the other side of the firewall

Over the week-end I went to two interesting places:

• there is an almost invisible “burger joint” in the lobby of the hotel Le Parker Meridien at 118 W 57th st. Once inside the lobby, check for a neon sign featuring a burger. Behind some heavy curtains, you will find something really unexpected.
• if you like stylish bakery, you should check Koryod@ng Bakery (31 West 32nd street). Everything is delicious. The French pieces are as good as the ones back home.

I am writing blog entries so that people can read them.

By using categories, people can selectively read what they are interested in.

By default WordPress only creates on RSS per site.

Here is a — dirty — way to have per category RSS.
You just need to edit your main page. At the end, where the RSS links are created, you need to do the following edit:

Before:
<li><a href="{bloginfo show='rss_url'}">RSS .92</a></li>
After:
<li><a href="./rss">RSS .92</a></li>

Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

You can read the article here.

I need to do a demo related to identity management.
I have installed some software on a machine and want to let other people get a feel of the “simplified sign-on” experience.

And to make things more real, I want to use real domain names.

A user would point his web client to www.meteo.fr and gets redirected to my server machine where the magic of SSO should happen.

There are many ways to masquerade an IP address. You can ask the user to change the way domain names get resolved: e.g. /etc/hosts on Un*x systems. lmhosts on Windows machines. But this requires some complicated changes.

A better way — since we are doing HTTP –, is to tell the user to use a proxy.
The proxy will route your masqueraded URLs to the right destination while leaving the rest of the trafic unchanged.

How do I do that? I have been struggking of a few days, looking at mod_proxy and mod_rewrite. Here is one way to do it:

NameVirtualHost *:8666
	
    # masquerade www.figaro.fr
<VirtualHost *:8666>
    ServerName www.figaro.fr
    ProxyPass / http://my.machine.com
    ProxyPassReverse /
</VirtualHost>
	
    # masquerade www.lemonde.fr
<VirtualHost *:8666>
    ServerName www.lemonde.fr
    ProxyPass / http://my.machine.com
    ProxyPassReverse / http://www.yahoo.fr/
</VirtualHost>
	
    # regular trafic
<VirtualHost *:8666>
    ProxyRequests On
</VirtualHost>

I started with Blogger, but I did not like the interface.
Then I moved to Bloglines, but I want to have my own categories.
WordPress seems to be a nice tool to use and Blogsome is the first site I found to offer free blogging.
So here I am.