The Vault

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I haven't written anything here for a while...

Today I read some articles about current web dev. I have played a bit with Django, a Python web MVT framework. It's quite clean, well-design and quick to use. I found in the last IBM Developer's Works a interesting article about Mashups, SOA and Web2.0: Mashups -- The evolution of the SOA, Part 1: Web 2.0 and foundational. This first part summarizes the basic aspects of Web2.0 paradigms.

In my opinion, web development needs to be quick and efficient. That's why many people use MVC framework like RoR, Turbo Gears or Django. But I am not sure these frameworks are ready to support microformats, ReST, APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) and any else that help to provide the wanted services.

Some Web 2.0 resources:

- Getting Started with jQuery
- WSO2 Oxygen Tank
- What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly
- Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog
- Web 2.0 Reference Center, this one must be in your bookmarks !
- RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 compared

About storage

- ..and HA: DRBD FAQ
- DRBD, LVM, GNBD, and Xen for free and reliable SAN
- OpenFiler
- How S3 fits in comparison to other storage solutions

For cheap SAN - understand with a linux server ;) -, I see iSCSI (over IP), HyperSCSI (over ethernet) and ATA over Ethernet. But why choosing a SAN and not another storage technology?

Which cluster filesystem?

Old

• Currently I am interested in Business Intelligence. I have discovered Pentaho and JasperIntelligence.

• I am looking for a web portal solution. It seems that Jahia (however the licence is not actually opensource :( ) and Liferay are leaders in this domain. They are Java based. In the past, I tested Plone which was a very good portal solution.

• I like the idea of configuration management. The three main apps in this field seem to be cfengine, puppet and bcfg2. cfengine is an old, mature and recognized solution. I don't know the others but I'll give them a try, beginning with bcfg2 :). Configuration management has some fun properties like auto-reconfiguration (which can be quite useful to isolate an attack for example by reconfiguring proxies or firewalls). Taking a look at ITIL may be useful (it recommends the usage of configuration management) to find best practices.

• SOA is in the hype! So read this article Enterprise SOA the Apache way.

• Some thoughts (not mine) on OpenID : Identite en ligne
• If you like wiki, you can host yours on pbwiki.

• That'll be a good idea to have a HLFS base with debian packaging. I had this idea after I've discovered BTux.

• RBuilder online provides a easy online interface to build server appliance. I've discover that while browsing OpenFiler features.

• As a base for uclibc projects Buildroot.

• I had forgotten this, and now I found it again !! Gumstix and Gumstix community are funny embedded devices to play with.

• Need to test Open XChange to see if it's an actual alternative to commercial groupwares.

• Seems to dig a bit more into OpenID.

• Some recent commercial projects:
  • Whisher routerless communautary wifi
  • Soonr your desktop files remote access
  • Orb desktop files remote access and multimedia file streaming

• Screen recording can sometime be very useful. I found Istanbul that do that.

• I've just discovered DimDim, a opensource (Mozilla license) web conferencing (webex-like) application. I've been looking for this kind of project for some time and I'm glad having found it. Hope I'll find some time to test it. Another interesting project is Moodle, which is a opensource e-learning portal.

• Wikrypt is a personnal project that will be a encrypted wiki. Several people create a account with each his own private and public keys. Some people who trust each other create a group with a shared private key. When someone from this group creates content owned by the group its encrypted with the shared public key. Encryption can be done with gnupg or with javascript. The remaining problem is (as often with crypto) the distribution of the shared private key ... The main goal of wikrypt is to provide privacy independantly of who owns the server e.g. I can host data on a untrusted server.

Another problem is the integrity of the javascript code. If you don't trust the serveur you can't trust the content it delivers if it's not signed. For this reason I think it's more simple to develop a Firefox extension.

• Today I used to work with regexes. I found a useful tool packaged in Debian called visual-regexp. It's a gui (tcl/tk based) application that applies a regex to a text sample and allows you to match the N-th match pattern ($N). It has also some predefined regex (quite useful for IP addresses for example).

• Interesting project that implements OpenPGP in Javascript: OpenPGP Encryption in Javascript.

• Freenigma is a firefox extension which adds encryption (OpenPGP with keys managed by their server) to webmails.

• WIKID Commercial Open Source Strong Authentication. Has to be checked, seems interesting.

• NTLM Authentication against a ADS Winbind, with Apache, directly using Mod_auth_ntlm_winbind.

• Code Coverage Stuff: I believe that code coverage helps the security code reviewer. I've found some tools: BullsEyeCoverage, LDRA TestBed, and others.

• NCipher mini HSM: embedded hardware crypto module.