WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0 Beta Released

We released the WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0 Beta, just a few minutes ago. It is really good to see things that were developed independently, fit in nicely to produce a larger solution.

Please give it a try and send us your feedback.

Here goes the traditional release note...

WSO2 Identity Solution 1.0-beta Released
========================================

WSO2 Identity Solution team is pleased to announce the release of WSO2
Identity Solution 1.0-beta.

Release artifacts can be downloaded from :
http://dist.wso2.org/products/solutions/identity/1.0-beta/

WSO2 Identity Solution provides the following components to enable
CardSpace authentication for web applications.

* An Identity Provider
The identity provider includes an application to issue information
cards and a security token service. Security token service can be
deployed to issue tokens to trusted users. An identity selector will
obtain tokens from the Identity Provider and authenticate the users to a
Web applications with those tokens.

* A set of Relying Party components
Relying party components include an Apache HTTPD module and a Servlet
filter. The HTTPD module can be used with any Web application that is
hosted with Apache HTTPD irrespective of the implementation language.
The Servlet filter component is intended for Java based Web containers.

Key Features in this Release

* Identity provider
- Supports connecting to a JDBC or an LDAP user store
- Issues information cards based on username-token credential and
self issued credential
- Allows adding custom claims and mapping them to user attributes
in the user store
- Revocation of issued information cards
- Manage trusted relying parties
* Apache HTTPD relying party module - mod_cspace
* Java Servlet Filter relying party component

Reporting Problems
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at
https://wso2.org/jira/browse/IDENTITY

Contact us
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WSO2 Identity Solution developers can be contacted via mailing lists:
* For Users: identity-user@wso2.org
* For Developers:identity-dev@wso2.org
For details on subscriptions see
http://www.wso2.org/projects/solutions/identity#mail

Thank you for your interest in WSO2 Identity Solution

WSO2 Identity Solution Team

Lecture of a lifetime - Achieving your childhood dreams

I got this (sad, funny, entertaining, moving, motivating, you name it...) video clip from a friend. Randy Pausch a CMU professor dying of pancreatic cancer delivering his last lecture. If you find it good, watch the whole 2hour lecture here.

Best thing about this lecture is its finale. I think I never have seen (or attended) a lecture with such intense ending that made me think over and over again. I wouldn't say that this lecture changed my life though it for sure made a huge impact. At the very least, it made me think seriously, whether I do what I always wanted to do?

Talking about childhood dreams, I don't think it'd be easy to achieve my childhood dreams, except for a few. Mine are not as specific as Randy's, they usually are more generic in nature. However, it is not the time to reveal them yet (huh! topsy krets). Hopefully, I would someday be able to blog (or do the equivalent of blogging then) on my childhood dreams and how successful I was in achieving them.

The whole lecture was full of food for thoughts, but one clue in particular on achieving childhood dreams:

Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.

What's my blog rated?

Browsing around randomly - well, I was using google, so it was not entirely random - I found this funny web site which claims to provide a "Film Rating" for any blog.

Huh! my blog is rated PG-13. For 10x use of "crap" (can't help it when the blog it self is named "Random Crap") and 1x use of t i t.... What? Where did I say that? I searched through the whole blog, couldn't find where that is. Probably in html format only.... so I opened up a page source window and searched for the three letters followed by a space. Hmm, strange, I still can't find it. Could it be that their analysis is faulty somehow?

Anyway it's nice to have such a badge on your blog. Looks cool...

PG-13? who writes for children under 13? CRAP once more!!! Gimme an R.


Update (25/09/20007): As Yasith pointed out in his comment, after this post, my blog is rated R (isn't that great?):



For once I thought it would be a hard thing to achieve such an honor. Oh! it's just 13 craps and one word which happened to truncate in a totally unintended way, over which I have no control. Shame on blogger ;)

Go Offline with Google Reader

It has been a long time since I gave up my offline RSS reader. I loved the google reader interface and it's usability since it was in public beta. Only disadvantage about using it was that I had to be online to read any RSS feed, which hard was a problem for me.

I have been extremely busy these days due to an extended us trip and some deadlines to be met. Thus did not log in to the google reader for the last few weeks, until this evening after finishing my work. The first thing got my attention was a link in the top right hand corner which said offline. That was something I saw there for the first time. I was thinking may be they have written a stand-alone application to complement the web UI. Anyhow, I just clicked on it to check what it is and there I got the surprise of the month for sure.

Now you can save the latest 2000 items to your machine so that you can read them offline. 2000 is a decent amount I guess. This feature has been introduced to google reader only a week ago on the 31st May. It uses the recently released google gears, a browser plugin which enables writing offline web applications. It should rather be called a toolkit than a browser plugin. The official google reader blog says:

To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Here is my google reader gone offline, yay!

