Not having one of the "supported" platforms pushed me into playing with the provided Management Packs, and in turn I managed to use the MP for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a base, and replaced a couple of strings in the discoveries in order to get a working CentOS 5 Management Pack.

I still have not looked into the "hardware" monitors and health model / service model, so those are not currently monitored. But it is a start.

A lot of people have asked me a lot of information and would like to get the file - both in the blog's comment, on the newsgroup, or via mail. I am sorry, but I cannot provide you with the file, because it has not been throughly tested and might render your systems unstable, and also because there might be licensing and copyright issues that I have not checked within Microsoft.

Keep also in mind that using CentOS as a monitored platform is NOT a SUPPORTED scenario/platform for SCX. I only used it because I did not have a Suse or Redhat handy that day, and because I wanted to understand how the Management Packs using WS-Man worked.

This said, should you wish to try to do the same "MP Hacking" I did,  I pretty much explained all you need to know in my previous post and its comments, so that should not be that difficult.

Actually, I still think that the best way to figure out how things are done is by looking at the actual implementation, so I encourage you to look at the management packs and figure out how those work. There are a few mature tools out there that will help you author/edit Management Packs if you don't want to edit the XML directly: the Authoring Console, and Silect MP Studio Lite, for example. If you want to delve in the XML details, instead, then I suggest you read the Authoring Guide and peek at Steve Wilson's AuthorMPs.com site.

Disclaimer
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

"[...] What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It's hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. [...]"

In fact, being made by Microsoft people or not, the list of open source software on CodePlex keeps growing too. Mentioning CodePlex and interviews, another interesting one is that of Sara Ford, Program Manager for CodePlex posted on Microspotting. But Microspotting is awesome in general. My favorite quote by her:

"[...] Hey. My name is Ariel and I'm the person you thought would never work at MSFT [...]".

In fact, just as I do, she is running that blog on Wordpress, posting her photos on Flickr, using a RSS feed on Feedburner and in general using a bunch of things that are out there that might be seen as "competing" with what Microsoft makes. In fact, this attitude towards other products and vendors on the market is what I am mainly interested in. Should we only use flagship products? Sure, when they help us, but not necessarily. Who cares? People's blogs are not, as someone would like them to be, a coordinated marketing effort. This is about real people, real geeks, who just want to share and communicate personal ideas and thoughts. I had a blog before being at Microsoft, after all. Obviously I had exposure to competing products. My server was running LAMP on Novell Netware in 2002 - after which I moved it to Linux. It is not a big deal. And if I try to put things in perspective, in fact, this is turning out to be an advantage. I am saying this, as the latest news about interoperability comes from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit): and that is the announcement that System Center Operations Manager will monitor Linux natively. I find this to be extremely exciting, and a step in the right direction… to say it all I am LOVING this!!! But at the same time I see some other colleagues in technical support that are worrying and being scared by this - "if we do monitor Linux and Unix, we are supposed to have at least some knowledge on those systems", they are asking. Right. We probably do. At the moment there are probably only a limited number of people that actually can do that, at least in my division. But this is because in the past they must have sacrificed their own curiosity to become "experts" in some very narrow and "specialized" thing. Here we go. On the opposite, I kept using Linux - even when other "old school" employees would call me names. All of a sudden, someone else realizes my advantage.  …but a lot of geeks already understood the power of exploration, and won't stop defining people by easy labels. Another cool quote I read the other day is what Jimmy Schementi has written in his Flickr profile:

"[...] I try to do everything, and sometimes I get lucky and get good at something [...]".

Reading on his blog it looks like he also gave up on trying to write a Twitter plugin for MSNLive Messenger (or maybe he never tried, but at least I wanted to do that, instead) and wrote it for Pidgin instead.  Why did he do that ? I don't know, I suppose because it was quicker/easier - and there were API's and code samples to start from.

The bottom line, for me, is that geeks are interested in figuring out cool things (no matter what language or technology they use) and eventually communicating them. They tend to be pioneers of technologies. They try out new stuff. Open Source development is a lot about agility and "trying out" new things. Another passage of Brad's interview says:

"[...] That's true–the open source projects I contribute to tend to be the "by developer, for developer" kind, although I also consume things that are less about development [...] Like one tool that I've used forever is the GIMP graphics editor, which I love a lot".

