I registered for Twitter ages ago, but only recently started actually using it all of the time.
Internet
Archived Posts from this Category
Tue 10th Jun 2008
Adding Extra MIME-types to WordPress.
Posted mid-morning, filed under Asides , Blogging.(Site Admin) → Options → Mime types
File Extension/Associated mime-type.
Add mime-type »
Hmm. That is new. Google Music.
I’m guessing it will now be better to use Google Music to check for artwork and so on than Amazon.com.
Mon 26th May 2008
(One reason) why J2EE sucks dog balls.
Posted in the wee hours, filed under Internet , Java.I really don’t respect or like Java as a language. I’m not going to go into reasons why here, but I am going to bitch about J2EE and Enterprise Java app development under NetBeans.
Now, I’m not just a clueless student annoyed with stuff that doesn’t work because I’m a gumby. I write enterprise applications in python, apache and SQL Alchemy for my day job. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is to develop in NetBeans.
For starters, if I deploy my code and it fails, I shouldn’t be able to redeploy it again and it works. Same goes for building. I have found instances where I can build and it fails, and then an immediate re-build succeeds. And I’m not talking “Clean Build”, just a regular ordinary build.
More to the point, if I do an “Undeploy and Deploy”, and I get a whole load of exceptions, I kind of expect that the deployment has failed. But if I then do a build, it works.
And, it appears that if I build without a fresh redeployment, it fails.
This is just build and deployment issues. I’ve also had instances where code has failed, when I was pretty fucking sure it should have worked. I was throwing exceptions all over the joint (or, more correctly, the JVM or some other bit of technology was), and they were meaningless. A redeployment and the associated re-build, and it worked.
Developing a similar application in python+SQL Alchemy is faster, doesn’t appear to run much slower, and is much, much easier to read later. Yet, it is not taken seriously, because it isn’t Java.
Ugh.
Fri 16th May 2008
Daring Fireball Linked List: May 2008
Posted early afternoon, filed under Internet , iTunes.John Gruber is well worth keeping in your feed list. Not only is the stuff he writes generally entertaining, on the ball and well written, but he finds other good stuff too.
Take, for example, his recent comment on How Apple is Changing DRM. Which, let’s face it, I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.
The flip side, though, is that DRM rules the day for paid video content.
[From Daring Fireball Linked List: May 2008]
I think that (tech-savvy) people are more accepting to have DRM applied to video content for a couple of reasons. First, you are less likely to keep watching the same movie over and over again. You are likely to listen to a piece of music over and over again. People will rent movies, either on DVD or from an online source, for this exact reason. By definition, rented movies must have DRM, else you have effectively bought them.
The second, and I think more important reason is to do with viewing modes of video. Most video is watched on a single device - at this stage still the device it was bought with. If you purchase a video on your computer, it’s probably to watch it there. Or, you have purchased/rented something as part of a system and plan to watch it on, say, an Apple TV, which uses the same DRM system as iTunes on your computer.
Perhaps in the future, as people have more video devices that can view the data they buy or rent, we will find less of an acceptance of DRM.
A third reason that just struck me is that traditionally, music was sold without DRM, even whilst in a digital format. Digital video has never really been sold without DRM. Even if it’s trivial to disable the DRM in DVDs and make copies, say to use on a device that doesn’t have a DVD drive.
I have around about 120 feeds in my NetNewsWire subscription list. And I love reading all of them.
Just recently, I had noticed I seemed to be getting less and less news than before. This was odd, but I just put it down to everyone else being as busy as me.
Then, tonight I noticed when I refreshed my feeds manually, most of them had generic icons, instead of the usual favicons that appear.
When viewing the properties, all of these feeds had the default address that pages get redirected to when using one of the various Wireless networks I use daily is accessed without authenticating.
Thus, some of them pointed at www.vpn.infoeng.flinders.edu.au, and some had the IP address of the authentication router that one of the other APs points me at.
So, I spent the first half hour of my free time this evening double-clicking each item in the feeds list, and re-subscribing to the feed, and then deleting the original feed entry, which is pointed to the wrong site.
I then spent the next few hours catching up on the feeds that had obviously been modified by the lovely WiFi router over the past few months. 455 unread articles.
I’m not quite sure how the feeds addresses got changed, whether it is a NNW issue, or something that is idiosyncratic of the way that HTTP redirects work. I’m thinking it’s just a side effect of the way the router redirects all pages. But it is a pretty crappy one. I have looked at a method of trying to automatically authenticate on an unsecured wireless network that uses web-based authentication, but it failed last time.
Mon 14th Apr 2008
Using Dynamic DNS as (partial) authentication.
Posted mid-morning, filed under Internet.One thing that you can do with Apache is limit access to particular domains. For instance, you can have a process running on a Server that handles internal requests as well as external requests, and have the internal site never exposed to the outside internet. This can be done using the apache Allow and Deny directives.
But, sometimes I need to work remotely, and still have access to the intranet data, such as the company wiki and bugzilla database. But I don’t know which IP addresses I will be using, and whilst I can open it up to allow a range of IP addresses in, this means that someone else could see the data.
So, set up a dynamic DNS for your laptop, and put in an Allow for this DNS entry. Then, you just have to update the address whenever you want to access it - or even better, update it whenever your IP address changes. That means, even if someone comes on to the same IP address after you, as long as you have a new IP address, they won’t be able to get in.
This does point out the flaw in the system: if you log off, and don’t log back on (or don’t renew your IP address), then that person can access your intranet data. So, you should not use this as a sole means of authentication. Instead, use http authentication, or preferably, some other method of protecting access. But as a lightweight (ie, no VPN) system, this looks pretty good. It should even work if you are behind a firewall that prevents VPN access. And adding a new user requires a bit of work - creating a new Dynamic Hostname and adding this to the httpd.conf file - or wherever your server config data is stored.
It strikes me you could use sub-domains to do this, too, and have userxx.company.dyndns.org, or whatever. Then an allow of company.dyndns.org should allow anyone using a subdomain. I don’t know how you can do subdomains with DynDNS, but it may be possible with some other system. (Or, if you run your own DNS, you could come up with a method of doing it there, which gives you more flexibility. However, if you have a DNS, you can probably stretch to a VPN too).
zsync is a file transfer program. It allows you to download a file from a remote server, where you have a copy of an older version of the file on your computer already. zsync downloads only the new parts of the file.
[From zsync]
Noted for future reference.
Doing support isn’t that much fun, however, at times it needs to be done. Until today, I used to have to either fire up a VMWare session, or run Darwine (or CrossOver) in order to run TeamViewer on my Mac. But today, when I went to the TeamViewer website, and they have a beta version of their client for OS X.
I haven’t had the chance to use it in anger yet, I nearly had to today, but managed over the phone instead.
What I did do for the first time yesterday is use IM for work specific purposes. That was kind of fun. And the cool thing about Adium is that it keeps logs of my chat with my minion, so when I bill my boss for the time spent on the tasks, I have evidence.
I ffffound a wwwwebsite today. It hhhhas llllots of ppppictures on it. Ssssome of them aaaare vvvvery ffffunny!
