I was messing around with my Mac computer tonight and discovered that my Boot Camp installation of Windows XP was not working. I was trying to boot up into my Windows XP installation and it continued to fail for me. I could get to the installation thorough Parallels, but that was it. I figured that if there was no way for me to access my Windows installation was through Parallels I might as well reinstall Windows in a Parallels Virtual Machine.

I started the installation, then realized that I did not have my Windows Product Key. Since I did not have a easy way to contact technical support I decided to do a little Google research. I found that I could retrieve the Windows Product Key from another installation of Windows XP by using RockXP 4.0 Beta .

RockXP is a cool little utility that will scan your installation and display your Microsoft Product Keys for you. In about 5 minutes I got my product key and wrote it down in a flash. I then ran over to my Mac and entered the Product Key that was given to me. With a skeptical click of the next button, I was relieved to see that the key was accepted. Thank god for the web and cool utilities like this, that has saved my another sleepless night wondering how I am going to get my computer fixed.

UPDATE: While this product did return the product key that I needed, it might have also introduced some viruses on the system in which it was installed. Be careful when using this software because of viruses. I would only use it as a last resort.

Here is a little online picture book that is great for telling people how to use the internet. Is is full of laughs.

Baby's First Internet

I am a music freak. I have over 10,000 songs on my ipod, and love listening to live concerts streamed from Archive.org. One of the things that I like to do with my ipod is do a random song selection, so I can get a kind of radio station listening experience from my music. The only problem with this is that I have so many different styles of music. I also really love to listen to music online, while I am at work. I don‘t know why I prefer it to plugging in my ipod, but I do.

Well today I stumbled upon Pandora Radio . This site can only be described as revolutionary. They say that they have created a "Music Genome Project" where they have related all different aspects of music artists, songs, bands, ect into relationships. When you bring up the online player, you can type in a artist that you are interested in. I typed in Phish and a Phish song was displayed to me. The songs after that are selected to what I might like based on my first artists selection. You can also rate if you liked or disliked the selection. This makes your customized radio station even more fine tuned to your listening tastes. The best thing about this too is that I now can expand my listening tastes, because Pandora will select new artists that they think I will like, based on my habits.

I think I might have found a web site that really has made a impact on me.

I have been using Skype for over a year now and love it. I have purchased the premium services and have my own phone number, voice mail, and unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and Canada. I have been very happy with the service, but don‘t always like using headphones with my computer to make calls.

Well now it seems that a new solution to peoples Voip needs has been created, MagicJack. MagicJack seems to be very comparable to Skype. The price is a little cheaper at $20 a year. It also is neat in that everything runs off of the USB device, so you can just unplug it and take it with you. The biggest advantage is that the you can connect a regular handset into the usb device and use your telephone as you normally would. I would suspect that you could even backfeed the device into your existing house wiring if you would like to do that.

According to the review at http://www.getusb.info/usb-review-magicjack-phone/ the Voip phone software has the following options.

• Menu – Switch to headset, download Outlook plugin, and other configuration options.
• Contacts – This is your list of contacts for quick reference.
• Calls – This provides call history. Using this feature allows you to quickly and easily reconnect to past calls.
• Favorites – This lists your favorite contacts like Mother In Law, Sister In Law etc.
• Redial – redial
• Vmail – This lets you set your own voice mail. To set MagicJack voice mail message you must login to their website and select user options to set voice mail for different locations. I also like the fact MagicJack sends an email with the .WAV file of the voice mail.
• 411 – Is an internet linke to Free411.com.
• Google – A simple hot link to Google for web searching.
• 911 Address – This function defaults to your original entry in MagicJack, but it also gives the benefit of adding multiple address in case you use this at work, home, families houses etc.
  

At being only $20 a year with a free 30 day trial I am tempted to go out there and get me one, to see how it works. I like the idea of just taking it with you. I wonder how it does compare to Skype, which seems to be getting cheaper and cheaper and has some really great functionality.

Currently at work we are in the process of setting up a Shibboleth IdP and IsP test. I was helping out by getting the Shibboleth Service Provider setup with Apache 2.2 on the new Mac OS 10. I found that the installation setups provided by internet2 was pretty good at getting me started. I did slightly stumble on a few issues at first. Probably the biggest issue for me was getting use to the Mac, since this is my first Mac experience ever.

I was told my the local Mac Guru to go and install the Apple Developer Toolkit. He said that this would get me setup with all of the necessary compilers. I installed the whole xcode3.0 set of code. This set me up with all of the c++ compile libraries that I need to get started with the installation.

Next I went to the following steps to install the service provider on my machine. The instructions can be found here.

NOTE: I found things easier if I ran all commands as root.

To enable the root user:
Open Directory Utility, located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.
Open Directory Utility
Click the lock to make changes. You will need to enter an administrator name and password.
Choose Edit > Enable Root User.
Enter a secure password for the root user, then enter it again in the Verify field, and click OK.

Now that the code has been installed in to the system, you will need to make sure that SSL is enabled on your Apache 2.2 server. This part might need some improving.

1st. You need to make sure that you Apace 2.2 server is setup to run in 32bit mode. You can fine how to do that here.

2nd. You will need to setup Apache to run in ssl and have php enabled. To do this I first uncommented out the following lines in httpd.conf, mine was located in thet /etc/apache2 directory.

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Then you will need to create some self signed certificates for ssl to use. I ran the following commands to create my certs. I then created a directory /etc/ssl and put the certificates that were generated in there.

openssl genrsa –out delorean.key 2048
openssl req –key delorean.key –days 1095 –new –out delorean.csr
openssl x509 –req –in delorean.csr –signkey delorean.key –out delorean.crt

This is optional but I created a /secure directory off of my main site. I put a index.php file in this directory and added the following code to this. This way when the IdP authenticates correctly and redirects to your site the page will show data that was returned.

php phpinfo();

Now to verify my service provider worked, I went to TestShib and clicked on TestShib Two to test Shibboleth 2.0. To use this site you will need to register with a ProtectNetwork or Openidp.org account. I also used the utility on this site to create the shibboleth2.xml file for me. This was very helpful in putting all values in the necessary place for me. And there you go, the IsP is now setup and working correctly in my version of Apache 2.2.

I did run into a interesting issue when I changed the Identity Provider from the TestShib IdP to my own. I got the following error.

2008-06-30 09:44:23 INFO OpenSAML.Metadata.Chaining : building MetadataProvider of type XML
2008-06-30 09:44:25 INFO OpenSAML.MetadataProvider.XML : loaded XML resource (https://idp.testshib.com/metadata/unc)
2008-06-30 09:44:25 ERROR OpenSAML.Metadata.Chaining : failure initializing MetadataProvider: Year separator is missing or misplaced.

It appears that my IdP is using the cacheDuration property in the metadata. This was causing a issue. When you remove the property things work just fine.

You can see the bug issue here