That holds true, when you consider that a lot of these things are not really mainstream. Tools made "by developer, for developer" are usually a sort of experimental ground. Like Twitter. Every geek is talking about Twitter these days, but you can't really say that it is mainstream. Twitter has quite a bunch of interesting aspects, though, and that's why geeks are on it. Twitter lets me keep up-to-date quicker and better (and with a personal, conversational touch) even better than RSS feeds and blogs do. Also, there are a lot of Microsofties on Twitter. And the cool thing is that yo can really talk to everybody, at any level. Not just everybody "gets" blogs, social networks, and microblogging. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be on top of the tech news, or use experimental technologies. So in a way stuff like Twitter is "by geeks, for geeks" (not really just for developers - there's a lot of "media" people on Twitter). Pretty much in the same way, a lot of people I work with (at direct contact, everyday) only found out about LinkedIN during this year (2008!). I joined Orkut and LinkedIN in 2004. Orkut was in private beta, back then. A lot of this stuff never becomes mainstream, some does. But it is cool to discover it when it gets born. How long did it take for Social Networking to become mainstream? So long that when it is mainstream for others, I have seen it for so long that I am even getting tired of it.

For some reason, geeks love to be pioneers. This is well expressed in a digression by Chris Pratley:

"[...] some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we're not actually normal - you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress. [...]"

But I have been digressing, too, all along. As usual.

Installed moonlight on Ubuntu from source by following these instructions (there are some typo's but they are understandable and correctable).

All in all, even being still under heavy development, what Miguel de Icaza has achieved (with moonlight, just like with mono) is amazing.

After I posted the above picture on Flickr, John Montgomery was amazed to see PopFly (his creature) working on moonlight, and he linked to me from his blog.

I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest "we want to interoperate" fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).

Anyway, what do you think ?

But in my blog I don't require or need people to actually log in to do anything. I actually like anonymous/free comment. A CAPTCHA takes care of spammers and I am fine with it so far. Probably for a big site with a lot of users it might make sense, but for my blog so far it doesn't. But there's one thing for which this is instead useful: I have always been worried, when logging in through HTTP (thus, without SSL) to my blog from networks I don't manage or completely trust, that my password could be sniffed over the wire and stolen. Live ID solves my problem by letting Microsoft validate my identity: I have associated my Live ID to the blog's main user account(=myself), the one writing this post. So the plugin in its current form is used as a replacement of the login form (the standard wp-login.php wordpress form CAN still be used if you like, of course, you just don't HAVE to. Also the use of xmlrpc will still require local user/pwd combination.). Anyway, this new form will authenticate you thorugh Live ID and then check if your Live ID is associated to any local user. If it is, it will log you on to wordpress with that account. Otherwise it will inform you that you are successfully logged on to passport Live, but unfortunately there is no corresponding local account for you, and that it would need to be set up. Setting it up is as difficult as adding a line to the database… probably adding a form or a property page would be nice, but in my case I just did it with a query:

INSERT INTO `wordpress`.`wp-usermeta` (
`umeta_id` ,
`user_id` ,
`meta_key` ,
`meta_value`
)
VALUES (
NULL , '1', 'LiveID', 'f11fa1d3e82c68776f94a3a5c459b70b'
);

which adds an extra "property" for the first user (admin) called 'LiveID' which contains your Live ID (the one above is not my real one, in case you were wondering). When you are authenticated by LiveID and you get back this value, the plugin checks in this table which WordPress userid in the database has been associated with this Live ID and - if it finds one - it authenticates you as that user. Of course you should not have duplicates.

My code is mostly based on the SDK PHP Sample, with some modification to integrate it in WordPress as a plugin. Of course I removed the file that is used as "user database" and used wordpress DB instead.

