Weekend with Glennn and Megan

The basic plan was Bath, Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral. We left Malvern aiming for Forest of Dean, but found a road closure. We found ourselves heading into Wales, towards Monmouth. Those street signs are unpronouncably interesting. Raglan Castle loomed on the horizon, and although there was some concern that we didn't have time, and also that the weather was not very clement, we paid up and went in. Despite being in ruins (compared to Tower of London), it's still an imposing place.

From Raglan, we headed back past Tintern Abbey (no time to get out there), and made it into Bath. We didn't really have a detailed plan, and it was the weekend of the Bath festival, so trying (with only a tiny map) to decide which part of the city we should search for a car park resulted in an extended tour. But we found the Abbey, and almost went into the Pump House - only detered by the queue and cost factors. It was certainly a nice place to walk (and drive) around - fine weather would probably have only increased the crowds.

There was time to visit Stonehenge on our way to the Salisbury accommodation. It was quite impressive for my third visit - but we found it too cold to enjoy the full benefits of the audioguide. Only Joanna had gloves handy (is that a pun?), so the rest of us couldn't hold them up to our ears for long enough to hear the stories. But I'm sure Megan and Glennn were pleased to have visited, despite the temperature. I understand it was a significant contrast with Jerusalem, where they had been three days earlier.

After installing ourselves into our B&B place, we went for a walk in the Salisbury city centre. Having seen his poster in the south, the four wise guys went searching for the Messiah. (It was remarkably funny at the time.) We asked three different people (a taxi driver, who said that the church didn't exist any more, but basically had the location right; a bartender; and some senior citizens smoking outside a bingo hall) where St Martin's Church was, and got three different answers - each in a different quadrant. We tried the closest place, but it wasn't right. And so we decided that there wasn't time to acquire both culture and dinner, and the latter had priority. It did take quite a lot of walking, finding no room in the Haunch of Venison, and ... negotiating ... to finally choose a place. And it turned out well. The Red Lion had been built in about 1220 for the people working on the Cathedral, which was started the same year.

The next morning we attended a service at the Cathedral. I was a little disappointed that it wasn't the Cathedral Choir, but the repertoire was good, including the Howells Paean as a postlude. (Interestingly, I heard my other favourite Paean - by Leighton, the only other paean I know - on the radio that afternoon.) Then we went off via Nether Wallop, Middle Wallop, and Palestine to Avebury, where there is another stone circle. This one had smaller stones, but was a larger site. It was perhaps more interesting, since we could walk all around them and touch them. Lunch at the village pub was slightly disastrous - two meals arrived after 20 mins, but after waiting for an hour, the others didn't. We cancelled them and left hungry.

The trip home was via Cotswolds - in particular Upper and Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water. They were all very pleasant, and I think Glennn would need no convincing to come back for a relaxing romantic getaway.

We had an interesting conversation about Footpaths.

(This post written from memory on 11 May about the weekend of 19-20 April.)

Visits to Worcester, Hidcote Gardens

We went to Worcester for an evensong, and to explore a few streets around the city. There were some snow flurries as we were walking along, and the wind was rather chilly.




Hidcote Gardens has marvellous hedges and a nice avenue.












The Fleece Inn was very historic.









We saw the Severn Bore tide coming in. There aren't many places where it's visible as a wave that rushes past.









We visited the Brewers Arms - the hotel next to Wayfarers, where we spent our first three Malvern weeks.









Mealtimes at home (eight people in a four-bedroom house) are fun.

Installing Shibboleth 2.0.0 IdP on Tomcat 5.5 on Windows XP

It took me some messing around to get this working, so I thought I'd try documenting it, in case it helps someone else.

On my system, I already had Java jre1.6.0_05 (and jdk1.6.0_05). You can get the latest from java.sun.com.

1. Download tomcat 5.5.26. Get the windows installer version. Install with all defaults. I loaded the examples and documentation, and I set a very simple admin password. Mine runs on port 8080.
   
2. Download shibboleth 2.0.0 idp src. Unzip into a directory which I will call SHIBSRC.
3. In a command window, change directory to SHIBSRC/identityprovider.
4. Try running ant.bat. If you don't have JAVA_HOME environment variable set, you'll need to do so. Press Windows-Break > Advanced > Environment Variables > New System Variable. JAVA_HOME and C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_05 (for me).
5. Ant should ask for various configuration information. For the path, I wasn't sure whether it would cope with spaces, and I suspect it won't, so I chose c:/shibboleth-idp-2.0.0 - perhaps not very scalable, but ok for a test. Supply a hostname, and a password, and the whole thing should be installed into the directory you chose.
6. In a browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080 and you should see the tomcat home page. Click on Tomcat Manager to see a list of all the applications. You probably won't see "idp".
7. Attempt to deploy the file C:\shibboleth-idp-2.0.0\war\idp.war. Use the "WAR file to deploy" section, navigate to that directory, double click on the file, and
   click deploy.It fails with
   

   java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/io/output/DeferredFileOutputStream
   and
   java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.commons.io.output.DeferredFileOutputStream

8. This seems to be a problem with the tomcat packaging to me. Download apache commons-io and unzip. Copy the file commons-io-1.4.jar file into tomcat's common/lib directory (ie. C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\common\lib).
9. Stop and start tomcat. Start > All programs > Apache Tomcat 5.5 > Monitor Tomcat. This will put a little apache feather icon in your system tray (right edge of
   task bar). You can double click on it to get a window from which to stop and start tomcat (or do it with a right-click menu).
10. Try deploying the war file again. It now shows up in the list, but with "false" in the Running column.
11. Try starting the application, by clicking Start on the right. After some time (about 15 seconds?) the browser returns. The application still isn't running, and there's a "Message" at the top saying:
    

    FAIL - Application at context path /idp could not be started

12. Recall that the IdP instructions (can't find this instruction any more!) require the installation of some XML libraries that are better than the default Sun ones (ie. they work). Look for the endorsed libraries in C:\shibboleth-idp-2.0.0\lib\endorsed and discover they're not there.
    
