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.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Sentinel Dome #hike #sentineldome #yosemite Spectacular views from this hike to the top of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite National Park, California. )

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.

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(Hike Map)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve #hike #blackdiamondmines Seven mile hike in the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve in Antioch, California. )

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:

1. Check WebOperationContext.Current.IncomingRequest.Headers for an ‘Authorization’ header. If it’s there decode and validate the credentials.
2. 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.

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(All Code Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Basic HTTP auth for an IIS hosted WCF 4 RESTful service #code #wcf #iis #rest How to implement .NET Basic HTTP auth for an IIS hosted WCF 4 REST API. )

The Startup Genome people have launched a complicated tool to benchmark your Startup against others.

I’ve developed a simpler model. It used to be you spent too much money on Sun and Oracle. Now it’s fighting off patent trolls.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: The startup costs are too damned high #politics #patents #sun #oracle Startups used to spend too much money on Sun and Oracle and now spend too much money on patent lawsuits. )

CNET stopped being a useful source of downloads for me ages ago. Over the lifetime of my account I’ve had nearly 100,000 downloads through CNET, but these days it’s one or two a week. I left my products up there anyway, but I’ve just asked them to remove everything they have listed for Catfood Software.

The reason is that CNET has rolled out a download manager that wraps every single download. Instead of the customer getting the product they thought they were downloading they are dumped into a CNET experience that tries to install a toolbar and push Bing / MSN into your browser defaults. Yuck.

It’s one thing for a vendor to partner this way. It’s quite another to roll it out site wide with little notification and no opt out, let alone a revenue share. CNET sell this as being about analytics. Of course it’s all about referral dollars. This isn’t the experience I want for my customers and so I’m pulling the plug on download.com.

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• Do you want me to use Edge, Microsoft?
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Download.com goes nuclear #etc #download.com #cnet Download.com hijacked my download to install some toolbar and so I'm leaving the site. )

My first and last foray into being a TV production company. Tragic that this never got made…

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Cam of Fortune! #etc #letters #cam #cams #channel4 A proposal for the ultimate STEM game show, unfortunately rejected by Channel 4. )

I became a US Citizen in 2010 so I didn’t get to vote in the last presidential election. If I had been able to vote it would absolutely have been for Obama. I was captivated by the promise of a transformational presidency. I should have known better and I was completely mistaken.

The outcome of the debt ceiling negotiation is motivating me to write about this now, but it’s really just the final straw. Well, not quite a straw, it’s unconscionable that an increase in tax revenue isn’t part of the deal. And how was the conversation boxed into subtle differences in where to cut trillions of dollars rather than why? It’s hard to think of a better way to increase unemployment and decrease growth.

Reasonable people can disagree on the budget. What really bothers me is that Obama has failed so comprehensively to rectify the damage that Bush did to America’s reputation and moral authority. If you want to spread democracy and freedom it would seem to me that the most powerful tool is providing a shining example and an inspiration. America has often played this role – never perfectly but the imperfections have historically been an embarrassment. Now, increasingly, they’re a source of pride: celebrating assassinations, brushing torture under the carpet, a war on whistleblowers and increased use of ‘state secrets’ to brush aside inconvenient due process.

On torture in particular Obama’s “…belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” kills me. It’s not a defense I feel I could use to fight a speeding ticket. It’s a complete abrogation of responsibility.

It also really bothers me that Obama can’t just come out as supporting gay Americans having he same rights as the rest of us.

All this leaves me with a large problem in 2012. Even though I live in California and therefore have a worthless vote I still take my electoral responsibility seriously. I just don’t think I can vote for this guy, even if he’s better than the alternative.

Obama: please don’t run in 2012. I need a new hope.

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• 2020 Results
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Episode Four #politics #obama #democracy #debtceiling #torture #whistleblowers #statesecrets Why I can't bring myself to support the reelection of President Obama. )