There's a ton of things that could be improved. I just did not put any more effort and time in it. As you might know if you read this blog, I am not a full time developer. Actually I shouldn't write code at all for work and I am mainly considered an "infrastructure" guy. Anyway, I would like to code more and even if I am not supposed to, I always try to find stimulating situations that require a bit of integration, thinking out of the box, some scripting, etc…

[updated: november 3rd 2007] You can download the sample plugin "AS-IS" here: liveauth.zip . This has only been tested and only works with Wordpress 2.3.x serie (but should also work with earlier versions - not tested)

[updated: march 30th 2008] Wordpress 2.5 has changed the way the authentication cookie is generated, therefore here is an updated version of the plugin that works with the new secure cookies: liveauth02.zip
I should really invest some more time in this and clear up the code. I should also make an interface to make the configuration easier, and maybe make a version that works on both 2.3 and 2.5 branches. I am not sure when I will have time for that, though…

[updated: april 20th 2008] I have released version 0.3c of the plugin which now finally includes a simple configuration page, and should work on both WordPress 2.3 (and older) and on the 2.5 brach. Please visit the new Windows Live ID Authentication WordPress Plugin Page.

Disclaimer:
The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I'VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.

In the end it turns out that I did not have to wait or be worried, since the cat was already out of the bag!!!

[As a side note, it happens a lot of times that stuff gets public much earlier than when I actually read that internally. In those internal communication it very often is still considered "confidential" when the whole world is speaking about it.... I don't get this whole "confidentiality" thing in these days of porous membranes...]

Scott Guthrie writes:

"[...] One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them. [...] VS 2008 will include support to automatically retrieve the appropriate .NET Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means that the source code for the ASP.NET GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes above do not have to already be installed on the machine before we started the debugger. Instead, when we use F11 to step into their implementation VS can automatically download the source files from Microsoft and open it within the IDE. [...]"

WOW. This is so cool, and a further step in the right direction.

Thanks to Alessandro for having picked this up, as I read it on his blog, and I thought it was an information worth spreading!!!

Some months ago Christian discovered a hack to change your Facebook status. Some other people also used it and extended it. I also ported it to C# and made a winform using its unofficial method.
Suddenly after, Facebook asked us to take down the code, as it violated their terms of service.

It has taken a while, some struggles, but now they finally recognized the need for federated status, and implemented a user.setStatus API.

Twitter is the first to pick it up, so now you can update twitter and have your status propagate in Facebook!

Well done, guys!

When I'll have some time I might think of rewriting my app using the SUPPORTED method, maybe finally writing that Live Messenger plugin… it would be nice
When I'll have time…

Ubuntu on Virtual PC 2007, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This was a VMWare "virtual appliance" with Ubuntu that I was using for testing. As I mostly use Virtual PC or Virtual Server, I found it annoying having to switch to VMWare player to use that specific machine, and I could not be asked to install a new one. So I converted the .VMDK to .VHD format (the other way around than it is described on this article ).

After that, I had to change GRUB's configuration to inform it that the SCSI disk (/dev/sda1) was all of a sudden become an IDE one (/dev/hda1), and then I also had to reconfigure X.

After that it runs like a charme!!!

I used to have Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Messenger on my Windows 2003 Server box. Now, this new fantastic integrated setup says it won't install on this operating system. Ridiculous. You read the release notes, and in fact it only says Windows XP and Vista.

I see.

Well, I happen to use a Windows 2003 Server at home - the same machine for day to day use (like writing this post or checking private email) and doing some study/testing. I don't have loads of machines. I don't actually have money for a new machine (even if I would really need a new one to test stuff).
I try to do more with less.

Well, if this does not install, what am I supposed to do ?
I want to chat with people, which means I'll keep using Pidgin on this machine. That way I also have my GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo buddies all in one place. And it eats up much less memory that the "real" live messenger. And without advertisements. How nice.

I am sorry when my employer does this kind of stupid things. This is not interoperability. It does not even work on OUR operating systems!

As for Windows Live Writer, read Phil's post. It seems like FrontPage, all over again.
For writing this post I've used Flickr.
Since I happen to post quite a bunch of photos or images on my blog, I find it ideal. The ONLY thing Flickr is missing, when used as a blogging tool, is the ability to post tags/categories too. Otherwise it would be perfect.

[...] I've been pushing the idea that every app should be a platform for a long time, that in addition to a user interface, every app should have a programmatic interface. For me the idea came from growing up using Unix in the 70s, where every app is a toolkit and the operating system is a scripting language. Wiring things together is an integral part of being a Unix user. It's why programmers like Unix so much [...]