13. Download the shib bin distribution and unzip it. Copy the four jar files (xalan and xerces ones) from SHIBBIN/endorsed to C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\common\endorsed Stop and start tomcat, and check the manager http://localhost:8080/manager/html/list and find the idp is still not running.
14. Look at the tomcat log files at C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\logs. The largest one is stdout_yyyymmdd.log, so look in there. Discover several errors of the type

    
    15:24:04.921 [http-8080-Processor25] ERROR o.s.web.context.ContextLoader - Context initialization failed
    org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: IOException parsing XML document from URL [file://c:/shibboleth-idp-2.0.0/conf/internal.xml]; nested exception is java.net.UnknownHostException: c

15. The unknown host "c" is the c in "file://c:/...", which is in the web.xml file. The source for the web.xml file is SHIBSRC\identityprovider\resources\WEB-INF\web.xml. Add an extra slash at both occurrences in this line, so that it (line 15 for me) looks like this:

            <param-value>file:///$IDP_HOME$/conf/internal.xml; file:///$IDP_HOME$/conf/service.xml;</param-value>

    
    
16. Run ant.bat again in the command window (not a new installation). Use the tomcat manager to undeploy the old idp. If it doesn't undeploy, stop tomcat, delete idp.war and the idp directory from C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\webapps and then start tomcat, and try deploying the new one. Now the app is running, and if you click on the \idp at the left of the row, you'll see a shibboleth page.
    

Snow in April

We didn't really believe the weather forecasts at first - there have been so many "chances of snow on higher ground". But they became more and more confident. In the end, it seems most of the country had snow on 6 April.


We had snowball fights, made a snow-baby, and Christopher liked splashing about in the muddy puddle on the road. We even got a photo of our Christmas tree with real snow on it.

Grandparents

I've slowed down on the diary for the last couple of weeks. We've had so much on, with Nana and Pop here. I'll just have to make some quick notes to try to catch up.

There was another visit to the Weir Garden in Herefordshire. The weather was much better than the fog we had last time.









There was a walk along the school's cross-country mile track, where they met pigs, lambs, and lots of different flowers.

JMathQuiz

After how many years of paddling around the edges of the open source development pool, today I jumped in, by setting up a new project. I've been working on it for a while (off and on), but now it's out there for everyone to see (and contribute to, if they want).

There are so many other advanced projects out there, that I feel a bit embarrassed to put up something so un-polished. But I guess I can cope. I wonder how much time it will absorb...

Check out the JMathQuiz site at sourceforge.net.

Chiemsee

It was a very fine and sunny day - hard to believe that there was skiing at the higher altitudes. I suppose it's just what they want for the last day of the ski season. But we weren't skiing. We said goodbye to Familie Falbsoner, our hosts, and we said hello and goodbye to some horses on the next door farm, before driving off. We decided that the direct route to Chiemsee would be too quick, and wouldn't provide enough scenery, so we decided to take a detour via Jenbach and Achenpass. It was deliberate - honestly!

It was a nice drive. A shame that the two pairs of eyes in the back seat were glued to their books, at least until we stopped by the site of Weisssee where we noticed a little playground. On the way to explore the shoreline, we discovered that the source of the "white" was a very sticky clay that we were walking through.

After driving further along that lake, and finding Tegernsee as well, we made it to Chiemsee - even bigger - and the town of Prien. A boat took us on a 15 minute cruise to the Herreninseln (Mens Island), where after a brief and too-large lunch at the Chorherrenstift (Monastery), we had a quick look at the Königsschloss (palace). It took a 10 minute walk through a nice forest, until we came across quite a sizeable palace. We don't seem to have much luck seeing fountains in working order. Despite an outside temperature of about 17°C, they were all covered up - reminiscent of golf ball coverings for satellite dishes. We caught the next boat to Fraueninseln (Ladies Island). It was much more inhabited - dozens of houses, an abbey, and a church. We took in another playground experience, before topping up with a drink in the hot weather, and catching the boat back to Prien. After that, it was back to the familiar airport routine - with the only unusual activity being a suitcase weight redistribution exercise prior to check-in.

It's been a wonderful holiday - seven countries in ten days (UK, Austria, Hungary, Croatia briefly, Slovenia, Italy, and Germany). Of course that means it's a rush, but I think we packed in a bunch of different highlight experiences for the girls. They say they enjoyed the skiing, Venice, and Budapest (because of the four-seater bicycle) the most. It's hard to know how much they'll remember in a few years, months, or even days. But there's new excitement afoot - Nanna and Pop will be arriving in a couple of days!