Effective Writing Skills

Found this a while ago, but it's still very good material on effective writing skills.

Click here

My VPN Speed for Today

Not too bad, just need to see where the 102ms ping is coming from.

How to enable HTTPS with AXIS 2

I've been using AXIS2 for a couple of months now and decided to take the HTTPS / SSL plunge. The following notes are guidelines on how I configured HTTPS with AXIS2.

I am using Tomcat 6, so firstly you need to enable HTTPS in Tomcat:
1) Create a keystore with the following command and enter the required values:
  keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -validity 365
2) Then copy this file to a directory e.g. /usr/share/tomcat6/.keystore
3) Edit the Tomcat server.xml e.g. /etc/tomcat6/server.xml and add the following section inside the <Service name="Catalina"> tag

 <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true"
               maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true"
                keystorePass="yourkeystorepassword" keystoreFile="/usr/share/tomcat6/.keystore"
               clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" /> 
(replace yourkeystorepassword with the password you used in step 1)

4) Restart Tomcat and test that you can access Tomcat via HTTPS on port 8443 (you will get a certificate error in your browser as it's not a trusted certificate).

Now onto AXIS2:

5) I downloaded the axis2.war file.

6) Extract the war file with unzip to a empty directory.

7) Edit the WEB-INF/conf/axis2.xml file

8) Change this:

<transportReceiver name="http"

                       class="org.apache.axis2.transport.http.AxisServletListener"/> 

to this:

   <transportReceiver name="http"

                       class="org.apache.axis2.transport.http.AxisServletListener">

        <parameter name="port">8080</parameter>

    </transportReceiver>

    <transportReceiver name="https"

                       class="org.apache.axis2.transport.http.AxisServletListener">

        <parameter name="port">8443</parameter>

    </transportReceiver>

9) Now restart Tomcat and go to the HappyAxis(https://localhost:8443/axis2/axis2-web/HappyAxis.jsp) page. You'll see you get some internal server error. This is because Tomcat does not have the keystore configured for AXIS2 to use.

I fixed this by adding the following JAVA_OPT options:

        JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=\"/usr/share/tomcat6/.keystore\" - Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=\"yourkeystorepassword\""

(replace yourkeystorepassword with the password you used in step 1)

10) Check HappyAxis page and WSDL -> https://localhost:8443/axis2/services/Version?wsdl

All done no mess no fuss :)

stackoverflow.com

I must say I love stackoverflow.com I really don't know what I did without the helpful posts you can find on the site. Recently I had to do a recursive SQL query and found a nice solution here. I also needed some help with threads and found a quick answer here. A big thanks to the people at stackoverflow.com.

Oracle Database Fun and Games

I've been working with a number of Oracle databases lately and decide to post some of the tips and tricks that I found:

SQL Developer
Error when you connect to database:
"Status : Failure -Test failed: ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1ORA-01882: timezone region not found"
Solution: Edit the sqldeveloper.conf file and add the following line:
AddVMOption -Duser.timezone=GMT

Error, running out of RAM
Solution: Edit the sqldeveloper.bat file and change the following parameters as required:
-Xmx640M -Xms128M
You can also set the -XX:MaxPermSize setting in the sqldeveloper.conf file, but I have not had to increase this yet.

Start Database Script
Old but good article here -> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Oracle-7-HOWTO-6.html
Basically you need to do this:

Start the listner: lsnrctl start listener

Start Enterprise Manager: emctl start dbconsole

Set the SID of the database: export ORACLE_SID=report

Connect to sqlplus: sqlsplus "sys as sysdba"

Run the startup command: startup

Get list of tables
select tname from tab

Delete all tables
select 'drop table '||table_name||' cascade constraints;' from user_tables; ref

Stop it from prompting you for input values due to the & character
set define off

Cool tool to create new database
dbca (ssh -X into the server and run this command)

Novell IDM Convert Structured Attribute

Every time I need to work with structured attributes on a driver I land up googling for that same page of how to convert a structured attribute to a string and vice verse. Thus to save time I decide to post a link to the forum   here

The meat of the what you need to do to convert from a structured attribute to a string and back again is below, just remember to replace the attribute and component names as required:

Output Transform (struct -&gt; string):
<do-reformat-op-attr name="faxnumber">
<arg-value>
<token-xpath expression='$current-value/component[@name="faxNumber"]/text()'/>
</arg-value>
</do-reformat-op-attr>