It is entirely true. The limits are blurry, IMHO. In the Unix world it is common to find full-fledged "applications" which have been written by the ground up by people that were doing SysAdmin tasks, and those "applications" are usually just… scripts. Simple shell scripts, or something more evolved (PERL, PHP, Python) it does not really matter.

I am so tired of the division traditionally made in the Microsoft world between "Developers" and "IT Professionals". We even have separate sites for the two audiences: MSDN and Technet. There are separate "TechED" events: for"Devs" and for "IT Pros". There are blogs that are divided among the two "audiences"…

There aren't two different audiences, really. There are people, with various degrees of expertise. There is no such a thing as a "developer" if he doesn't know a bit how the underlying system works. His code is gonna suck. And there is not such a thing such a "IT Pro" that builds and integrates and manages systems if he does not have the palest idea of how things work "behind the GUI". He's gonna screw things up regardless of how many step-by-step (click-by-click ?) procedures you spoon feed him.

That's why automation and integration are best done by people who know how to write a bit code.

The PowerShell folk GET IT.

For this reason, I had to pull down the code of the small application I had previously released, which was "logging" into the mobile web application "pretending" to be a mobile browser and change your status. Big deal!!!

I am quite sure there are a lot of people writing "official" applications (that is using the "platform API" and so on) that are collecting A LOT of information about users who install their applications. They are being sent the info about the visitors by facebook, they are storing them, they might do whatever they please with (study it, sell it to spammers, to marketers, to making-money-assholes) and nobody will ever notice because it is on their servers and nobody can check that.

But a script that changes your status from remote - since this is not a functionality they CHOSE to expose in their API - then THAT is a big issue. Doh!
It's just plain ridiculous, but that's it.

Sure, the terms of service for app developers say a bit more in this regard:

[...]
4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;

5) You may store and use indefinitely any Facebook Properties that are explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; provided, however, that except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any such Facebook Properties: (a) if Facebook ceases to explicitly identify the same as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation; (b) upon notice from Facebook (including if we notify you that a particular Facebook User has requested that their information be made inaccessible to that Facebook Platform Application); or (c) upon any termination of this Agreement or of your use of or participation in Facebook Platform;
[...]
You will not directly or indirectly sell, export, re-export, transfer, divert, or otherwise dispose of any Facebook Properties to any country (or national thereof) without obtaining any required prior authorizations from the appropriate government authorities;
[...]

Are we sure everybody is playing by these rules, when every facebook "application" really runs on the developer'server ? How do you know that they are really storing only what you want them to store, and deleting what you want them to delete ? Everybody knows how difficult it is to really "delete" digital content once it has come into existance… who knows how many copies of this database/social graph are floating around ?

Of course that is not an issue because people don't talk about it enough. But a script that changes your status - now, THAT is a very terrible thing.

I just don't get this "politically correctness". It must be me.

Oh, no… look! It's not only me!
I had read this post of Dare, but I problably had overlooked the last bit of it…. because he did point out this Hypocrisy going on:

[...]
Or (5) the information returned by FQL about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address) so it is pretty useless as a way to utilize one’s friends list with applications besides Facebook since there is no way to cross-reference your friends using any personally identifiable association that would exist in another service.

When it comes to contact lists (i.e. the social graph), Facebook is a roach motel. Lots of information about user relationships goes in but there’s no way for users or applications to get it out easily. Whenever an application like FacebookSync comes along which helps users do this, it is quickly shut down for violating their Terms of Use. Hypocrisy? Indeed.
[...]

He then insists in a more recent post in calling things by their name:

[...]
I will point out that 9 times out of 10 when you hear geeks talking about social network portability or similar buzzwords they are really talking about sending people spam because someone they know joined some social networking site. I also wonder how many people realize that these fly-by-night social networking sites that they happily hand over their log-in credentials to so they can spam their friends also share the list of email addresses thus obtained with services that resell to spammers?
[...]
how do you prevent badly behaved applications like Quechup from taking control away from your users? At the end of the day your users might end up thinking you sold their email addresses to spammers when in truth it was the insecure practices of the people who they’d shared their email addresses with that got them in that mess. This is one of the few reasons I can understand why Facebook takes such a hypocritical approach.
[...]

