Upon the discussion of illegal immigration, specifically people from one nation working in another state while being undocumented, a common argument against immigrants is that the act is itself illegal. Regardless of the reasons why one would chose to leave their home and their lives to travel to a new land, the issue of legality as an argument against such individuals is a funny one. There are places in this world were it is illegal for women to show their faces in public. In many developed countries, there were times when it was legal to own slaves, or illegal for a person from one race to sit at the same table or drink from the same water fountain of someone from another race. It was once illegal to divorce and in many places, it is still illegal to admit to being a homosexual. Although both realms are somewhat subjective, it can be argued that legality does not necessarily equivocate with what is morally right.

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Up until Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0, the MacOS version would show you the number of new messages in Thunderbird since you last clicked on the window, in the dock icon. Now by default it shows you the total number of unread messages, which is pretty useless if there are just a ton of messages in your bulk mail accounts you have no intention of reading. A bug report was filed for this issue, in order to restore the old functionality (or at least make it optional). Although the bug was closed and the option was added to Thunderbird, it’s not in the main user interface. It must be set using the advanced configuration editor.

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By some virtue I don’t fully understand, I have a lot of friends from various walks of life. I am surrounded by those who are both older and younger than myself; those who are professionals, students, professional students and those who are barely making it. For New Years Eve, I’m one of those people who often jumps from one party or group to another in a futile attempt to spend a little time with everyone. It was at a dinner event this past year, an event that left my coffers a bit more drained than I would have liked, that taught me a valuable lesson about clothing.

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Last year my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told them they didn’t need to get me anything. I no longer celebrated Christmas. I’ve grown tired of the rampant consumerism associated with a holiday season that originally came about because humans were simple thankful they had survived another frigid, harsh winter. Although I have no problem with people celebrating any of the winter holidays, I can say my life has been amazingly less stressful during this time of the year. Meanwhile others bustle around to buy gifts, half of which well end up in a storage bin anyway.

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It’s been nearly two and a half years since the last release of RearViewMirror. There aren’t any new features on this release, just several updates to help improve speed and to check for future releases.

For those who have never used it before, RearViewMirror is an over-glorified version of those mirrors office workers attach to their monitors so people don’t sneak up on them. Instead of using a mirror though, it uses a webcam and allows users to share their webcams with others around the office.

Shibboleth’s IDP can store audit logs that indicate when people authenticate against the IDP web application. These files are written to disk by default using the settings in the logging.xml configuration file. This tutorial will show how audit logs can be placed in a MS SQL database and also include the IP addresses of the connecting clients.

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At home I use the latest version openSUSE with network updates and patches, but in a corporate environment a server administrator or developer often finds him or herself having to deal with older enterprise versions of products. I was surprised to discover that SUSE Enterprise Server 10 SP2 did not contain a subversion package (or anything above python 2.4.2, but that’s for another post). I found several conflicting and outdated instructions, so here is a current version of how to install subversion 1.6 on SUSE Enterprise Server 10.

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Many institutions are using Shibboleth for unified single sign-on between both internal and external web application. Shibboleth is an authentication engine and, as its backend, it can use a variety of sources for authentication including LDAP, a SQL database or other resources. It simply deals with authentication, so more advanced configurations, such as systems which allow grace logins after a password expires, may require more customization. The following tutorial shows how to use Shibboleth with a Novell e-Directory server that allows grace logins after a user’s password has expired.

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Shibboleth is an Internet2 project used to implement identity authentication and authorization across multiple domains (sometimes known as a single sign-on). Shibboleth also allows federated authentication, which allows an organization or institution to let a user on one domain to authenticate to another domain. This is common in academic settings where one university may want to allow users from another university to use their services using that first university’s authentication system. A plug-in for Shibboleth known as uApprove provides an approval screen so users can see what information is being shared before being logged into a remote system. uApprove is designed to work with MySQL, however this tutorial shows how it can be easily modified to use Microsoft SQL Server.

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Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician from the 1600’s, once proposed that people should live their lives as if there were a God, because by doing so, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Although Pascal never intended this statement as a proof, it’s often used by religious apologists as an argument for the belief in God. It places the assumption of a god and the afterlife into a weighted game around such beliefs, instead of first looking at the benefits of a good life in relation to the possibility of a god.

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