Axis2/C 1.0 Released

Apache Axis2/C 1.0 was released a few days ago. Well that was last Sunday, the 6th. The release was delayed by a few weeks due to improvements and fixes suggested.

Wow! what an achievement, of course I am happy to be (however vanishingly small) a part of the great amount of human hours used in this exercise.

In the meantime, Apache Rampart/C project, the WS-Security implementation for Axis2/C has plans to release 0.90 by the end of this week. We found a small memory issue with our xml canonicalization (xml-c14n) implementation yesterday, and it is fixed now. You can test the release artifacts from here.

On Bits, Bytes, and Bitrates

How fast can you download torrents?

This is one of the problems that I get from most of my friends who are into torrent downloading business. When I say that I get something like 55 kBps, with SLT ADSL basic connection, which offers 512kbps downstream, most of them go nuts! What the heck happens to the 457? If you wonder where 457 came from, try subtracting 55 from 512.

This post is a reply to all those who disagree with me at such discussions. Now I can ask anyone who starts arguing with me on this regard, to do their homework first, i.e., to read mu blog ofcourse!

Theoretically, with SLT ADSL basic package, I should be able to download at 512kbps (i.e., 500Kibps, 62.5kBps, or 64KiBps). All these figures are in accordance with the IEC 60027-2 standards. IEC stands for International Electrotechnical Commission. They define the standards on Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology [1].

kbps, kBps, Kibps and KiBps

In the above paragraph, I've mentioned kbps in four different manners (sometimes with an i next to the k). This shows the difference it can make just by capitalizing a single letter of a letter sequence in engineering. Oh! did I say "gibberish"?

kbps is a measure of data transfer speed. Some refer to it as a measure of bandwidth too. However, as bandwidth has no fixed definition at all, for some meanings of bandwidth, it may not make any sense to be measured by kbps. Wikipedia has a great article on different meanings of the term "bandwidth". 1 kbps is 1000 bits per second (not 1024). This measure had been always used mostly (if not only) in telecommunication and there is no dispute over whether it is 1000 or 1024.

kBps is the data transfer rate in 1000 Bytes (a byte is 8bits) per second. It is commonplace to write this measurement as KBps or KBPS, though it is not the standard. Also it is very common to use kB to indicate 1024 bytes. Even it was used in almost all the computer applications that were built before the new millennium and in many applications even today. However, since IEC now have a standard for measurements of information too, kBps stands for 1000 bytes.

Kibps is pronounced kibi-bits per second. The kibi- prefix stands for 1024, in the same manner kilo- stands for 1000. This prefix was introduced to replace k, the kilo- prefix used in a binary sense.

KiBps by this time it should be fairly obvious that KiBps stands for kibi-bytes per second. and that it is 1024 bytes per second.

In the same way Ki is used for 1024 (2^10) bytes, Mi, Gi, and other respective prefixes are used to represent 2^20, 2^30 and the respective powers of 2. (FYI: Mi is mebi- and Gi is gibi-)

Calculation

Okay, now it's time for elementary mathematics.

My ADSL connection is 512kbps download.
Therefore it is 512*1000 = 512000 bits per second.
That means (512000/8)/1000 =64 kilo bytes per second.
also, 512000/1024 = 500 kibi bits per second.
and in turn, (512000/8)/1024 = 62.5 kibi bytes per second.

giving 15% for noise, the actual download speed would be something like... (64/100)*85 ~ 55kBps.

Afterall, I am a happy man, I get almost the most out of my ADSL connection practically possible.

Usage

Even though the standards are there, it has not been adopted by many computer applications yet. For examples, Windogs still use kB for 1024 bytes. Linux and other open source software (rulez!) like Gnome are among the first to use the standards.

Lessons to learn

1. If you have an SLT ADSL basic package and your torrent client says that it is doing 55kBps, don't complain, it is doing it's best.
2. Never trust the computer when it comes to storage sizes or data transfer speeds. You never know (if it's manual specifically says so) whether k stands for 1000 or 1024, and whether M stands for 1000000 or 1048576.

Someone Else

Someone Else
by Nuwan Ishantha

Is this you who I see?
Or is it someone else?
Or is it someone else that I saw in you?

Is this confusion?
Or is it that I "was" confused?
Confused that you were someone else, when you were still actually you?

Am I who I think I am?
Or am I someone else?
Or am I just not the one I thought I was?

Am I?
For I see that you are still who you are
But that you are still someone else.

I am someone else.