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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“We’re fighting them terrorists there, so we don’t have to fight them here,” is a common nonsensical catch phrase used in many variations during the Bush presidency from 2000 until 2008. In the past few years, the exact opposite has happened. United States policy and military training has left the war theaters of the middle east. With military style weapons and training given to SWAT teams in municipal police departments around the country, infantry tactics are often used domestically now against US citizens in non-violent drug crimes. In some cases, this has lead to accidental deaths, police brutality and the destruction of lives for non-violent peaceful citizens.

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The concept of supporting our troops has become its own mantra in the United States. We talk about those who “sacrifice” and “defend our freedom,” in such that we should honor them for their service. We go as far as to place yellow plastic magnets on the back of our vehicles as a symbolic gesture of our support (with the money typically going to some manufacturing company in China). Even liberals have taken up the “Support our Troops” mantra by tacking on “Bring them Home” in a way to attach a degree of appeasement to the staunch advocates of continued war. But the reality is not some pretty idealized view of American bringing democracy and freedom to the world. The reality is that as a nation, we’ve accepted blanket statements and embraced nationalism without taking time to discern the facts of our history and understand all the wrong our government does in order to sustain our standard of living.

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