Thanks, Dare, for mentioning Hypocrisy. Thanks for calling things by their name. I do understand their approach, I just don't agree with it.

I did pull my small application off the Internet because I have a family to mantain and I don't want to have legal troubles with Facebook. Sorry to all those that found it handy. No, I cannot even give that to you per email. It's gone. I am sorry. For the freedom of speech, especially, I am sorry.

I will change my status more often on Twitter.

They are very simple: you enter your user name and they connect to their REST web service, extract the information about your places and/or goals, and show them as a list in a box in your profile.

I don't know why I did not blog about them before… maybe I thought they were too simple ? Well, they are, but, seriously: who cares?

[...] Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion) [...]

Tafiti, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

www.tafiti.com/#p=0&q=%22Daniele%20Muscetta%22

Try it out.

Searching for myself on Yahoo Image Search, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Here I start a quick comparison of what search engines actually find about me.
I am glad to read that Live Search can find Jimi Hendrix's face, and Google can spot those portraits of Paris Hilton.
Unfortunately I am not as famous as them, so not enough people have tagged me. Not on "normal" web pages or newspaper.

Yahoo did a great/smart thing buying Flickr.
It gets people doing the TAGGING for them.
So the results are accurate for pretty much everything.

Ok granted. All of these pictures are coming out of Flickr.
But while that is a limitation, it is also its power.

This is also why I was able to search for "blackberries" the other day and find the thing I was searching for, that is FRUIT that grows spontaneously in the woods, rather than a bunch of stupid mobile telephones.
try: images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=blackberry+OR+fruit

Doing the same search on Google:

Ok this is not all from flickr anymore, they actually have the rest of the web in their database. Most of them are pictures I made - granted. But only one OF me, and definitely not the first one. Ninth position.

try the blackberry serch images.google.com/images?svnum=10&q=blackberry+OR+fruit

And now Live Search:

Same as Google: images from everywhere. Less images than Google. Most of them made by me (not all). An actual picture of myself is in 9th position.

my blackberry search here finds a lot of fruit…

strangely enough, there's an IPhone among them!!!!

Facebook mobile is not working from mobile operators not in the US, I suppose.
I can't even log on to m.facebook.com with my WIndows Mobile SmartPhone.
I can't send status updates through SMS.

I can't even send them by mail, or I get the following back:

So, now, I am updating Twitter.
Twitter can be updated with an SMS even from Europe. Or it can be updated with a bot running GTalk. Very easy, can do it from everywhere.

I then wrote a small command line application (based on the same "hack" as the one described before) that runs every five minutes from the scheduler on my server and keeps the two in sync.

I wrote it in C# as a Console application because that's usually what I do when I want it to run it both on my windows machines and/or on my Linux server (with MONO). I already used this approach in the past and I found it to be successful. As long as you keep the application simple enough and check out the documentation for the implemented classes on mono, it runs without modification both on windows on the "real" .Net framework and on Mono on Linux. i just copy the executable and I am ready to go.
Not this time, though.
I am hitting what seems to be a bug in mono. I might be able to find a workaround, but I haven't had the time to dig in the issue yet.
I posted some info about this on this forum.

Windows Live ID Team has published on the web the SDK that lets you liveID (or "passport")-enable your applications!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676633.aspx

There are even code samples in six different languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby e Perl! You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91761

Wow! Having time, it would be cool to write a Wordpress plugin using Passport authentication to authenticate/identify users that want to comment… mumble mumble…..

Interoperability. Wow.

More info at the Live ID starting Page: http://dev.live.com/blogs/liveid/archive/2006/05/18/8.aspx

I keep finding way too many software that claim to interact with Web 2.0 sites or services, and connect here or there…. still forgetting one basic simple rule, that is: letting people use a proxy.

Most programmers for some reasons just assume that since they are directly connected to the internet, everybody is. Which isn't always the case. Most companies have proxies and will only let you out to port 80 - by using their proxy.

…which in turn is one of the reasons why most applications now "talk" and tunnel whatever application protocol on top of HTTP… still a lot of softwares simply "forget" or don't care proving a simple checkbox "use proxy", which will translate in two or three extra lines of code… three lines which I personally usually include in my projects, when I am not even a *developer*!! (but that might explain why I *think* of it… I come from a security and networking background :-))

I thought of writing this post after having read this post by Saqib Ullah.

