Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Java ZipEntry bug on Windows

I rolled out the Clearfox plugin on the Jive Software Community site a couple weeks ago and got some good feedback and some bad feedback. A number of people said they tried to install the Firefox part of the plugin, restarted Firefox and then didn’t see the Clearspace icon like my screenshots / screencast showed. [...]

Java, Commons HTTP Client and HTTP proxies

If you’re living at a giant corporation during the day and you want to browse the web you’re probably going through some sort of proxy to the outside world. Most of the time you don’t care, but if you’re writing a Java application that needs to access resources on the other side of said [...]

Using a custom socket factory with HttpClient

The documentation on how to use a custom socket factory in HttpClient is actually pretty good, but there’s one thing they don’t make very clear. If you want to specify a per-host socket factory like this:

Protocol p = new Protocol(”https”, new MySSLSocketFactory(), 443);
HttpClient httpclient = new HttpClient();
httpclient.getHostConfiguration().setHost(”example.com”, 443, p);
GetMethod httpget = new GetMethod(”/mypath”);

you must specify [...]

Finding the number of files of a certain file type that a process has open

Used this week when trying to debug a problem with an application that was resulting in errors that said “too many files open”:
/usr/sbin/lsof -p $processID | grep .$ext | wc -l
where $processID is the ID of the process that is opening the files and $ext is the (most likely) three letter file extension of the [...]

command line script to delete .svn files / folders

I wrote this down in my notes.txt awhile back where it’ll eventually get lost, putting it here so that I search it from google:
find ./ -name “.svn” | xargs rm -Rf
source: http://www.rickhurst.co.uk/category/linux/

The Referer header, intranets and privacy

I’ve discussed meaningful URL’s a number of times on this site: one of the biggest benefits of a good blog URL is that you can infer who posted the article, when it was posted and what the blog post is about. For the most part this is all ‘a good thing’. But when you’re [...]

Firefox mimeTypes.rdf corruption

Came across another interesting bug today involving Firefox and mime types. Firefox uses a file called mimeTypes.rdf (stored in your profile folder) to keep track of a) what application should be opening the file you’re downloading and b) what kind of file it should tell a server it’s sending when you upload a file. [...]

RSS/Atom feeds, Last Modified and Etags

Sometime last week I read this piece by Sam Ruby, which summarized says this:

…don’t send Etag and Last-Modified headers unless you really mean it. But if you can support it, please do. It will save you some bandwidth and your readers some processing.

The product I’ve been working on at work (which I should [...]

Bulk import of email addresses into Movable Type notifications

One of the blogs on my Movable Type installation is actually using the notifications feature built into Movable Type (which gives you the ability to let people subscribe to a blog via email) and needed to do a bulk import of email addresses that he already had in csv format. Unfortunately, Six Apart doesn’t provide [...]

New design

I got really bored with the old design of this site and all the cool kids seem to be using Wordpress these days so last weekend I exported all 900 or so entries from Movable Type and imported them into WordPress, installed the ScribbishWP Theme and wrote a servlet filter to map my /blog/year/month/day/entry_name.html Movable [...]