Posts

The Simple Way to Create an AM Authentication Node Project

What's that all about? ForgeRock's Identity Platform Access Management introduced Authentication Trees for preview in version 5.5. Version 6.0 will see Authentication Trees and Nodes become an integral part of the product. This blog post will help you quickly and easily create a Authentication Tree Node project using Maven Archetypes. About Authentication Trees and Nodes Authentication trees provide fine-grained authentication by allowing multiple paths and decision points throughout the authentication flow. Authentication trees are made up of authentication nodes, which define actions taken during authentication, similar to authentication modules within chains. Authentication nodes are more granular than modules, with each node performing a single task such as collecting a username or making a simple decision. Unlike authentication modules, authentication nodes can have multiple outcomes rather than just success or failure. You can create complex yet customer-friendly
2 comments
Read more

ActiveMQ hints, tips and lessons learned.

I'm using ActiveMQ 5.9.0 Java Runtime: Oracle Corporation 1.7.0_45 OS X 10.9.1 This system I had trouble running the activemq-admin script. When running it I see the following output; Jamies-MBP:bin jamie$ activemq-admin Error: JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly. We cannot execute auto I get this despite me having JAVA_HOME set in my environment. This can be fixed by changing and entry in ~/.activemqrc. Do a search for JAVACMD and you should find the following few lines; # Location of the java installation # Specify the location of your java installation using JAVA_HOME, or specify the # path to the "java" binary using JAVACMD # (set JAVACMD to "auto" for automatic detection) #JAVA_HOME="" JAVACMD="auto" The remedy here is to comment out the JAVACMD line which seems to break the activemq-admin script. No need to set the JAVA_HOME here unless you want to over-ride the environment default.
1 comment
Read more

Android logging put to bed.

I've been developing an android application recently, and I have had to scrabble around more than I should have in order to get logging working correctly so here's what I've learned. How to get logging working; The basics. Android has a Log class that you can use to make log entries. You can find that here; https://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html Here's an example of a log entry made from an Activity #import android.util.Log; class MyActivity{     private static final String TAG = "MyActivity";     @Override     protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {         Log.v(TAG, "savedInstanceState contains " + savedInstanceState.size() + " mappings");         ......     } } The Log.v call makes a 'verbose' log entry. Log levels (in increasing order of 'importance' are;     ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, VERBOSE These entries are made with Log.e, Log.w, Log.i, Log.d & Log.v.
7 comments
Read more

Editing the hosts file on android virtual devices

I hosts several web sites on an Ubuntu server that I run at home, and I do this using Apache 2 name based virtual hosts. This allows me to host multiple web sites on the same server at the same IP address. This causes problems when trying to test how the websites look on mobile devices on the local network. To enable multiple sites to be hosted at the same ip address Apache2 will redirect the http request to correct web site files based on the domain name supplied with the http request. For example both site1.com and site2.com can resolve to the same ip address, but Apache will route requests to site1.com to the virtual name host files for site1 and requests to site2 to the virtual name host files for site 2. You can read more about this here . The problem with this set up is that I can't browse to the non-default virtual hosts using the IP address of my local server, and my ISP don't let requests from my IP address route back to my IP address, i.e. I can't browse to si
5 comments
Read more

The importance of 'it'

Image
What is 'it'? It's incredible how many software organisations don't understand the importance of 'it'. By 'it' I mean the ephemeral 'it' that is 'the thing you are building'. The concept of 'it' is what holds the different engineering functions together. Without a clear, shared understanding of what 'it' is the software development process will not run smoothly. So how does 'it' relate to the various disciplines in a software company? It should be central to them all. From the above diagram we can see the importance of the Requirements Engineering discipline. They are the team responsible for defining the central concept of 'it' around which the entire software organisation should be centred. The health of this team is vital for the health of the entire organisation, and yet it is often underfunded, under-resourced or in extreme cases, non existent! Agile and 'it' No talk of requirement
Post a Comment
Read more

Using an Ubuntu VM to connect to a VPN using juniper network connect.

Recently I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 running in a VirtualBox VM to connect securely to a VPN using Juniper Network connect. I've been doing this for years with a windows VM, but have recently worked out how to do it from Ubuntu. The benefits of using Ubuntu for this task are; No licensing requirements for OS. Smaller footprint for VM. - Windows 7 VM footprint was 120 MB Private Working Set. Ubuntu is as low as 70 MB Private Working Set. I haven't found any drawbacks yet. Step 1. Create an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop 32bit virtualbox machine. It is important that you choose the 32 bit platform as the 64 bit version will install a 64 bit java, and juniper network connect won't work with this. If you have an existing 64 bit 12.04 install that you want to use see  here  for a work around. Step 2 Ensure openjdk-6-jdk and icedtea-6-plugin are installed by running this command from the Ubuntu VM's command line; sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk ic
22 comments
Read more

Why you should learn Maven

It's hard to understand what Maven can do for you until you experience it, but bear with me and I'll try to explain what its done for me. A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to get on a Google Web Toolkit learning course. It was taught by great and inspiring young hacker. He seemed to know everything. We spend ages downloading library jar files for junit, easymock, hibernate, slf4j, and all the libraries that those libaries are dependent on. It took up a lot of time, and I wondered how I would ever find/navigate/manage all those jar files and their dependencies. I could see that it would be pretty easy to get into the java equivalent of .dll hell. However under our instructors expert advice we patched it all together and built our GWT project. I learn a heck of a lot. I learnt some Java, the MVP pattern, saw glimpses into Test Driven Development (TDD) using junit, and easymock, Object Relational Mapping with Hibernate and Dependency Injection. In truth the course b
3 comments
Read more