d go so haywire to go on such a rampage.

Friday Sep 29, 2006

K. I admit, the 2.0 syndrome has hit me too. I have been watching all these 2.0 applications sprout up, and am taken up by it. I have seen numerous applications branded 2.0, and have seen social bookmarking sites like digg, netscape (my very own hac.kers.us), del.icio.us, wikipedia, community driven sites, blogs across multitudes of platforms, blog aggregators like planet identity, etc.

I wondered if all these social 2.0 sites really made any money. I then thought of starting an experiment…. just to see what community involvement really meant. Is is just a bunch of folks who want to be heard, or folks who really involve themselves in the technology that they preach. But being in the identity space, I wanted to come up with a cocktail recipe that had a flavor of wiki’s, aggregation, tags, community commenting, the ability to modify anything, the ability to post anything. So I though of putting up a RSS feed aggregator which enabled folks to not only submit their feeds, but also vote on them, archive them, publish them, comment on individual posts, tag the articles etc… I used pat’s planetidentity’s opml feed for a starting point, and here’s what I came up with. The IDENTITY BlogReGator

Here’s the thought behind it. planetidentity started off as an aggregator for IDENTITY related blogs. But not every blog owner/blogger blogs about identity all the time, there’s numerous posts about cats, dogs, bicycles, airplanes, war, terrorism, saussage and eggs, and even sex. So basically what we end up with is just another aggregator. I wondered on how an aggregator could be setup to filter out the non subject matter related posts. Filtering on tags was one way, filtering on categories was another, but not everybody uses tags and categorizes their posts. I wanted to setup a community driven aggregator, where the community itself would decide on which posts from the aggregated feeds are relevant to the subject matter, the community would tag the posts, publish them, archive them and also edit them and comment on them. Basically this aggregator follows the OPEN DOORS policy where the community would drive the content and it’s visibility without the hassle submitting forms… no login, no authentication… (no infocard, well, if I am to accept any infocard presented, why should I accept any crediential at all, I’m gonna let everybody in) the community itself administers the site.

here’s what you can do… check out the site, play around with the several features that I have embedded into it (I’m in the process of embedding more as time goes by), submit your own feeds if you’d like, publish other posts if you find them relevant, delete posts if you think they are stupid, comment on others posts, edit other comments, and posts… basically let yourself loose and do anything you’d like…

All I want out of this is to see how much this community that cares so much about identity, web2.0 and community driven sites really involve themselves. This is PoC 2.0.

I’m gonna let the results themselves speak for itself. No involvement means nobody really gives a damn. It’s all hogwash… small talk… If the involvement increases, well, I wonder what the point really is ? thats something I would invesi=tigate and learn from later. and if folks simply launch a war by modifying the content of each others feeds/posts, then we are at war a 2.0 war, and if someone deletes everthing from my site, that someone really hates me… show me some love folks, check out the site and let me know what you think of it?

here’s the URL to my PoC 2.0 again : IDENTITYGANG.COM -> make this your planetidentity. Pat can have his planet (just a joke pat, no offense. i’ve been told that you have a great sense of humor.)

Tuesday Apr 11, 2006

With Debashish's Help I am moving all posts from this blog on rollerweblogger to wordpress. I hopefuly should complete this migration by this weekend. Once all the posts including comments are migrated over I hope you would continute reading my new wordpress hosted blog.

UPDATE : The reason for migrating the blog over is because I wish to enable yadis/lid/openid/sxore and infocard (PHP & JAVA) authentication on the blog. And it's not possible with a hosted service. So That was my only reason.

Monday Apr 10, 2006

AH!!! Hellooo world. Java based infocards are taking over... Here's Yet another Java Based Infocard Relying Party Demo. This time It's Ashish Jain's implementation of it. Ashish works for PingIdentity and is also the co-author of J2EE 1.4 Bible & Enterprise SOA (I bet you didnt need that introduction, as you would have known that already.).

His demo is available at pingidentity's Jetty Based demo server. His implementaion however does not use bouncycastle or XOM but is again a Java based RP developed from scratch using XMLBeans and XMLSEC.

It sure is a chweeth Object Oriented world aint it ??

UPDATE : There's one thing for sure that infocard and WS-* is helping me with. IE: Making new connections and a LOT of new friends.

According to this news report, Red Hat announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss Inc. The aquistion was being speculated for a while, But now, I believe that it's time to stop speculating as it's official. Reuters reported the deal to be worth an initial $350 Million.
WOW !!
Red Hat also said that they would pay another $70 Million if performance metrics were met.

Sweeet deal aye ?

Looks like the times of aquisions and mergers are back.. the dot com boom was really a "proof of concept".... And everybody seems to be capitalizing on it now.

I wonder whats gonna happen to JBOSS's user base who are using it especially because it's "Open Source". or maybe another Fedora App Server would be out soon... just so that it stays Open Source.

UPDATE : Links to Market Rumble on this topic available here...

Wednesday Apr 05, 2006

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Priority Code: MLGHNLAW
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Learn more about this event at www.interop.com.


Attend the Security Conference to gain insight into the key technology and business topics associated with securing an information infrastructure. Learn to identify, understand and measure threats and risks in order to properly design and deploy people, process, tools and technologies. Gain tips for presenting security in a business context where the business implications they represent are clearly understood.

Tuesday Apr 04, 2006

My laptop started behaving weird today. everytime I restart it I get a error window popup with the word "smoni" in the title and the message "ReceiveDatagram error # 10054". A screenshot of the error message is as below:


Does anybody have any idea what this could possible be from ? I'm clueless... I'd appreciate any help I can get to eliminate this error window from popping up on every reboot...

Well, I do not wanna say that I buy the concept of User Controlled Identities in it's "entirety" But however I'd like to say that I am trying pretty hard to buy into the "concept". Amartya Sen, The co-author of "Identity and Violence" says that the "freedom to choose one's identity affiliations is the antidote to divisive extremism"

Well. I'd not hesitate to do my part in playing a role to eliminate divisive extremism. And just to add to that I'm buying Kim's concept.. slowly.. very very very very slowly... ;-)

However while on the "identity" subject, like the "rest of the world"... I too have a question for Kim. Whats with this symmetric proof key in the SAML assertion? Like me, I bet there are several-several folks out there who are awaiting an answer... Kim Please... Could you ? PLEASE...

Monday Apr 03, 2006

A few folks have been having issues using self signed server certificates to invoke the Identity Selector WinFX Component. Here's a short walkthorough on how to use a self signed certificate and save a few $$$'s from having to but a Certificate from a Trusted Authority.

The key is to use the sha1rsa Signature Algorithm instead of using the default md5rsa Signature Algorithm.


openssl genrsa -des3 -out pass.key 1024
openssl rsa -in pass.key -out server.key
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -sha1 -newkey rsa:1024 -nodes -keyout server.key -out server.crt

Then copy the server.key and server.crt to your webservers config directory.
cp server.key /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/
cp server.crt /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/

Change file access permissions
chmod go-rwx /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/server.key

Made a test cert
make testcert

Create a server.pem file as by concatenating the server.key file and the server.crt file as follows:
cat /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/server.key /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt > /etc/httpd/conf/server.pem

restart your webserver.

Your self signed certificate should now invoke the identity selector without any issues...

NOTE : Remember folks. If youre learning anything at all from all of us who are blogging our experiences and processes about getitng infocard to work in all these various platforms and scenarios to PLEASE "pay it forward".