If you probably using “Search Unification” capability in Google Search Appliance, you may notice that when you pass the HTTP login form of GSA (built-in security manager), you may have prompted by the dialog box for reentering credentials. The quick answer is go to Serving>Access Control, and change the “Challenge users with HTTP Basic Authentication” to never.
p.s. Beware of your security policies.
Recently, I showed a little greedy appetite to renew my gadgets. Here are my current stuff:
Lenovo ThinkPad R400
One word. I really love this one. I have Win 7 Professional installed on it and it works awesome. On the other hand, I tried openSuse Linux on that and it works fine without any headache. My current OS currently is Win 7. One of the things I really like about it is ThinkVantage package customized for Win 7.
Microsoft Notebook Wireless Optical Mouse 3000
I bought this wireless mouse some time ago. I really like how smooth it is. However if you have more money, go for blue track ones.
Nexus One
Oh… This is my latest checkout. 3 years ago I bought an i-mate sp5 shipped with win mobile 5 standard edition. This Nexus One now is my migration from win platform to Android. I really like how connected this device is.
Maxtor Basic
Well, as the name implies, it is Basic. However, I installed TrueCrypt on it so that I can take full advantage of security features you should pay money for in higher specs versions.
I was watching Google I/O, and I remember they implied that Google Wave is the future of communication or perhaps the next generation of Email. Considering how awesome Google Wave is from technical perspective, at first this statement seems logical. However, I remembered an informal survey by Robert Scoble that asked from Friendfeed followers “Who is still using Google Wave?”. obviously most of them replied negatively.
On the other side of the fence, I compare my own behavior in Facebook and Twitter. I can find my Boss and get a faster reply in there than our corporate email. People, who barely know each other, asked their technical questions in Twitter and they get a fast reply from other people. In other words, twitter works as a pull system (specific requests come in) rather than Search engines’ push model (lots of un/related information comes in).
The whole idea that I am trying to express (and I know, it is still pretty lame) is that the whole future email, email 2.0, collaborative communication, or whatever else, has two pillars: 1) it is (more)open and social, 2) It is a mixture of business and leisure tools.
What I really like to see in future, is something like docs.com. It is a business app (potentially) that is integrated with a social network. You can type a project plan, and share it between colleagues. Consequently you may get approvals, and comments, in one place. That seems awesome!
SAP StreamWork may be a glimpse of future communication efforts.
Recently, I was dealing with one of our customers who had problem using Google Search Appliance (GSA) for serving secured contents to users. The scenario is as below:
The repository was a proprietary CMS written explicitly by one of their vendors. It uses NTLM for authentication and it uses Java servlet to serve contents. GSA successfully crawled all the document (obvious from crawl diagnostic section), however, the contents could not be shown in the serving page to the users.
As the contents were secured, users is asked about their credentials first, and GSA sends a batch of 10 URLs (by default) to repository to check whether the user has the right to see those results or not. For each URL, GSA waits 2.5 seconds to get the reply back and if CMS doesn’t reply, the GSA closes the TCP connection and removes the URL from the user serving results.
The box sends a HEAD request for NTLM (and GET request for form authentication) and gets the authorization result by that. We sent a cURL request to the box using the following command:
curl -I -G --ntlm -u "NTLM Username:NTML Password" --trace-time sample_URL_to_Check > output.txt
The result I got is:
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
WWW-Authenticate: NTLM TlRMTVNTUAACAAAAEQA3ADkAXwAzADIAXwBDADcAAAAAAA==
Content-Length: 0
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2010 06:47:40 GMT
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=F6E2053FSHDHFGC4DB5241EDD8.jul; Path=/
Last-Modified: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:27:37 GMT
Content-Type: application/mspowerpoint
Content-Length: 97792
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:49:40 GMT
The first request is a challenge, and the second one is the response to check the authorization using the username/password. as it is obvious, it takes more than 2.5 seconds to return.
The first solution is to increase the timeout time (for each URL it can be maximum 5 seconds). However, we found a development issue that takes more than usual time to return the requested HEAD answer.
Recently, I was reading between lines of new press releases, and saw something strange happening. First and foremost, Microsoft phased out its Courier incubation project, that disappoints lots of people like me. Secondly, HP drops its Slate project running Win7. The last but not the least is the acquisition of Palm by HP.
Putting all these together, we can conclude that a company like HP (and presumably Lenovo, HTC, etc) are going to develop their own OS or using other open ones such as Android.
One of the only reasons Microsoft does not release its own hardware is expected retaliation by Hardware vendors (partners). As it is expected that partners such as HP (using WebOS), and HTC (developing its own OS) are leaving Microsoft, it is obvious that sooner or later we can see a series of Microsoft branded gadgets. I hope those gadgets will me more stylish and classy that Kin phones.
My current status is something like this:
3 Companies, 5 Department, 20 people involved (directly), and only one developer (me)
The above paragraph speaks for itself. Meanwhile I am trying to apply somewhere for my Ph.D.
Any Idea?
There are a bunch of case studies, selected by Nicholas Allen in his blog, about implementation of project using WCF technology. Check them out and get lots of ideas… [Here]
del.icio.us Tags:
WCF,
.net
As these days everyone is talking about this Google Wave thingy, I thought to start checking what it is really are. I got familiar with this platform firstly in one of Google IO 2009 videos where the team involved with this project introduced that. Well, nothing to hide and I should say that it created a Wow at that time but the same time I told myself isn’t it a little hard to work with?
Well it seems I was right at the moment. Robert Scoble called it overhyped and a too noisy product that brings un-productivity. He mentioned that it has the problems of IM and email together [Read here]. It is obvious from his review that he chooses twitter and friendfeed over Google Wave for mass real time communications. Also Louis Gray, wrote a great review about the service that is worth reading (you can see complexity there) [Read here].
Also Check Ray Ozzie comments about it and how he compares Live Mesh and Google Wave. He argues that [Read here]:
"if you have something that by its very nature...is very complex with many roles and the way you configure it...then you need open source to have many instances of it because no one will be able to do an independent implementation of it"
In my own view as a developer, Google Wave is going to be a good platform for me to develop real time applications but with one hiccup! I really don’t like the API they provide when I compare it to the Live Mesh API as a replacement option. I think we should wait for future updates.
Personally, If one day I have a chance to talk to someone in Microsoft, I prefer to have a chat with Ray Ozzie or Scott Gu but I cannot hide how impressed I am after reading part three of Techcrunch interview with Steve Ballmer.
Just interested in how beautifully he managed to describe competitive market of OS, Mobile, and of course browsers. The golden quotations are:
Chrome is a rounding error to date. Safari is a rounding error to date. But Firefox is not.
In the OS business, it’s generally advisable to get it right and stay right as opposed to have many of them.
Netbooks are just the first battleground.
You can read the interview here.
Today for the first time I configured the box to use GSA authentication for serving the secured data. Previously our customer used NTLM for authentication.
While I was configuring the section under Administration->LDAP setup I encountered a weird exception. It raised a “javax.naming.authenticationexception” with the error code of 49. After some Googling I finally found out that instead of a loooong Distinguished Name (DN) like
uid=username,ou=op1,dc=ld,dc=corp,dc=com
we should use it in a email address format as follow:
username@ld.corp.com
where ld.corp.com is the LDAP server address.
Enjoy.