The User-Agent String: A History of Biblical Proportions

One of the last projects I did for Room 214 was build a tool for tracking what kind of browsers were hitting a site. With a database of several hundred thousand hits spread over multiple content types, I had a lot to work with. Now, every web developer groans when asked about browser detection of the "big boys" (IE, Mozilla, Safari, Opera). But in this case I had hundreds, perhaps even thousands of distinct user agent strings. It was awful. And it made me wonder what the history of these awful nearly-unparseable things was.

On the WebAIM blog, there is an explanation in the form of a Genesis account. And it was good.

Linux.Com article on NA-CAP 2007

Linux.Com posted my article on NA-CAP 2007 today. It's called FOSS and the Philosophers.

I'm a little worried that posting a mainstream article like this may actually lead to backlash from the philosophical community. Some of them tend to get upset when they feel like philosophy is being "commercialized" (read: exposed to the general public).

Tony Beavers, on the other hand, has been very encouraging, and sent the article on to several IA-CAP officers. I've really enjoyed working with Tony on this conference. I have a lot of respect for him.

NA-CAP 2007

At the end of July, we hosted the North American Computers and Philosophy conference at Loyola University Chicago. And ETL did a lot of the work to make it go. Konstantin, George, and several of the graduate students made significant contributions to the conference, doing everything from hosting Richard Stallman to cleaning up the tables after the show.

The conference went fairly well, though some of the discussion -- particularly in Stallman's sessions -- was quite heated. But many of the papers were first rate, and I came home feeling inspired.

Some of the papers, including mine, are showing up at Slide Share. I gave my paper on Information Justice (the same paper I mentioned earlier). I was very happy with the outcome. I got some great feedback from legal scholars, ethicists, and FOSS advocates, and I think I'm getting close to having a publishable paper.

Book Renamed

I think we have agreed to rename the book "Mastering OpenLDAP: Configuring, Securing, and Integrating Directory Services."

Much better, IMHO.

OpenLDAP Book

I've been working on a book, tentatively entitled "OpenLDAP for Developers." It is just about complete, and should be available to buy in August. Like the two OpenCMS books, this one will be published with Packt.

The book covers OpenLDAP -- server, utilities, and clients -- from installation through configuration and integration with other services. The focus is on OpenLDAP 2.3, with some forward-looking information about 2.4.

Here are some of the topics covered:

• LDAP basics (LDAP operations, binding, searching, etc.)
• Setting up the server on Ubuntu Linux 7.04
• Creating a new directory information tree from an LDIF file.
• Using ldapsearch, ldapadd, ldapmodrdn, ldapdelete, ldapmodify, and ldappassword command line clients.
• Using slapadd, slapcat, slappasswd, slaptest and other command line utilities.
• Creating slapd.conf and ldap.conf configuration files.
• Using common object classes, like inetOrgPerson, groupOfNames, document, and others.
• Setting up simple and SASL binding. I cover DIGEST-MD5 and EXTERNAL types of SASL binding.
• Configuring SSL/TLS using both LDAPS and StartTLS.
• Creating and modifying Access Control Lists (ACLs) for SLAPD.
• Creating an LDAP proxy
• Replicating directory information trees with SyncRepl (and the syncprov overlay)
• Using overlays, including translucent proxies, accesslog logging, refint referential integrity and more.
• Using and creating custom schemas
• Building OpenLDAP from source
• I also cover integration with Apache, and with phpLDAPadmin.
  

The book should be pretty hefty. It's looking like it will come in around 400 pages.

Special thanks to George Thiruvathukal of ETL for contributing to the book. Also, I have benefited enormously from input from OpenLDAP project members.

Relocating

I've just finished relocating from Chicago to Colorado. It's been a great move, but a little exhausting.

While this has caused a bit of a delay in Sinciput's development, things are picking up again. I've just gotten Eclipse configured for development.

Richard Stallman to Speak at Our Conference

The Loyola Computer Science and Philosophy departments are jointly hosting the 2007 North American Computers and Philosophy Conference.

The panels will be great, and several will be on Free and Open Source Software and Open Access. Richard Stallman and Peter Suber will be the keynote speakers.

The conference will be at Loyola's Water Tower Campus from Thur., July 26 to Sat., July 28.