Personally, I like it.  I like the patent clauses that keep those with large paten portfolios from coming after free software vendors and developers.  I also like that it’s compatible with the Apache Software License 2.

What do you like/hate about the GPL?

I still have a bunch of old smart cards kicking around as well as my American Express Blue card. I thought it might be fun to play around with my old smart cards as well as play with the JSR-268 APIs. I have a built in smart card reader in both my Dell Latitude 810 and my Latitude 820. Just in case I couldn’t get the built-in smart reader to work in Linux, I dug up my trusty old GCR 410 that I inherited from IC One. Remember the GCR 410? The smart card reader that plugged into your serial port and your keyboard port to get power. Fortunately my docking station has both the old school serial and keyboard ports on it.

I’m running Ubuntu which I highly recommend to everyone, especially those of you running Windows. The JSR-268 API requires that PC/SC be installed. To install PC/SC on Ubuntu just do ‘sudo apt-get install pcscd pcsc-tools‘ from the command-line (or use Synaptic if you like the slow GUI way of doing things) and everything you need to use PC/SC will be installed. pcsc-tools is optional. It provides a nice utility called pcsc_scan for debugging which might make your life a little easier.

After installing PC/SC, I ran pcsc_scan. It successfully found my built-in smart card reader and indicated that there were no cards in the smart card reader. I inserted my blue card into the slot and voila! It detected the presence of a smart card and told me that it was a blue card based on the ATR. Now if only I could remember what ATR and APDU stand for…

After looking at the output from pcsc_scan, I realized that it didn’t find my GCR 410. So much for my trusty backup. It’s still sitting next to my computer though. The green LED is blinking on and off. I put a smart card into it and the LED didn’t stay on. Too bad. On with our story.

With PC/SC working, it was time to try and get things working from Java. I started out with a simple program like:

TerminalFactory tf = TerminalFactory.getDefault();
CardTerminals terminals = tf.terminals();
List<CardTerminal> terminalsList = terminals.list();
if (terminalsList.size() == 0) {
    System.out.println("No terminals available");
    return;
}

Much to my dismay, Java wasn’t able to find my card reader. After Googling around for a bit, I discovered that JSR-268 expects libpcsclite.so to be in my library path. I looked in /usr/lib and found libpcsclite.so.1.0.0 and a symlink to that library called libpcsclite.so.1. I create a second symlink called libpcsclite.so and everything started working in Java.

I soon had a Java program that would display “Card inserted!” when I inserted a smart card and “Card removed!” whenever I removed the smart card. It was at that point that I couldn’t think of anything really useful to do so I wrote this blog entry.

Youngm keeps making inroads deep into the world of Enterprise Java.  He’s also a committer on the Red Hat/JBoss Seam project.  Mike has been debating with Gavin King (the found of the Hibernate project) about Seam architecture and has been winning many of those battles.

First of all, many thanks to Mike, James, Mike, Herrick and Nick (and of course, Josh…)for the feedback and technical help. Nick was a lifesaver with helping me figure out how to include header/footer files with PHP. That would have been such a pain if I hadn’t had those.

First thing you’ll notice is the site still needs a lot of work. It needs to be database-driven with a detail page for each activity listed. I’m just NOT doing that manually for each entry. Huh-uh. No way. Also I need to clean up the design a bit more, set off the sidebar for readability and add some more graphics and photos for different things.

But I’d love your feedback. Please send your thoughts along and give me some feedback (positive and negative). Or if you know of something to add to the calendar, send it my way.

I’m a model. You know what I mean? And I do my little turn on the catwalk… well, I haven’t had a chance to work the catwalk yet, but give it time.

Here’s to hoping Microsoft sues a number of open-source distributors with the same results as SCO.

Anybody else want to join us if we go another time?

Several master’s degrees under way, several bachelor’s done or on the way, etc.

It would be fun to know the average graduating GPA of TNI at OHS. And then take reimda (the outlier) out of the equation and recalculate. That would be good times.

Just wanted to say congrats to all of you for how far you’ve come in the last few years. It really is amazing how much you’ve all accomplished.

One of the features of IPCop is that it will produce traffic graphs for you. I thought it would be cool to make my traffic graphs publicly available. I figured it would be easy to just use mod_proxy to forward requests to my firewall to fetch the graphs. Unfortunately, mod_proxy forwards the HTTP Authentication down to the browser and doesn’t let you specify the HTTP authentication credentials in the proxy configuration.

So I decided to just set up a cron job that runs every hour and downloads the graphs to my web server. It’s not as cool as mod_proxy but it only took a few minutes to set up and it works just fine.

The “Traffic on RED” means that it’s the traffic for the red network interface. With IPCop, the red interface is the public facing interface, the green interface is the internal NATed interface (not shown because in my case it’s just the inverse of the red graphs) and the orange interface is the DMZ. I have an orange interface but nothing’s plugged into it so I didn’t bother to show graphs of nothingness.

The graphs are shown below. Push refresh every hour to watch them change. If you were to run some type of DoS attack, you could watch the graphs peak. I’m not suggesting you launch a DoS attack. I’m just saying…