another high quality weekend

Let me take a huge jump from IdentityCamp Bremen to another event that was high quality, but completely different: I am talking about the "schweizer Gesangfest 2008" in Weinfelden. I haven been there on Friday Juni 13, with the male choir of our village (Männerchor Dittingen). For our presentation we got the highest possible rating ("vorzüglich"). This was really a surprise.

But the most impressive thing on that day was the concerto with the "Choir des Jeunes de Lausanne". I never ever heared such clear and grandiose voices. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to them, do it! They even have some non-professional mp3 live recordings to download on their site.

IdentityCampBremen outcomes

First of all: thank you Ralf & co. for organizing this fantastic event! Many new thoughts and ideas are continuosly jumping around in my head!
All the web2.0 IDM stuff is still very much under development.

Because I was the only one contributing something about shibboleth, I had some very interesting discussions. For example about interoperability between CardSpace and shibboleth (but did not know much about it).
I just found some interesting (but rather old) blog entries that shibboleth is planning to integrate Cardspace support.
https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/i2-news/2007-05/msg00009.html
http://www.identityblog.com/?p=779 (by Kim Cameron!)
And, yes: cardspace support is indeed integrated into shibboleth 2.0 as a plugin (but still in alpha state): https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB2/SP+Infocard
However I don't know yet if there is any productive implementation. I'll try to set up a testing environment.

Another theme that is worth mentioning is the problem with openID that it supports just a few attributes. There are some ideas to extend this (see for example http://axschema.org), however it is impossible to find an attribute set and attribute definitions that fit all needs. I am going to post some thoughts that I firstly wrote just by mail but I think are worth mentioning (sorry, it's german):


Es ist in der Tat nicht so einfach, ich hab aber hier etwas gefunden, was vielleicht interessant sein könnte. Ist aber fast zu ausführlich und leider nicht aktuell (2005 :-( .

http://middleware.internet2.edu/dir/docs/draft-internet2-mace-dir-higher-ed-person-analysis-latest.htm
Zwei Profs haben sich die Mühe gemacht, zu analysieren, wo (im higher education Bereich) welche zusätzlichen LDAP-Attribute genutzt werden.
Offenbar aufbauend auf die LDAP-Attribute aus RFC 4519 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4519.html

Das ist alles natürlich rein LDAP und garnicht openID spezifisch.
Und das Resultat ist auch recht entmutigend:
jeder macht weitgehend, was er will.

Man kommt in der Tat langsam darauf, warum bei openID zunächst mal nur so wenige Attribute verwendet werden: alles andere ist noch schwerer zu vereinheitlichen und funktioniert, egal wie man es definiert, nur in bestimmten Bereichen (leider meist geographischen).

Vorläufig sehe ich noch keine Lösungsmöglichkeit (die nicht irgendwelche zentralistischen Merkmale hätte).
Vielleicht muss man in die Richtung meta-descriptions weiter denken, so wie axschema mit ihren xml-descriptions angefangen haben.
Vielleicht könnte man innerhalb einer (axschema oder was auch immer) Attribut-Definition zusätzliche tags wie "comparableAttribute/relatedAttribute" mit (ggf.) irgendwelchen Transformationsregeln (xslt oder regex) definieren...

Und eigentlich sind wir jetzt schon mitten im Bereich DataPortability und/oder semantic web :-)

IdentityCamp Bremen

Hurra ich fahre wirklich hin!
http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/IdentityCampBremen

Beim SWITCHaai Opcom-Meeting letze Woche hab ich auch davon gesprochen, das Resultat war folgende Fussnote im Opcom-Newseltter:

A hint for an event on Identity and Privacy next week in Germany as provided by Tobias Marquart UniBAS:
http://www.barcamp.org/IdentityCampBremen
BTW: 'bar' in the context of 'barcamp' has nothing to do with alcoholic drinks  :-) 

Für deutsch-sprechende muss das in der Tat gesagt werden. Der Kontext ist eher vom (allerdings hauptsächlich Software-Entwicklern bekannten) "foo-bar" als Platzhalter für Variablennamen oder ähnliches zu sehen, siehe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp

joomla backup and restore struggle with joomlapack

Today I tried to transfer a joomla (joomla 1.0.15) site from one (hosted) server to another. I used joomlapack.
Below are all the necessary steps that worked for me. Both of the sites are safe_mode=on

It is more a note for myself then anything else...

0) get the latest patches / update files from joomla and ftp them to your (old) joomla installation
http://joomlacode.org/

1) get the newest joomlapack files and unpack them locally.
http://www.joomlapack.net/downloads/index.html

2) via ftp: In [joomlapath]/administrator/components/ create a new directory com_joomlapack and make it world writable (for later config file write).

3) copy all the unzipped files from step 1 into that directory

4) ensure that the "[joomla]/installation" directory exists in your (old) installation. Maybe you need to get it from a current joomla full source, because you deleted it on your server... It is no problem to just copy it from a fresh zip archive. Be aware that your site will switch to offline mode as soon as the installation directory exists!
=> during backup joomlapack puts all (!) the database-entries in your current installation in the installation/sql/joomla.sql file for easy restore.

5) call joomlapack extension like this http://[yourserver]/administrator/index.php?object=com_joomlapack
because we just copied the files and did not a true component installation there is no other way to access it. Nevertheless it works great!

6) finetune the joomlapack config: create two folders via ftp (jpbckup, jpbckuptemp or whatever) somewhere in your source and chmod them world-writable. Put these folders as backup and tmp-backup locations in the joomlapack_config dialogue. Take care of the full path! Remember that the ftp path that you see is probably not the real root path of the server.
When there are no red errors anymore (joomlapack can find the path to the backup and tmp directories and can write them and can write the config file

7) backup your joomla installation with joomlapack (use the first option).

8) If you have a running joomla installation on the target server be sure to make steps 1-7 on your target server as well before continuing. - It may be enough to get the configuration.php config file in order not to loose important params (e.g. db connection).

9) download the zip file (via ftp or joomlapack webinterface) that joomlapack created.

10) unpack it locally and transfer the files to your target server, thereby overwriting an existing installation if there is one.

11) delete the configuration.php file on the target server. Because it is from the old installation it will probably not work.

12) go to http://[yournewjoomlaserver] and run through the installation process.
If you get an "restricted access" error, check http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=21663
If you only see a blank page, delete your configuration.php file

13) be sure to select "drop tables" and to _not_ select "install sample data" in the appropriate step of the installation

13a) ignore the admin password that you need to enter/accept. And that is shown as a last step of the installation. It will never work, because all accounts and data from your old system will be installed!

14) Delete the installation directory.

15) visit your site. It works exactly like the old one!

don't tell me...

that all these trails are from ordinary air traffic. I took the pictures a minute ago.
What do you think? Just yesterday the planes started trailing that way, forming a grid. I counted about 40 different trails.
You may not believe in the chemtrails thing (google it, if you like!),
but there is something in the air, isn't it?

Hi there, no videos today.

"We had to disable the feature for a little while, because of some
security concerns. Our brightest engineers are rattling their wrenches
to make things all right and bring the beloved videos back. Soon. Sorry
about this. We still love you."

This is what Skype is telling you today when you try to add a video to your
profile.

Isn't that a nice message??
You didn't know that Skype is loving you, right?