In eWeek, Hardening the OpenHack App, checkout the Web Application Security Best Practices.
All posts by ajohnson
MIT OpenCourseWare Course List
Old news, but if you’re into learning, check out the MIT OpenCourseWare Course List. It would take some kind of discipline to complete a class that you weren’t enrolled for, had no teacher or TA for and didn’t even get a grade or feedback. But it’s an opportunity to learn from some of the smartest (if not *the* smartest) people in the world.
NEJUG
Not going to DevCon, I’ll hit something more interesting: NEJUG! Seriously though, the next meeting “The Use of Open Source Solutions in Enterprise J2EE Applications” sounds fascinating.
shell script to automate the Lucene search
Wrote my first shell script to automate the Lucene search that handles searching for this blog. Got the goods here on shell scripting and stuff here on Cron. End result: a shell script that updates the Lucene index for this blog and pipes the output of the index script to an email:
#!/bin/bash
# Script that indexes the appropriate directories
# using Lucence & Java
cd /usr/hosts/cephas.net/wwwroot/blog/
java -cp /usr/hosts/cephas.net/wwwroot/WEB-INF/lib/lucene-demos-1.2.jar:
/usr/hosts/cephas.net/wwwroot/WEB-INF/lib/lucene-1.2.jar org.apache.lucene.demo.IndexHTML
-create -index /usr/hosts/cephas.net/wwwroot/blog/index/ .. | mail -s “LUCENE[cephas.net/blog]” aaron.s.johnson@gmail.com
Microsoft’s Terraserver
Sorta SOAPish.. Microsoft’s Terraserver “.. contains 3.3 tera-bytes of high resolution USGS aerial imagery and USGS topographic maps.” It sounds so high tech… but what’s really scary is how accurate it is. I fed it my home address and it came up with this which REALLY is a picture of where I live. And this is where I grew up. Wowsers!. And to make it on topic, they have a webservice implementation. (from xmethods)
Mobius Redmond 2002
Doc blogs about Mobius Redmond 2002… sounds like the IPAQ that I’ve been drooling over for months is going to be outclassed by some of the new devices being developed by Dell.
reloadable=”true”
I should have known this but for whatever reason, I never RTFM. Make sure to set:
reloadable=”true”
within the Context element of server.xml in Tomcat 4.x. More information here.
leaf peeping
Took off yesterday (Saturday) to do what all good New Englanders do: leaf peeping. We (Craig, Kristen, Karen and myself) drove up to Franconia Notch State Park, home of the Flume Gorge, the Old Man of the Mountain and close to Kancamagus Highway.
We hiked the short 1.4 mile hike up into the Flume Gorge while taking a bunch of pictures of things like the Flume Covered Bridge, beautiful rock formations, breathtaking fall colors, and stunning waterfalls. This is my favorite picture. No wait! Maybe this one is. Or maybe this one… 🙂
After looking at leaves on the Flume Gorge trail, you have to look at leaves while you’re driving, because it’s all about the leaves. So then we drove to see the Old Man of the Mountain and snapped this picture, which doesn’t do the Old Man justice, but get a New Hampshire quarter if you want to see him up close.
We ended our leaf peeping day by ‘gorging’ (ha ha!) ourselves @ Horse Feathers in Conway, NH. Conway is described as the “… hub of outlet shopping in tax-free New Hampshire”, a sentence which should strike fear into the heart of any knowledgeable husband.
Jason Harrod
Went to hear Jason Harrod last night @ Club Passim in Harvard Square. Great concert.
Trio Service Manager
Here’s the demo/presentation I did for the Rich Internet Applications Seminar we had two weeks ago. I was able to get it setup on my laptop quite quickly using ColdFusion’s standalone webserver, but getting it running via IIS turned out to be a bigger deal.
To get the most out of it, use the ‘4KEH833’ license plate.
After you complete the demo, make sure to hit this page to restore the original data to the database.
This app took me awhile to get working because Flash remoteing wasn’t working to well w/ the IIS/Virtual Hosts and because I’m not sure that I fully understand CFC’s and pathing issues… I solved the CFC issue by putting the appropriate CFC’s into the c:\CFusionMX\wwwroot\ directory… turns out that these particular CFC’s need access to the application scope so you have to keep an application.cfm in the c:\cfusionmx\wwwroot\[yourfolder] AND [drive]:\hosts\[yourhost]\wwwroot\. This seems kludgy to me, but whatever… The Flash Remoting trick (at least it worked for me twice now) is to run:
C:\CFusionMX\bin\connectors\Remove_ALL_connectors.bat
(which removes all CFM mappings from IIS)
and then run:
C:\CFusionMX\bin\connectors\IIS_connector.bat
which adds them all back…
restart CF and voila… it should work for you.
You’ll notice that running IIS_connector.bat adds a ‘JRunScripts’ virtual directory to each IIS virtual host you have setup.