Input Transform (string -&gt; struct): 
<do-reformat-op-attr name="faxnumber">
<arg-value type="structured">
<arg-component name="faxNumber">
<token-local-variable name="current-value"/>
</arg-component>
<arg-component name="faxBitCount">
<token-text xml:space="preserve">0</token-text>
</arg-component>
<arg-component name="faxParameters">
<token-text/>
</arg-component>
</arg-value>
</do-reformat-op-attr>

Why don't you run Linux? An absolute classic

Steve the super villain

Software testing

Lately I've been involved in a lot of software testing and came across this awesome article about it:

Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers

I find this guys blog very insightful and like the list of checks he recommends for software development:

Do you use source control?
Can you make a build in one step?
Do you make daily builds?
Do you have a bug database?
Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Do you have a spec?
Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Do you have testers?
Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Do you do hallway usability testing?

My WSDL Cheat Sheet

Service -> ‘Java Class’

Operation -> ‘Java Function’ The Operation defines the name of the Operation and ties the request response messages together.

Port -> A service is assessable on a Port.  A Port has a unique name space and binding attribute. The Port specifies the service address. Web service can be exposed as SOAP or HTTP. The same web service can also be exposed by multiple Ports.

SOAP example:

<port name='WeatherSoapPort' binding='wsdlns:WeatherSoapBinding' >

<soap:address   location='http://localhost/demos/wsdl/devxpert/weatherservice.asp' />

</port>

HTTP example:

<port name='WeatherSoapPort' binding='wsdlns:WeatherSoapBinding' >

<http:address location="http://localhost/demos/wsdl/devxpert/weatherGET.asp"/

</port>

Message -> Normally two messages required i.e. input message and output message. Messages contain zero or more <part> elements. Sample messages below

<message name='Weather.GetTemperature'>

    <part name='zipcode' type='xsd:string'/>

    <part name='celsius' type='xsd:boolean'/>

 </message>

 <message name='Weather.GetTemperatureResponse'>

    <part name='Result' type='xsd:float'/>

 </message>rt name='WeatherSoapPort'

Binding -> ‘Ties it all together’ - specifies binding(s) of each operation in the PortTypes section

More Holiday Photos

Cartoon effect on my camera

Dam on Table Mountain

Dam water

More dam water

Some people choose to ignore warnings

Nice bird

uShaka

uShaka

Swimming at Silvermine

Holiday Photos December 2011

Table Mountain

St James Beach - 26 December 2011

View of Constantia wine farms

View of Table Mountain from Milnerton - I like the panorama mode on my camera phone :)

Out at the Baxter for 'Some like it Vrot'

Sea Point

View from Hillcrest Berry Farm

Beware of the Prawns (only in Joburg)

Novell SAP HR Driver Documents

These are some good documents to read if you are working with the SAP HR Driver:

Troubleshooting iDOC Issues in the SAP HR Driver for Identity Manager
IDM SAP HR Driver: Where to Get the JConnect Libraries
Decoding iDOCs with the IDM SAP Driver
SAP HR iDoc Decoder
Error Codes of the SAP HR driver for Identity Manager - Part 1
SAP HR driver - Structure of the HRMD_A*.meta files

Novell IDM (dirxml) - How to get the user DN in LDAP format

You can use the following Dirxml script to get the user DN in standard LDAP format:

<do-set-local-variable name="SlashDN" scope="policy">

<arg-string>

<token-src-dn/>

</arg-string>

</do-set-local-variable>

<do-set-local-variable name="userDN" scope="policy">
    <arg-string>
        <token-parse-dn dest-dn-format="ldap" src-dn-format="qualified-slash">
            <token-xpath expression='query:readObject($srcQueryProcessor, "",$SlashDN,"","")/@qualified-src-dn'/>
        </token-parse-dn>
    </arg-string>
</do-set-local-variable>

jQuery and IE8 not the best of friends

So I've been pulling my hair out with IE8 ... again. I wrote some code that was working like a charm in FF and Chrome:

$(this).val().trim().match(match)

Sadly this code did not work in IE8 and I got the following error:

"Object doesn't support this property or method"

Changing it to the below did the trick:

jQuery.trim($(this).val()).match(match)

Another part of my life wasted debugging IE issues :(

Some of my old IT Textbooks

Wow what a find! Was digging around the house and found some really old textbooks. Check this out. Love the story about the CPU.