Neutrino by Frank Close
3/5
Narrow topic, but an interesting book, especially the frustratingly long effort to reconcile observed electron neutrinos from the Sun with reality. Has a rather repetitive recap at the end that ends up recapping some of the recap which rather bogged things down. I definitely know more about neutrinos than I did before though.
More...
Mark Jackson, my co-founder at Cucku, is blogging re-mastered debugging tips from StackHash at infopurge.tumblr.com. StackHash is now an open source project on CodePlex and all of the great content from the original site has been taken offline. This new project is a great resource for debugging on the Windows platform, especially post-mortem crash dump analysis. If that’s your thing do yourself a favor and subscribe to Mark’s blog.
Slightly easier than Half Dome, and when you get to the top you get to look at Half Dome. What more could you ask for!
(View in Google Earth)
Hike starts at: 37.715495, -119.584577.
Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve is an East Bay park spanning more than five thousand acres.
I spotted what looked like an easy four mile loop. It was nearly seven, I guess all the .3’s really do add up. The loop we did was a mix of exposed sunny ridgelines and shady canyons. We went on a ‘cold’ day which was still high 80s and a nice sweltering break from the San Francisco fog.
Kate taking a break outside of ‘Jim’s Place’.
Gill and Kate, again outside of' ‘Jim’s Place’.
Gill with a view to Pittsburg and the California Delta.
(View in Google Earth (KML))
Hike starts at: 37.958487, -121.862883.
Wasted far too long on trying to get WCF to work with custom basic authentication this week. Custom in the sense that I need to look up the username and password in a database and not have IIS attempt to match the credentials to a Windows account. Given how well WCF 4.0 supports RESTful services in general it’s a bit shocking that basic auth over SSL isn’t supported out of the box. It seems like you should be able to derive and hook up a class from UserNamePasswordValidator, set the transport clientCredentialType to Basic and be ready to go. I’ve heard that this works for self-hosted services, but no dice in IIS.
Basic access authentication is a simple protocol and so in the end I added a helper method that checks for access (and in my case returns the user information for later use) at the start of each call into the service. It’s very simple:
- Check WebOperationContext.Current.IncomingRequest.Headers for an ‘Authorization’ header. If it’s there decode and validate the credentials.
- If the header is missing or the credentials are incorrect add the WWW-Authenticate header to the response - WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.Headers.Add("WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm=\"myrealm\""); – and then throw a WebFaultException with a 401 Unauthorized status code.
This triggers a browser to prompt for your username and password and then try the request again. When calling the service in code you can add the ‘Authorization’ header preemptively and skip the 401 response entirely.