I ordered something from Amazon last night. Take a look at the dates on this order status:
They apparently managed to ship the item before I ordered it! How’d they know! Now, if we lived on the East Coast then, sure, time zones, etc…but we live in California.
This was a tricky problem I’ve been trying to solve for a little while.
If your webserver is providing the authentication service then your application simply needs to read in the `remoteUser` value out of the request header and trust it. In Grails you can do this with the Spring Security Core plugin using a PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider. But it requires some configuration.
Follow the regular Spring Security Core setup process with the following adjustments.
In Config.groovy, define the providers you want available:
grails.plugins.springsecurity.providerNames = ['preAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider', 'anonymousAuthenticationProvider']
And we need to define that preAuthenticated provider as a bean.
In resources.groovy we need:
beans = {
userDetailsService(org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.GormUserDetailsService) {
grailsApplication = ref('grailsApplication')
}
userDetailsByNameServiceWrapper(org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.UserDetailsByNameServiceWrapper) {
userDetailsService = ref('userDetailsService')
}
preAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider(org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.PreAuthenticatedAuthenticationProvider) {
preAuthenticatedUserDetailsService = userDetailsByNameServiceWrapper
}
requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter(org.springframework.security.web.authentication.preauth.RequestHeaderAuthenticationFilter) {
principalRequestHeader = 'remoteUser'
authenticationManager = ref('authenticationManager')
}
}
And finally, in our BootStrap.groovy file we need to register the authentication filter:
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.SecurityFilterPosition
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.SpringSecurityUtils
class BootStrap {
def init = { servletContext ->
SpringSecurityUtils.clientRegisterFilter('requestHeaderAuthenticationFilter', SecurityFilterPosition.PRE_AUTH_FILTER)
}
}
Yesterday I convinced Jess to go for a hike with me up at Del Valle Reservoir. It’s a nice area just outside of the Livermore city limits. I haven’t done anything outside in awhile beyond driving to/from work (or bicycling the same occasionally) and I wanted to be outside since it has been nice out.
So yesterday we drove out to the reservoir and did a short hike, about 1.2 miles. We stopped about halfway through and rested. While resting I took a bunch of pictures, none of which quite turned out how I had imagined. The wind was blowing rather strongly, so I thought it might be fun to try and get a picture of the tall, dry grass covering the hills blowing in the wind. Kind of like the kind of pictures you can get of water where it looks silky. Well, that didn’t quite work out, it mostly looks like a blurry mess, but I was able to adjust one to look kind of nice. I used an oil painting effect to get a somewhat impressionist version of the hillside. It looks okay, but there’s nowhere really for your eye to settle.
As we began hiking again we passed a bunch of thistles. We happened upon one that was growing all by itself which presented a nice opportunity to get it isolated from the background. As I mentioned, the wind was blowing so I didn’t have much control of the exposure besides cranking the shutter speed up as fast as it would go in order to keep it from blurring. This also meant I needed to bump up the ISO, so the shot came out a little bit grainy, but I think it still looks pretty good:
After the hike we stopped at Wienerschnitzel for some ice-cream. On our way to the reservoir we had seen that they were selling 79-cent soft-serve ice-cream cones. Jess, however, opted for a caramel sundae instead. Regardless, the ice-cream was good. I would be more than happy to make a regular thing of hiking / photographing for 1.5-2 hours and then getting ice-cream.
Jess decided she wanted a body pillow. So we picked one up from Target. Jess tossed it on the bed and when she came back a few hours later she discovered that her new pillow had made itself at home and was so tired from the day’s excitement that it fell asleep while reading a book:
I submitted a picture from our trip to the San Diego Zoo to the Intermediate Pictorial category of our camera club this week. This year there have been a lot of good photographers in the intermediate group. Some months I disagree with the judge and the pictures that place. However, as we were going through the images this week I was thinking there were many very good pictures and that I wouldn’t feel grumpy about them being placed over mine. When my picture was shown the judge didn’t have any critiques about it, but also moved along fairly quickly without much comment. So I was actually quite surprised, and very flattered, when it was awarded first place.
I do rather like the photo. But I don’t claim to be able to find and take shots like this with any regularity. Of the 328 pictures I took at the zoo this is the only one that I still really liked after I worked with it. So I’d like to show a few of the steps this image took before the finished product.
Top-left: The original image as it came off the camera.
Top-right: The first step was to take out the extra blue. Your eye is very good at making you think the color balance is OK, but when you see the image with the blue removed it looks much better. The only thing done between the original and this image is the removal of the extra blue.
Bottom: Then I cropped in on the face and bumped up the contrast a little, the saturation a little, and removed some distracting blobs in the background.
The final step was to add some selective darkening to tone down overly bright areas and help the eye stay focused on the face. Here is the final image:
