Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Finally resolved inability to change WebEx One Click Meeting Topic

When I first started using WebEx 3 years ago for my current job I accidentally set the WebEx One-click meeting topic to my colleagues' name.

When I tried to update the one click meeting topic it wasn't very intuitive and I gave up pretty quick.

I tried looking a couple of times when WebEx would launch but there didn't seem to be a way to do it in Meeting Center when you were actually in a meeting.

Finally decided to do another Google search and came up with Cornell's site:

Cornell's web site

Basically, you need to go to the WebEx Meeting Center website, which in my case is Meeting Center.

Then you click My WebEx on the top task bar in the browser winder, This will bring up a new page and on the left hand side gutter, click on Productivity Tools Setup.

When the Productivity Tools Setup page appears, there should be a 'virtual' card that appears in the middle of the screen.  Click Edit Settings on the top right of the card.

Then you'll be able to edit your meeting topic name.

Wouldn't it be easier for WebEx to have a global settings link from the Meeting Center main page instead of burying a change in settings with multiple mouse clicks?




Friday, November 22, 2013

First foray into Splunk

As I continue my testing endeavors into our more recent enterprise offering here at work, I've had the opportunity to test our logging framework's newest support: Oracle 11g and Splunk.

Oracle is old hat. Splunk is a little more exciting.

We've been using Spunk a lot for logging and the associated analytics in our two older products so it's nice to have support for it going forward for our newer access management offering.

For a Spunk newbie, I'd say it's pretty easy to install and for a certain log size, is free without having to buy a license; which is convenient for testing.

I was able to use Splunk on Mac OS X, read some basic docs, point it to some Splunk formatted log files and get it working within 3 hours.

We use blitz4j on top of log4j and the setup in blitz4j didn't require a lot of time from the developer too.

Here's a snippet of the way we setup inside our blitz4j config file:

### Logging for Splunk
#
# To include API audit logging for Splunk, uncomment the log4j.appender.
# ex: "log4j.logger.apiaudit=INFO,apiaudit,SplunkApiAudit
#
# log4j.appender.[your string here]=org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
# log4j.appender.[your string here]=./logs/splunk.log
# log4j.appender.[your string here].Append=true
# log4j.appender.[your string here].DatePattern='.'yyyy-MM-dd'.log'
# log4j.appender.[your string here]. layout=com.netflix.logging.log4jAdapter.NFPatternLayout
# log4j.appender.[your string here]. layout.ConversionPattern=%d subject="%X{AUDIT.subject}" authMech="%X{AUDIT.authMech}" client="%X{AUDIT.client}" method="%X{AUDIT.method}" requestUri="%X{AUDIT.requestUri}" responseCode="%X{AUDIT.responseCode}" %n



Wednesday, August 21, 2013

You don't have a SNAPSHOT project in the reactor projects list

We use Eclipse, Perforce, Jenkins and Artifactory here at work.

Since maven uses a lot of online repositories we do regular builds in Jenkins (after logging in) and then Maven releases.

Maven releases are tricky and sometimes our local setups are a little different where we use local (.m2) repositories or non snapshot versions.

If you get a message like this make sure you have -SNAPSHOT in your POM and resubmit.

For example you'll need:

<version>1.0.0.15-SNAPSHOT</version>

Friday, August 09, 2013

Changing a battery on my Iphone 4S is too difficult

I bought a new battery for my year and half old Iphone 4S.

In addition to the battery I bought proper tools to do it myself.

Everything seemed to work well, except for a little difficulty taking out the original battery that was glued into place.

I thought I had done everything right but when I restarted the IPhone 4S I was getting the message: "Searching..." The phone turned on and I could use everything, including wireless, but no connectivity to the AT&T network.

Seems other IPhone 4/4S users have encountered similar problems when I did a search on the internet.

I already went to the ATT store and they tried a working SIM card. No luck.

Tomorrow I try the Apple store and if no continual luck I'll try a repair shop.

I think I'm sick of Apple not having user friendly replaceable parts like a battery.

Update >>>

Went to the Apple Store Saturday morning before the opened and they couldn't help me. They asked me to reset the phone completely and restart and they took the phone in back to open it up briefly. They couldn't see anything wrong.

Second, I went to the ATT Store to see about early replacement. They couldn't offer me an upgrade deal until September 1st

Third, I went to a local repair shop: "Bouder Mac Repair," and paid $40.00 for diagnostics and a possible fix. Unfortunately, I shelled out $40.00 and no luck.

Saturday evening I posted the Iphone on cragistlist. Got some bites and sold the phone on Sunday for $150.00. They guy I sold it to works for ATT so I'll presume he had an easy way to fix.

Now using Google voice with my ATT phone number forwarded to it.


Monday, June 24, 2013

Exploring writing headers and using mod_rewrite with Apache 2.2

I've moved to a new group at my job and I'm currently testing a product similar to a reverse proxy/WAM.

We are trying to add some initial rewrite capabilities for headers, cookie attributes, and URLs received back from the server we are proxying for the client.

I was having some initial setup problems with Apache.

Enabling mod headers and rewrite is pretty straightforward in Apache's httpd.conf file.

The tricky part after that was building up a file to test adding headers, trying a 301/302 redirect when I need to test modifying server responses.

The file in question I used was .htaccess. That way I could customize it for certain folders I was working on.

Some caveats/notes:

1) I screwed up a common RewriteCond rule that I saw on the web. The !-f and !-d don't have any spaces. Otherwise, if you have spaces you'll get errors in your error log with the title > bad flag delimiters

2) Adding headers to return in the response is pretty straightforward. Even bogus ones work just fine :)

3) Redirects for basic redirect testing in the same web folder are easy. You just need to know a little REGEX.

4) After each change I did restart httpd.exe to reload the changes.

Here is an example .htaccess file that I used:

Header set URI "http://hostname.test.com/URIsubpathTest/"
Header set Content-Location "http://host.test.com/TableOfContents.html"
Header set Location "http://anothertest.com:8080/index.html"
Header set BogusHeader "http:///URIsubpathTest/"
Header set Set-Cookie "BEC=abc123; language=English; Path=/englishPath/replaceThis/BlahString; Domain=testdomain.tryitout.net"


RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.html [L]
RewriteRule ^requestedpage.html$ /redirectpage.html [R=301]
RewriteRule ^originalrequested302.html$ /temppagefor302.html [R=302]





Monday, April 29, 2013

p4 sync <> must refer to client <>

I was having the toughest time trying to sync a new folder tree in my depot.

I was getting this error:

//depot/Some-path/some-sub-path/... - must refer to client 'myclient_February29th2012'.

Well, what I was doing wrong was that I was taking the depot path instead of my client path.

So when I did p4 client on the command line it listed my views including this one below:

//Some-path/some-sub-path/... //myclient_February29th2012/Some-path/some-sub-path/...

I updated my p4 sync to use the right side and then the problem went away.

Sometimes, a slight edit can make a world of difference.


Friday, April 19, 2013

OpenID Connect Testing

At my company we are early implementors for bleeding-edge protocols that some of our customers might want to use in an upcoming release.

One of these is OpenID Connect.

OpenID Connect leverages and builds upon OAuth 2.0. It uses the the same authorization server, some of the same endpoints as OAuth 2.0, an access token (in addition to the new id token), and builds upon OAuth use cases like auth code and implicit.

In my testing it seemed simpler to use, less heavyweight, more restrictive in claims/attributes sharing, and used some of latest technologies for its framework: REST, JSON, JWT, JWK, and newer cryptographic libraries like Elliptical curve.


Sunday, March 17, 2013

Two films this weekend

Watched two films this weekend. One quite good. The other monotonously weird.

The first I chose because it was a film noir mystery from the early 40s and it was a newer release from the Criterion Collection. The second because it was a David Cronenberg film, where he also wrote the screenplay.

Ministry of Fear:

Fritz Lang was the director of Ministry of Fear; an adaptation of Graham Greene's novel - written just a year or two earlier. Although not a classic film noir selection, I'd still recommend it to get an idea of a film noir piece placed within the context of World War II and Nazi spies. 

Cosmopolis:

"All wealth has become wealth for its own sake." This is a quote from one of the characters in the film during the first third of the film.  Maybe the film is the same way. It's too self indulgent and slick for its own sake. I think the self-indulgence is too much dialogue and the ostensibly, invariable ploddingly slow pace of the movie. I also believe the talk is too monotone with dialogue that just doesn't propel whatever plot there is to begin with at the start of the movie. Regardless, it still has some the telltale signatures of a Cronenberg film: general weirdness, plenty of violence, and examinations of fringe characters that may not represent mainstream society.

It's nothing if not a concept film

Ministry of Fear: B to B+

Cosmopolis: D+  to C

Exploring ELK (Elastic) Stack for hack-a-thon

At my current gig, our group finally got to do hack-a-thon week and I joined a team project that tied together a few of the technologies I&#...