Anyway. I keep finding this thing over and over again. Both in simple, hobbyist, sample and/or in complex, big, expensive enterprise software. Last time I got pissed off about a piece of code missing this feature was some days ago when testing http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit. The previous time was during Windows Vista beta-testing (I had found a similar issue in beta2, and had it fixed for RC1.)

Actually, I am being polite saying it is "missing a feature". To be honest I think missing this "feature" would have to be considered a bug: every piece of software using HTTP *should* include the possibility to pass thorugh proxy (also, don't forget about  AUTHENTICATED proxies), or the purpose of using HTTP in the first place is defeated!!

Developers!!! You have to remember people ARE behind proxies !!!!!

What I had in mind was a simple program that would run on my PC, maybe minimized in the system tray, that would let me update my status in a click, thorugh the day, without having to log on to the website. Most of the day I am busy working, and I don't really have time to go surf and check Facebook… but I like the possibility for people to hear how I am doing. Changing the status would keep them up to date, and would keep my profile current.

As I figured out afterwards, their API does not yet let you change your status yet.

There are other people asking for this possibility… but then I went further searching on the Internet, and I found this blog: http://www.nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/. 

I just hacked together a small WinForm written in C# that reimplements this idea.

I indeed would like to thank Christian for the idea, and my friend and colleague Pierluigi for his precious help with the regular expressions

At the moment it has terrible things such as hardcoded passwords in it, but as soon as I will have time to polish the code a bit, I will post it.

One more thing I would like to do with it is turning it from a standalone application into a Live Messenger Add-In, so that it synchronizes my messenger status with the one of Facebook. When I will have time for that.

PopFly lets you create mashups and even custom blocks, and I liked that too. But you have to use fancy-shiny Silverlight (which is very cool indeed, but probably not *always* necesary) and you can only create blocks using Javascript. Sure, as someone as already written, the meaning of AJAX is "javascript now works". I can understand (even if I don't know them for sure) the reasons behind certain choices. But I find it limiting. Maybe it is because I don't like Javascript. It must be it. 

Facebook, instead, empowers you to inject code into their social networking framework. Any code. In whatever language you like. They started it in PHP, but you can plug-in whatever you like: Java, Ruby, Perl…. you can even have your application running on your own server, still providing a seamless experience inside of facebook. This opens up to millions of possibilities, and I got fascinated by that.

At the same time, the paranoid part of myself has been thinking to the security implications of it. This open platform is cool, but it also sounds like a framework for cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. Sure, you can "report" an application made by a third party that does something weird… but who will really notice if all that happens under the hood is that your cookies get stolen (and someone accesses your bank account) ? Will you figure it out it has happenend because you wanted to see the "dancing pigs" loaded in your profile ? Or will you figure it out at all ?

This said, I set aside my fear for a while and I delved into coding. What I did learn in the last couple of years, having slowly moved away from security engagements, is to relax. When I was working costantly with security I was a lot more paranoid. Now I case much less, and I live a lot more.

So I developed a couple of quick and simple apps running from this very server into Facebook, and I started using thePHP5 library they provide, so to be able to follow the examples first and figure out how it was working.

Now I also want to take a look at the .NET library for facebook when I have time. It sounds cool.

Facebook_Daniele, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

Yet another social networking. I am on there too, now.
http://www.facebook.com/p/Daniele_Muscetta/742258687

Ah, and by the way, I really find it incredible that every time I invite some people to a new social networking site (it has happened for all of them), it happens that some (many) of the persons I have invited reply to me or call me asking me "is this really sent by you ?" "it looked like spam" "what is this thing" and the like.

Come on, guys, we are in year 2007, you still don't know what social networking is… especially if you work in IT you are sort of a dinosaur, you know?

The layout is still crap, but I sort of like it being so light weight, so that is not on my priority list so far. Moreover, I am a crap designer.

Before that, tough, I still have to add important functionalities like the possibility to POST comments (which needs a new CAPTCHA, etc, so it will take me a while), and I am having issues with text encoding (it does not show the accented characters properly, yet).

But I am having fun doing it.

You can build complex web-mashups in minutes.

