The various GB-PVR enhancements have I have been working on over the last while have finally all been upgraded to .Net 2.0. UncleJohnsBand was kind enough to upgrade the Enhanced Web Admin, and ubu upgraded the External Recording Plugin along with doing the first pass on the WDM Recording Plugin. A few minor .Net 2.0 differences later (I upgraded DShow’s UCOMInterface references to ComTypes.Interfaces, and had to fix an out/ref array parameter) and the WDM Recording Plugin is working on GB-PVR 0.97. I even upgraded my Detect Multi Recordings utility (which only really required a single line of code change).

Except for a minor issue with NetLimiter 1.30 breaking some .Net 2.0 remoting, it looks like everything is working 100%

I’ve been naughty, and haven’t posted any update for almost two months now. I thought that I should give at least a little feedback on what I’m up to:

GB-PVR: WebAdmin, Software Recorder, and less so External Recorder, work continues. The web admin is now fully themed using css, and is rapidly growing into a full featured web frontend and not just a recording management web page or two. Two other side projects have spawned aiming to support Web Services, and Proper Web Streaming.

The Software Recorder pluigin is slowly sporting support for more and more capture cards. The other day someone commented on the mamoth forum thread we have managed to build (almost 900 posts). I find it quite satisfying that the top two threads (by number of posts and number of views) are for the WebAdmin and the Software Recorder – also other programmers are getting involved and are sending in patches and fixes

XMPP/Jabber: If you haven’t tried gtalk in gmail yet, where have you been living? At work I’ve been looking to put in a IM server – Jabber based of course. I use jabberd 2 for darkskies.za.net, but it’s not quite ready to be used at the enterprise level on a windows box.

Wildfire to the rescue. It has full LDAP integration, shared roster groups, a pretty web admin interface, a bunch of plugins, including an auto-updater for their Spark client. Only down side is that it’s java, but on the server that can be excused, on the client, not so much. Using a client like Pandion makes that client side experience far richer, but then you loose your auto-updating capabilites *sigh*. Pandion does feature Single-Sign-On support though.

So my attention for the past weeks has been turned to adding SSO into a variety of XMPP servers, starting with xmppd.py for the rapid prototype approach, and proving that it can be done. Then visiting Java’s SASL API, and trying to figure out how to hook it all up. I’ve ended up with a bridge between Java’s SASL API’s and Windows’ SSPI API’s. So anything that SSPI supports, SASL can now use too. A few minor tweaks to wildfire, and it too should be able to authenticate using GSSAPI (Kerberos), or NTLM (for Pandion).

Of course mustang is supposed to have native support for Kerberos and SPNEGO, but you can’t get into the RFE’s to see the details. (I checked build 71, and it didn’t seem to have any new toys – I see the beta is out, and I’m busy downloading that to see if it does)

Work: Terribly busy with a new semi-’proof of concept’ security framework to be used across applications for multiple clients, etc. The power outages haven’t helped – getting (back) to work at 4am to do a deployment for the previous project wasn’t exactly lots-of-fun. We’ve (royal) decided to go with VB LINQ for the new framework, and it seems to be everything it was promised to be. Gone are the days where you have to build stored procdures for each and every database access (by hand or using tools like Codesmith), LINQ does all of that for you – at run-time.

Home: Bathroom renovations are progressing, I can’t wait for it to be all over, and we can stop walking around in cement laden carpets :p

Now just before I disappear off to sleep, let me point out that 150 million Firefox downloads are approaching fast – that’s about 50 millions downloads in 5 months – wow.

I’ve done some work on GB-PVR enhancements. The bits I’ve been working on are:

• Enhanced Web Admin
• Software Recorder
• External Recorder
• Detect Multi Recordings Utility (written but not published)

Also I made a small update to my XML-TV importer to keep it working with the new DStv site.

okay, so I’ve been very quiet over the past few weeks after struggling with ipsec. I’ve actually been doing a hang of a lot of things, which I will proceed to post individually.