Wired News: Japan’s Growing Mac ‘Mod’ Squad

Went to the West Hollywood Halloween dealio last night. Pretty large crowd (several hundred thousand people, apparently) and some great costumes. I spent most of the time at one of the stages of a ‘band’ (Mutaytor) that my friend spins fire for. Also thought I’d mention, for those in the LA area, that RESFEST is coming to town this weekend. I bought tickets for the Cinema Electronica, Chris Cunningham Retrospective, and By Design shows. Also, all day Saturday is SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo.

The LA Freewaves kicked off their wan^H^H^Hmemefest today. Xeni did a little writeup in today’s Wired News. I love this quote:

“Before, artists had to figure out how to access costly facilities for editing and output,” she said. “Now, $5,000 buys you just about everything you need to produce high-quality video artwork.”

For those unfamiliar with the subject area, ‘high quality video artwork‘ is by and large an oxymoron.

In case I haven’t mentioned it before (I’m almost sure I have): Microsoft Windows HTTP Services 5.0 SDK (WinHTTP). Includes HTTP tracing/packet logging.

Redirect in response to POST transaction

Automatic redirection of a POST transaction to GET is entirely feasible, using status 302 or 303. Although the specification for 302 mandates clients to verify the redirection with the user, this mandate seems to be generally ignored.

Note, that if you’re doing an HTTPS -> HTTP redirect, the only way not to get an ‘insecure’ warning message seems to be by using a meta refresh. Going through a lynx shows that this is what Yahoo! does (interesting stuff in the trace). Too bad I didn’t think to look through lynx an hour ago.

Whoa, the Stowaway XT is so cool it almost makes me want to by a Tungsten T.

Way.Nu – Jonathan Peterson’s musings on technology, captivation marketing, net.culture and other ephemera

I spent a lot of time today at the Wilshire Grand today at the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting (USC is the host). The middleware presentations were fairly interesting. In one of the presentations, a short Shibboleth presentation was given. Shibboleth is basically a federated web-based authentication/authorization type middleware (think digital identity [but immediately useful, at least for education settings], role/attribute type stuff). It’s actually mostly running now, with the first beta coming out next week and a 1.0 scheduled for around December. I like the [More digital identity: Digital Identity Weblog, Digital ID World, OpenSAML).

More thoughts as I go through documents. The stuff I’m working on with developing some sort of intra-campus authentication/auth doesn’t directly map with the Shib stuff, but it’s still pretty relevant (and the rest of the middleware track of course). One interesting thing is that WebCT apparently implemented Shib support in a couple weeks (treating it as a portal). One interesting thing I noticed from the demo was that the Brown WebCT has a module for a ‘CLASS blog’ running MT. Weird and wacky.

[Will try to add some more links and stuff to this entry when I gather some thoughts / go through my notes]

One weird thing was that there was wi-fi set up, but it kept flapping up and down (and making it unusable). Very strange.

iCalibrate is a nice tool for customizing some visual bits of iCal. So, doing some playing around. Is it really possible that iCal doesn’t have Location or Category support? Even Mozilla’s Calendar has it. A reminder on what’s defined in the iCalendar spec: Attachment, Categories, Classification, Comment, Description, Geographic Position, Location, Percent Complete, Priority, Resources, Status, and Summary.

Ha. Sometimes I forget about how lame the default clipboard is It’s amazing that almost all systems today still default to a single buffer clipboard. Mystifying.

Summary: Omniture‘s SiteCatalyst is really slick, but honestly is just too expensive for USC’s needs. It’s sort of surprising the how lacking the field of open source software is for log analysis. None of the most popular packages (Analog, AWstats, Webalizer) allow any clickstreaming or path analysis, much less any sort of mining/drill down.

After going through a bunch of packages, we acquired a license for one of my old favorites, Sawmill. It was the best for our needs, being able to handle large data sets without choking (I did testing on about 35GB of logs, less than a months worth), being useful straight out of the box and extremely powerful/flexible. Also it has the advantage of being dirt cheap. Some negatives: really clunky interface, sometimes you wish it would do better caching for drill downs you’re going to want, I haven’t quite figured out configuring the HTML output for all the drill down views, and a lot of options can be changed, but the entire DB needs to be rebuilt (not just added to) to apply the changes. On the 1-CPU 1.26GHz P3 I’m currently running stats on, that means usually, I don’t get an answer until a few days later.

Sawmill is multithreaded, which seems like it might be good for clustering, although right now it looks like the threads are per config, not for single large jobs…

Oh, other related stuff, I finally got around to installing and looking at ClickTracks today. OMFG, this thing rocks. In a way, it’s really obvious, but it is a really great idea. And a great implementation. What can I say? It seems to work. [60s viewlet tour]

Hey, there’s an iCal weblog. Cool. Among the finds is PHPiCalendar, a php-based iCal file parser.

I want to synchronize all my events across all my devices via a central web accessible server. Here’s a run down.

• Mac – covered by iCal, maybe some applescripting might be needed to do two way syncs.
• Windows – Mozilla Calendar allows import and export. Hmm, can it do syncing? It’s probably scriptable. Some WSH might be required to automate… *shivers*
• Linux – on the server end, I’ll be doing some glue code (besides the aforementioned PHPiCalendar, Perl has both Date::ICal and Net::ICal), that’s fine, if I were going to do the Desktop, Evolution looks like it imports and exports iCal and is scriptable.
• Palm – covered by iSync
• Hiptop – hmm… there’s a web interface. It’s REST available. A Perl client could do it…
• Other – it’d be fairly easy to write an aim/imap/jabber bot to both give you upcoming appointments, searches, and insert/update appointments…

It looks possible. In fact, pretty good prospects given a free week or two. Hmm, my next vacation isn’t until December though. And until then I’m going to be trying my best to get my wiki outliner thing up and running. Oh well, maybe someone will take this idea and run with it. Or maybe it already exists, but I just havne’t found it yet…