Read on an interesting review at programmableweb.com and, obviously, more info at the official site http://www.popfly.ms

WordPress.Net, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

It has been quite a while that I wanted to experiment a bit more with ASP.Net but I don't have a windows machine on the internet. Not one that performs enough anyway. My server runs linux. I have had mono running on it for a while, but its support was not complete with the old release of Debian, so part of my mono and mod_mono installation were a custom compile and they were breaking from time to time, each time some library got updated. So I did run a "Hello World" page with it, but nothing more, because it was a bit of a mess to mantain and, moreover, because I had not yet figured out how to have it connect with mysql instead than with MS SQL Server.
Also, I did not have any real project or idea to implement in my mind.

Now that I have upgraded to Debian Etch, mono support seems to be much more out-of-the-box and stable on this release. I also got an idea of what to do with it, so I finally gave it a try.

As a starter, I am trying to re-publish my blog, historically running at www.muscetta.com, on my other muscetta.NET domain (it makes sense to use a .NET domain, right?). But this is not a new site, it is a republish of the same content, but done using C# - just pointing at the same wordpress' mysql database. Connection to MySQL is done with MySql.Data (the ADO.Net driver for MySQL).

I still need to implement a lot of things/features, such as comment posting (you can only read them now), some layout/styling/framing to make it look nicer, some sidebar/blogroll, feeds, and a many other things. I am not aiming at a complete rewrite (for example I won't do an administrative interface or a webservice so far), but just a republish/frontend to the visitors.
I don't know when I will have time to continue writing it, but all in all I am glad it works so far, and I had fun doing it.

Writing ASP.Net for mono on linux in the absence of Frontpage server extentions and WebDAV and the remote debugger is proving slightly more challenging than just dragging and dropping controls in Visual Studio and let it do a lot of work with you. You have to write the code, upload it, and see if it works. No debugging, no intellisense. Just the hard old way of trial and error, which makes development slower, but you learn a hell of a lot more that way. Of course you need to keep the MSDN library handly

And yes, I feel very "debiany" today. In fact I just finished upgrading my server from Sarge to Etch and it went very smoothly, even if I had to reconfigure / migrate some settings - for example moving all the virtual server configuration from Apache 1.3 to 2.x … but it was about time for me to move my ass off 1.3! Among other things I am quite glad now I can use mod_mono and have it update with apt-get, instead than having my own compiled version with all sort of broken dependencies… also, it performs better - faster, and takes up the same amount of resources, which I would not have believed and I was in fact slightly concerned about. Nothing to be worried about, it turns out.

Some other guy was pointing me out today all the other improvements in the desktop-feature-space. I would not know, I am a runlevel-2 guy when it comes to linux.

At the time I looked around but it seemed like no one had something like this already done.
So I wrote a very simple RSS feed generator for MOM Alerts.
I did it quite an amount of time ago, just as an exercise.
Then, after a while, I figured out that the MOM 2005 Resource Kit had been updated to include such a utility!

Wow, I thought, they finally added what I have been thinking for a while. Might it be because I mentioned it on an private Mailing list ? Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares. Of course, if it is included in the resource kit it must be way cooler than the one I made, I though.
I really thought something along these lines, but never actually had the time to try it out.
I think I just sort of assumed it must have been cooler than the one I made, since it was part of an official package, while I am not a developer. So I basically forgot about the one I wrote, dismissing it as being crap without looking too much into it anymore.
Until today.
Today I actually tried to use the alert to RSS tool included in the resource kit, because a customer asked if there was any other way to get notified, other than receiving notification or using the console (or the console notifier).
So I looked at the resource kit's Alert-to-RSS Utility.
My experience with it:
1) it is provided in source code form - which is ok if it was ALSO provided as source. Instead it is ONLY provided as source, and most admins don't have Visual Studio installed or don't know how to compile from the command line;
2) Even when they wanted to compile it, it includes a bug which makes it impossible to compile - solution in this newsgroup discussion;
3) if you don't want to mess about with code since you are using a resource Kit tool (as opposed to something present in the SDK) you can even get it already compiled by someone from somewhere on the net, but that choice is about trust.

