Atlassian has just released Crowd 1.3 that now has the Delegated Authentication option - two-faced directory with an external LDAP facing part for authentication and an internal Crowd part for authorisation. This double-faced functionality causes some non-obvious interface issues.

The most important issue to understand is that external part is accessed only when user is authenticated with full username/password. In any other context, users and groups are those that are copied/imported into the internal Crowd side of the directory. This produces a couple of cognitive problems:

1. One cannot lookup users from that directory just after the directory is created. The search runs against the internal database and does not even generate LDAP lookup. This is obvious once you realise that the directory has effectively both remote and local repositories in one interface and the search only goes against local (still empty) one.
2. Directory permissions are also about the local directory. In the past, I disabled all modify permissions when configuring LDAP directory, as I did not want to accidentally change external user. Doing the same thing with Delegated directory will causes very odd database integrity violation stack traces. (now CWD-911)
3. Wild card handling in user lookup screen is different between Crowd internal directories and LDAP directories. Internal directories use substring search, while LDAP requires explicit star (*) character. Searching against Delegated Directory is searching against Crowd directory, so putting star wildcard will actually cause no matches. (now CWD-912)
4. Local directory part seems to store a lot more information about user than just username and group association. It actually stores email, full name, etc. This means that if any information gets changed in the original external LDAP, it may not be reflected in Crowd’s directory (and therefore to the applications). As there does not seem to be a way for the administrator to easily check for mismatches, such problem will likely to be extremely hard to troubleshoot. (now CWD-913)
5. Finally, there is no easy way to copy small sets of users into local part of the Crowd’s directory from the remote counter-part. They have to be added (with full information) one by one or copied wholesale from another directory. I have opened a request to improve this.

Crowd’s Delegated directory option was eagerly awaited for a long time by great many people, but it is obviously still in a need of improvement or two. I am looking forward to having those issues addressed soon.

I just found my own oldest webpage (handcoded) and my oldest public source code (Java) at once. Archive.org - that has hosted this long-dead memory since 1999 - is just so great.

Looking back at it, I realise that I was right in the thick of Internet development:

• When I just started working with Java, we had to throw out all the printed Javadocs, because jdk1.0b2 was released and a lot of Java API (e.g. FTP and MAIL) from jdk1.0a3 has been hidden under sun’s internal packages
• I did a first (alpha) implementation of standard servlet API for W3C’s Jigsaw server, by porting it from Sun’s Jeeves
• I dabbled in hot 2.5D Apple technology (HotSause), by generating web server’s directory content in MCF format. The format has died, but apparently it turned into RDF. I was developing Semantic Web applications well before the term got popular.
• I contributed to an Open Source project, well before SourceForge’s first appearance
• I was a late-comer to /. and my ID is still below 36000

I am not bragging! I am just musing out loud at how much personal web history can be retrieved with few well placed searches.

The flip side of a coin of course, is that this history will not go away, even if I wanted it to. Which is why I do not link to my Slashdot account (and this is not an invitation for exercise in forensics). One just hopes that the future recruiter will look at timestamps of my various web appearances and makes appropriate adjustments to skills and effort.

I want to get my parents a digital picture frame. But at the moment I cannot. That’s because I don’t want my somewhat less-technical parents to have to fiddle with memory cards, choosing and transferring photographs or running Vista.

My ideal digital picture frame for them would be one sitting in a living room or a bedroom with new photos to delight my parents every so often.

Such a device would have to be:

• Wi-Fi capable - My parents have a wireless router and there is no point for a picture frame to sit next to the computer
• Able to pull content from private online photo account, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb, to which our extended family could push photos
• No ongoing monthly costs - subscription would make it a gift that keeps taking, rather than giving
• Controllable over the internet
• Ideally with speakers and/or some way to show video to be more future proof

I have been on a lookout for such a device for more than a year and had no luck. Obviously, digital picture frames are still a personal purchase rather than a gift one. Or maybe less technical parents is a smaller niche than I imagine.

But I have hope. Yesterday, I have received a small package that contained a Chumby! Chumby is not a digital picture frame. It is quite small (I think the website’s image is real-size). But it has features that make up for its size.

It has Wi-Fi access, including password-protected; it has no monthly costs; it is configured over the internet and comes with speakers. It also has touch sensitive screen, microphone and accelerometer (like in Wii controller).

