The Network under the Bright-Bright Sky

After acquiring so many toys (read: gadgets), it’s really common to conduct many hand-on experiments with them. Sometimes those experiments did actually grow to the size of mini-projects.

Sometimes the projects are so useful that I am eagar to share with everyone. Sometimes those are really just miniature but interested idea, and indeed needs the input from everyone to polish and make it useful.

At any case, this is the distribution center for the projects.

List of Projects

Please refer to the navigation tree at the right hand side.

Last update was almost 8 months ago. Now, xLanguage 2.0 could hide those post written in foreign language that reader cannot read. It’s effective under category list, in the RSS feed, when being searched…”This post is not available under…” is no longer shown! Of course, it’s your choice to activate this behavior, and you could also limit this behavior only to certain language.

There was actually a plan long ago to get this implemented, however life is hard and I just couldn’t find any free time to invest into this, afterall there wasn’t a strong user request. Until last Decemeber, when a user seriously asking for this feature (though with not much money) still I was exhausted and couldn’t take it. I was looking for help from my friend - Huizhe, but the user is converted to qTranslate when we were trying to send him an offer. Anyway, Huizhe spent a few good hours in the weekend to get this feature out of door, after bringing the UI and Readme file up to the par of Wordpress 2.7, the originally planned Milestone 2 is now finally completed! Enjoy!

Goal: Under Windows Domain environment, the Intranet user could authenticate oneself to a website hosted on Linux/Apache without password prompt, when browsed with IE or Firefox to browse, hence the Single Sign On (SSO). During the course of setup, the Linux box will join the Domain and have a Computer Account created.

Non Goal: Enable domain logon for Linux in General. Authorization is also not discussed.

Introduction

If the target is to accept domain’s credential, the question will actually be much easier. KB555092 is one of the way to achieve that, but basically that means the credential will be transmitted in clear text to the web server, then the server will test it with the domain controller. If such a website setup is browsed with IE, the prompt will state such problem in clear, and it won’t do SSO either. To the client, this is very insecure, even with SSL enabled, it means the web server could have the control of the credential. All in al, KB555092 is not what I want. I think there are other solutions like LDAP could achieve similar result.

The key in KB555092 is that KrbMethodNegotiate is Off, that denys the SSO from happening. However, to turn it on is not as simple as flagging it as on, there is quite some steps to need to be done in the background.

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Okay, publishing the work is always the hardest, especially for the first time for a particular project. Now I have Trac and Subversion setup (and BTW, I upgraded Wordpress to 2.5), publishing UsbAvrUsb, hColorLED and UsbHid.

With these software, with a Atmel USB AVR series controller (like AT90USB162) prototype board and some LEDs, you can then control these LEDs to be at any color on the computer, through the shinny USB interface.

Recently I have been involved in some LED side-project, and the whole story by itself should also be blogged…may be in another day.

A year ago I was looking for a calculator software replacement for my Windows Mobile, and finally ended up at some random Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) style calculator software. I didn’t know the existence of RPN before that, not even at the time of downloading, but I love it once get used to it. (At some points it’s because of the UI. The builtin one is just unacceptable)

After upgrade my Phone, I’ve lost the software and never found it on the Net. Not even a free RPN’s software. It’s about time to Ctrl-N!

Although the precision and functionality is less than optimal, comparing to Desktop’s calc.exe, but it’s far more superior than Mobile’s IMHO. It’s about time to release it (Release often, right?): http://hellosam.net/project/hrpncalc, a free RPN calculator written in .NET.

As I have mentioned in the eariler post, I was working to fix some critical bugs and at the same time putting some more features into the xLanguage plugin, a Wordpress plugin which enables multilanguage blog.

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