HCMC Blogs

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/middleeast/27scrolls.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

From PC Magazine, a list of what the editors consider the top 100 undiscovered wesites. The sites (not the editors) run the gamut from multimedia to social networking to travel.

Even if you're not a hardcore geek, you'll probably find a handful of sites to make your day easier or more entertaining.

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Got an acceptable user login system working, with a level parameter that should let us refine permissions at a later date if we need to. A text file stores usernames, hashed passwords and levels, and a login form handles the login. Protected pages just need to start with this:

<?php
session_start();
if (!isset($_SESSION['session_var_for_level'])){
    header("Location: login.php");
}
?>

All seems to be working OK, and more careful checks of the actual user level can be placed on individual operations such as AJAX handlers that write to the DB.

I'm trying to find a relatively secure way to do authentication for small projects using PHP on our servers. The best approach, as far as I can see, would be to use HTTP Digest Authentication, which allows encrypted authentication over regular HTTP connections (no need for SSL). This is supported in PHP, but unfortunately it only works if PHP is running as an Apache module; on our servers, PHP is running in CGI mode, so we can't use it.

So at the moment, I'm rather stuck. I've been able to use the PHP crypt() function to store only hashes of passwords, so that we're not, at least, storing text files with passwords in clear text on the network, but for the authentication process itself, we're still sending passwords in cleartext over http. We're going to set up a self-signed certificate on Lettuce, so that at least we can use SSL, but that will throw up some warnings in browsers because it'll be self-signed. Greg and I have talked about the possibility (and cost -- $229 per year) of getting a "proper" certificate for hcmc.uvic.ca, and putting in proxy URLs for all projects that need to use SSL for authentication. That might well be worth the money, at this point.

I'm writing this up because we're bound to hit the problem again at some point, and it took me ages to figure it out.

Writing a login system for the Roman Law db (which I'll cover in another post), I created a login form, and naturally I thought I'd make it consonant with the rest of the site by causing it to be rendered as a JQuery UI dialog. Once I'd done that, I started testing the actual login functionality. It failed every time; neither POST nor GET parameters were submitted to the server. I didn't twig for ages that this had anything to do with what I thought was the largely cosmetic decision to wrap the form components in a dialog call, but apparently that was it; as soon as I removed the JQuery code, all was well. I haven't yet been able to track down what exactly it is that causes the dialog to render the form ineffective, but I know to avoid it in future.

If the link for the Lab 300 Client and Server admin tool gets trashed (hrmph), you can get to the GUI by running this command for the Server:
"C:\Program Files\Sanako\Shared Components\NetCommPlatform\RSrv.exe" /UI

and this one for the Client:
"C:\Program Files\Sanako\Shared Components\NetCommPlatform\RCLNT.EXE" /UI

For documentation:
Settings in Lab C look like this

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I'm probably treading on Ray Siemens's territory here, but as a passionate, print-bound reader, I've been keeping an eye on Amazon's Kindle Reader. And despite the naysayers like Steve Jobs ("“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”") this week's New York Times heralds the success of the Kindle.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Amazon hasn’t confirmed these numbers, but the e-commerce giant has said that of the 150,000 titles it now sells for the Kindle as well as in paper, more than 10 percent of the sales are in Kindle format.

Long academic lunch + upcoming power outage led to overtime.

Had a lengthy lunch with a researcher from Ritsumeikan University, who came to visit RS and EG-W.