Notice I did not say anything about pictures or videos. That’s because Chumby is a more generic device. It allows to choose what widgets run on it and a widget is a program written in Flash, the same environment that allows us to watch Flickr slide-shows and youTube videos, listen to internet radio and play casual games. It can also double as alarm clock and iPod music player.

More importantly, because anybody can develop and share a widget, I am not married to any particular way of presenting photos. Flickr widget exists already, but other photo and video service widgets are on the way.

And, if I am still unhappy, I can write my own widgets. Chumby runs Linux under the covers and Flash Lite 3 interface. And, differently from Apple’s position with iPhone, Chumby Industries encourage people to modify their software, hardware and even basic device shape. Already, there are compilation packages for python, perl and even Java (actually JamVM).

Chumby is not yet for public sale, but that should happen any day now. I was on a mailing list, so got a pre-release invite. That is good, as it means I have some time to really play with my Chumby.

And if all goes well, my Chumby will soon have a new friend or two hiding under the Christmas tree overseas.

From time to time I experiment with GATE NLP toolkit. Just now I tried to upgrade to the latest version (version 4) and run into really strange problem with ANNIE system not loading correctly. Later, when I uninstalled older GATE version, it stopped loading at all.

The problem is the user configuration file gate.xml that is stored in the shared location, usually home directory. On Windows, that is C:\Documents and Settings\[ProfileName]\.

One of those settings was pointing to where the plugins were loaded from and was still referring to GATE 3.1’s locations. That caused NullPointerExceptions in the GATE and everything was breaking from that point on.

I found this by using FileMon, but later realised that it might have been done easier by changing runtime.spawn property to false in GATE’s build.xml file that is used to start the program. Using ant to start a program is a new one for me, but I guess it makes sense in some cases. Setting the property to false shows the startup messages and the exception that the wrong directories cause.

I have deleted the old gate.xml and gate.session files in my home directory and everything started to work. Back to actually trying to use the software.

I am currently at The Rich Web Experience 2007 conference. It is interesting to compare it to JavaOne conferences I have been to in the past.

To start, RWE is much smaller. It is about 400 people as compared to 15 thousands at JavaOne. This obviously makes scheduling logistics and eating arrangements simpler, but there is also a very different feel in the air. It feels that it is much harder to walk around without bumping into speakers and/or other moderately famous web people. At JavaOne, it is all about learning, here it is more like sharing.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that a lot more people than I expected were coming from Java server side background. In fact, we had a round of introductions at Web design Birds-Of-Feather session and more than half of the  people in the room had some (often strong) background in Java. To me, this is a great sign as it shows that the path I am taking (adding HTML/CSS/JavaScript to my Java skills)  has already been done by multiple people before without too many problems.

I have gone to the following sessions:

1.  Secure application development with Ajax (by Dean H. Saxe)  - The presentation itself was great and covered interesting topic in details. I did not understand all of the advanced concepts and consequences, but the core message was very clear and the slides give enough hints and terms to do further research on my own. I would have liked a more detailed example (e.g. ‘This is why SOP is not applicable’ ), but overall it was great.
2. Merging Ajax and Accessibility (by Mark Meeker) - Another great presentation. I heard before that designing for accessibility actually has beneficial side-effects of increased general usability and better design practices, but it was good to see it confirmed with large commercial sites. Mark also had great examples and talked about Hijax a bit as a way of building accessibility into the process, rather than trying to bolt it on at the end.
3. Web Design for Server-Side Developers (by Greg Murray) - This one I have found somewhat disappointing. I knew that covering good HTML, CSS, Javascript,  modular design and supporting tools in one presentation might have been too ambitious.  Still, I was looking forward to some sort of high-level view consistent story tying together the bits together with some best practices thrown in. Unfortunately, Greg was not able to deliver that. He spent too much time jumping between the topics. He also talked about jMaki’s  implementation a lot. That might have been useful, but given that some very important issues (Internationalisation, classes vs. IDs, etc) were still not implemented correctly (by Greg’s own admission), I felt jMaki was not yet ready to be shown as an example of best practices.
4. Web design/architecture Birds-Of-Feather session with Aaron Gustafson, David Verba and couple of others. It was actually interesting, because I sat with them at the dinner table without realising who they were. But you could see they were really smart and interesting, even in their unstaged moments. True geeks, in the good sense of the word. The session itself was a very interesting discussing and somehow I even managed to hog the floor for a while with my questions. Hopefully, it did not annoy too many people.

I am looking forward to the second day.