I investigated trying to install an LDAP server for testing purposes.  I looked at OpenLDAP, but there it wants to run on Unix, not Win32.  I installed the Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack and investigated using Active Directory for LDAP.  It turns out that you cannot run Active Directory unless the server is a domain controller -- which is not going to happen.  Back to OpenLDAP...

I downloaded OpenLDAP for Windows from Lucas Bergman's site.  I referred to the OpenLDAP admin guide and installation steps in someone's homework assignment.  Installation:

• changed all of the paths in slapd.conf to relative paths in the appropriate installation directory
• changed the database suffix and rootdn parameters to appropriate values
• ran slapd -- didn't work, no output.  Ran it again with the debug switch, -d 1.  It was complaining that it could not find the slapd.conf file.  I ran it again using the command line slapd -f etc/slapd.conf -d 1.
• Now it is complaining that ucdata is not a valid directive and, later, 'error loading ucdata (error -127)'.
• I tried switching from the BDB backend to the LDBM backend.  No change.
• The slapd man page does not mention anything about ucdata.
• I downloaded the source and discovered that there is an undocumented directive named ucdata-path.  I changed the config file to use this directive and, voila, slapd is running.

I spent the afternoon at the POSC WITSML SIG meeting.

I continued working on the 'web services' investigation project.  I spent time reading up on the Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit.  I downloaded the toolkit and generated some VBA from our well pilot WSDL.  That's as far as I got.

I am still trying to decide whether to focus our initial web efforts on SOAP web services, or URI addressable HTTP GETs.  I tried to locate a paper I read on this topic, but was unable to find it.  I thought it was in Fielding's REST paper, but it wasn't.  I also poked around W3C's TAG site.

I helped a colleague work through certificate generation for IIS.  We ended up using OpenSSL (in CygWin) to generate the certificates, and they worked fine.  I rooted around in my archives to locate any docs I had about certificate generation, and I found some old stuff about Microsoft's MAKECERT (in my old diary!).  I have summarized certificate generation in a document.

A few days ago I captured some miscellaneous Java lore.

Finished up experimentation with using SSL with SOAP in Apache AXIS.  The Eclipse project can be found in axis-test.  Of particular interest is the document about configuring Tomcat/AXIS to use SSL.

I installed synergy, OSS that creates a virtual desktop out of the monitors from any number of machines and that allows you to control that virtual desktop from a single keyboard and mouse.  It supports copy-and-paste of text across the systems as well.

It has some idiosyncrasies.  Sometimes the client software will fail to connect to the client after a reboot.  Also, sometimes the mouse freezes during heavy processing (on either side of the connection).  Finally, the mouse occasionally enters a state such as thinking a button is being held down when it is not.  However, all of these occurrences are rare, and synergy is very pleasant to use.