Anyway, one way or another, after it is finally set up…. surprise surprise!!!
It does NOT show a LIST of alerts (as I was expecting).
It shows a summary of how many alerts you have. basically it is an RSS feed made of a single item, and this single item tells you how many alerts you have. What is one supposed to do with such a SUMMARY? IMHO, it is useless the way it is. It is even worse than one of those feed that only contains the excerpt of the article, rather than the full article.
Knowing that I have 7 critical errors and 5 warning without actually knowing ANYTHING of them is pointless.
It might be useful for a manager, but not for a sysadmin, at least.

So I thought my version, even if coded crap, might be useful to someone because it gives you a list of alerts (those that are not resolved) and each one of them tells you the description of the alert, the machine tat generated it, and includes links to the actual alert in the web console, so you can click, go there, and start troubleshooting from within your aggregator!
My code does this. Anyway, since I am a crap coder, since I wrote it in only fifteen minutes more than a year ago, and since I don't have time to fix it and make it nicer… it has several issues, and could be improved in a million ways, in particular for the following aspects:

1. is currently depends on the SDK Database views - it could use the MOM Server API's or the webservice instead;
2. it uses SQL Security to connect to the DB - by default MOM does not allow this - it is suggested for the SQL instance hosting "OnePoint" to only use Windows Integrated Authentication.. so to make my code work you have to switch back to Mixed mode, and create a login in SQL that has permission to read the database. This is due to the fact that I've coded this in five minutes and I don't know how to use delegation - if I was able to use delegation, I would… so that the end user accessing IIS would be the one connecting to the DB. If anybody wants to teach me how to do this, I will be most grateful.
3. it could accept parameters as URL variables, so to filter out only events for a specific machine, or a specific resolution state, etc etc
4. At present it uses RSS.Net to generate the feed. It could made independent from it, but I don't really see why, and I quite like that library.

The code is just an ASP.Net page and its codebehind, no need to compile, but of course you need to change a couple of lines to match your webconsole address.
Also, you need to get RSS.NET and copy its library (RSS.Net.dll) in the /bin subfolder of the website directory where you place the RSSFeed generator page. I see that I wrote this with version 0.86, but any version should do, really.

Here is what it will look like:

And here's the code of the page (two files):

Default.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

Default.aspx.cs

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using Rss;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string webconsoleaddress = "http://192.168.0.222:1272/AlertDetail.aspx?v=a&sid=" // must change to match your address

// Inizializza il Feed
RssChannel rssChannel = new RssChannel();
rssChannel.Title = "MOM Alerts"
rssChannel.PubDate = DateTime.Now;
rssChannel.Link = new Uri("http://192.168.0.222:1272/rss/"); // must change to match your address
rssChannel.LastBuildDate = DateTime.Now;
rssChannel.Description = "Contains the latest Alerts"

// query - you might want to change the severity
string mySelectQuery = "SELECT ComputerName, Name, Severity, TimeRaised, RepeatCount, GUID FROM dbo.SDKAlertView WHERE Severity > 10 AND ResolutionState < 255"

// SQL Connection – must change SQL server, user name and password
SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("Data Source=192.168.0.222;Initial Catalog=OnePoint;User ID=rss;Password=rss");
SqlDataReader rdr = null;

try
{
conn.Open();
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(mySelectQuery, conn);
rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (rdr.Read())
{
RssItem rssItem = new RssItem();
string titleField = rdr[1].ToString();
rssItem.Title = titleField;
string url = webconsoleaddress + rdr[5];
rssItem.Link = new Uri(url.ToString());
string description = "<![CDATA[ <p><a xhref=\"" + rssItem.Link + "\">" + rdr[1] + " </a></p><br>" + "<br>Computer: " + rdr[0] + "<br>Repeat Count: " + rdr[4] + "<BR>Original ALert Time: " + rdr[3];
rssItem.Description = description;
rssChannel.Items.Add(rssItem);
}

// Finalizza il feed
RssFeed rssFeed = new RssFeed();
rssFeed.Channels.Add(rssChannel);
Response.ContentType = "text/xml"
Response.ExpiresAbsolute = DateTime.MinValue;
rssFeed.Write(Response.OutputStream);
}
finally
{
if (rdr != null)
{
rdr.Close();
}

if (conn != null)
{
conn.Close();
}
}
}
}

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