Informative
I started playing around with the Mono-Android SDK. Pretty cool stuff! Not having developed anything for Android yet, it was admittedly confusing at first trying to figure out the structure of things. For example, the link between the XML UI definition and the actually class objects. Why you have to use + and / in ID, is very odd. I have yet to figure out the meaning behind it.
Pluses:
- Pretty easy to jump into. The visual studio project template jumps you right into it with a very basic application.
- Configuration is reasonably simple. Ultimately, the installer app for Android SDK could never find my Java SDK installation. It worked out in the end though when I just used the .zip archive of the Android SDK and changed the settings in the Visual Studio Mono-Android app to point to the location of the Android SDK.
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When I originally started using Crowd, I set it up with an internal directory… A type of directory that is proprietary to the Crowd application. Ideally, I would have set it up with an AD/LDAP directory, but at the time I did not have one setup. Now, of course, I have one setup and want to migrate away from the old (proprietary) directory to the new LDAP directory. Confluence and JIRA are both using Crowd for authentication/SSO and of course migrating from one directory to another is not as easy as I had originally thought it would be.
Atlassian Support recommended that I use the Alias feature in Crowd.. The problem with that though, is that it only provides a synchronization of passwords. The users would still have to continue using their old username to login to Confluence and JIRA. I believe the reason Atlassian chose to do this is because there are many “behind-the-scenes” references to a username. This must be so that users can freely be added and removed from Confluence/JIRA without directly affecting the integrity of Confluence pages and JIRA issues. However, this provides a problem for me, because in my scenario I no longer can afford to manage users that have two separate usernames.
I ended up creating a set of SQL scripts to migrate my users from the old (proprietary) directory, to the new (LDAP) directory. It is a very manual process and not one that I take lightly. Ultimately, I have to migrate one user at a time and it involves notifying the user that they cannot use Confluence or JIRA, restarting Confluence and JIRA a number of times and updating a number of tables in the Confluence and JIRA databases. Here I will outline the process in which I have followed to accomplish this and will also provide the SQL scripts for download. I make no guarantee that this migration process will work for anyone else, but thought I would at least share it just in case. (more…)
This last couple weeks I’ve been slowly setting up a new install of Exchange 2010. Needless to say, it was a very interesting experience. My job description may not be “Administrator” but I do enjoy setting up systems like that. Even more-so when it adds structure to an organization, like I feel Exchange does.
Google apps is very powerful and comparable to Exchange these days, and is becoming even more powerful as they continue working on the product suite. However, the fact that google still calls most of their products “beta” is bothersome to me. If they are calling it beta just so that they can make updates to the products whenever they want, that’s pretty lame. Isn’t that a reason to make an application web-based, instead of a desktop app? But regardless, the feature-set is still unpolished compared to Exchange (especially 2010).
A while back I began working on a project where I had to develop an XCA service. For those of you who don.t know what XCA is, see this: Cross-Community Access (XCA). XCA is a supplement of the XDS.b standard, which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (the .b. as opposed to .a. for the older version). Well, I find that there is plenty of specifications on XCA and XDS.b in PDF form, but they seem to focus on the format of data being sent over the wire, not really how to implement the service that communicates that format of data.
Initially, someone told me that I could just generate code out of the XSD and WSDL. This sounded great in theory and I had done that for working with CDA documents, but in this case when I tried to use XSD.exe to generate objects for the RIM.xsd schema it gave me a number of errors that elements were missing, so I gave up on that after reading articles on the internet where other people were having similar problems. One statement indicated .IHE is working on creating an XSD that is compatible with Microsoft.s XSD.exe tool, and will be out shortly.. Unfortunately, that post was made quite a while ago and I couldn.t find anything about a newer version from IHE.
So, instead I looked into using Microsoft.s implementation of XDS as an example to implement just my own little pieces. Their interfaces used a very odd approach of accepting (and responding with) raw System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message objects. In this case, I parsed and created raw XML and converted that raw XML into the Message object. (more…)
My most recent work has put me in a position to learn a great deal more about the health care IT industry. It has been quite an interesting learning curve over the past few months. Looking back, I’ve worked on hospital scheduling systems for an extensive period of time, then coincidentally lead the development of a claims administration system and now I’m learning about another corner of the industry (clinical documentation).
CDA is short for Clinical Document Architecture, which is a standard based on a standard called the HL7 RIM – reference information model. CDA, essentially, defines the XML-based structure in which a doctor can report information on procedures, allergies, diagnosis (etc.) for a patient.
Earlier I was thinking about all the different tools I use and how neat they are and I thought I would share the (vast?) list of tools with everyone and individual thoughts on them. (more…)
Any developer that has programmed PHP can recognize that PHP was intended for Linux distributions and web servers. However, coming from a windows background I generally fancy windows web servers (not Linux). Don.t get me wrong, I am very familiar with Linux and at one point ran my own Linux servers and X-Windows desktops. However, I do believe that Microsoft is making good headway with web servers (II7), web services (WCF) and web applications (handy APIs such as Silverlight and WPF). Every one of these products have impressed me greatly.
Now, I am faced with a decision to make. Use PHP or use C#? Hands down I prefer C#. However, this project I am going to be working on is going to involved with a person that prefers PHP. This got me thinking. Why not use both? If I am going to be handling the back-end side of the web application and the other person is going to be handling the front-end, there doesn.t seem to me to be any reason why we shouldn.t use both! Now I need a proof of concept. I need to be able to feel confident that if I offer this as a suggestion (front-end done in PHP which calls the back-end WCF web services done in C#) then I need to be able to show that it works well (efficiently, cleanly, etc). (more…)
So my home server has been running now for almost a week (sort of). On Saturday the power went out in my basement and all my machines were shut off. When I flipped the breaker everything started coming back up and online, except for my new server. I talked to technical support via their email and eventually via phone and all was useless. However, eventually I WAS able to get it back online.
The problem was that the machine SEEMED as though it were booting like normal, but it would never finalize and connect to the network (allowing me to connect to it with WHS Connector). The blue power light would come on, the blue hard drive status lights would flicker for a while, and then the hard drive status light would stop and the .i. status indicator would repeatedly flash (and never stop). The hard drive lights that indicate WHS has loaded the drives into the WHS pool would never come and the network lights would never come on either. (more…)
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Evolving software one discussion at a time.
