nimret.org

Eclipse plugins I use often

admin — 2010-02-23T13:51:46GMT-08:00

I usually find myself writing code in either Vim or eclipse these days. So here are some plugins that I currently find useful:

Subclipse
Maven
ECL Emma good code coverage tool.
QuantumDB my fave JDBC access tool.
Groovy like it or not, it's here to stay.
PMD useful for catching silly things but may lead to angst.
Checkstyle useful for maintaining some level of sane literary standards on the source code but may lead to angst also :)
vim plugin - mixed feelings about this one. Couldn't get it to work and I usually fire VIM up from within eclipse or separately anyways.

2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

admin — 2010-02-19T14:25:58GMT-08:00

Interesting read about various kinds of vulnerabilities to watch out for when developing webapps. Some of the classic ones like buffer overflow which modern programming languages like Java don't have. But some other interesting ones in there too. The consistent theme is to be careful about allowing any kind of 'programattic' or 'dynamic' functionality with input come from outside the app ( the user for example). Having implemented SSL support in Java clients/servers and implemented encryption support I found this a real interesting read from the security perspective:

http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/?

Website performance hints

admin — 2010-02-16T17:07:18GMT-08:00

we've been looking into front-end performance optimizations at work here and I came across an interesting blog post on the topic:

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

useful info.

Cleaning up WinXP

admin — 2010-02-07T01:25:22GMT-08:00

I've been meaning to clean up the missus' winxp laptop for quite a while now. It had slowed down to the point of being completely unusable. Followed some of the tweaks from:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1494&page=2

and turned off mcafee ( avira is much better) and some other unused apple crap. The machine is blazing along now.

Kubuntu 9.10 rocks!

admin — 2010-01-24T23:29:15GMT-08:00

I had been putting off upgrading to Kubuntu 9.10 for a while now even though it's been out for a while. I had heard all kinds of horror stories about folks moving to KDE4 and not really liking it as much as KDE3. Well, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded and it kicks some serious a**!

I just selected the upgrade from within my older version and it downloaded and updated all the packages. One reboot later everything came up just fine - no hassles at all whatsoever. During the upgrade it prompted me for input whenever it found a diff in any files in /etc which was really nice. So I didn't have to do anything to setup my Brother MFC-495cw. It was automagically picked up by the new version.

Everything so far has been quite stellar - kudos to the kubuntu team!

Importing contacts from Windows Mobile to Android

admin — 2009-11-04T13:40:00GMT-08:00

I've picked up a new Google Android based Samsung Moment recently. The UI and functionality is a little different from the Windows Mobile phone we're used to but it's definitely a big improvement though the Mrs is still pissed that her long fingernails don't quite work on the touchscreen ( probably cuz it requires tactile feedback).

As usual the phone company couldn't transfer the contacts from the Windows Mobile phone to the new Android phone. So I started googling around looking for solutions to this problem. Just when I was contemplating writing a custom app using as specified at:
http://pythonce.sourceforge.net/Wikka/PIMs

I came across this really neat freeware program which exports the contacts into a csv file:
http://www.freewarepocketpc.net/ppc-download-thunderbird-contacts-export.html

Then one can import them directly into gmail:
http://www.freewarepocketpc.net/ppc-download-thunderbird-contacts-export.html

Works like a charm!

I must say that the android phone has really blown me away with it's UI, features and most importantly integration with web based applications to access and update it's data ( gmail, calendar, etc). The icing on the cake is the fact that the SD card mounts just fine as a usb drive under Linux. The integration between the phone and the internet based apps is a dream compared to the nightmare than activesync was for the windows phones.

free book: pro git

admin — 2009-10-16T12:34:54GMT-08:00

I've been using git off and on for some of my personal stuff for a while now. I found an interesting little tidbit of information at the git talk which Matthew McCullough gave at no fluff a few weeks ago. Apparently there is a neat way to use git under the hood which makes it work seamlessly with the SVN repository. All the git commands are mapped onto SVN commands so the integration is seamless.

Also, on the topic I found a cool free book online about git: http://progit.org/book/

sweden falls off the internet

admin — 2009-10-13T12:42:40GMT-08:00

all I have to say is .. wow :)

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/10/13/sweden%25E2%2580%2599s-internet-broken-by-dns-mistake/

I wonder how well their testing for this change was designed and implemented.

kinda makes you one wonder how reliant we are on DNS these days …

chrome

admin — 2009-10-05T20:35:27GMT-08:00

I've been playing around with Chrome at work these days. Though it does kick ass in terms of performance, I still miss gestures from Firefox. Still, here's a couple of tips you might find handy:

if you run into weird 'Unhandled Exception' errors, you may want to try the '- -no-sandbox' option to start it. Just keep in mind that it's supposed to be a security risk so be careful about where you browse to.
there's a way to block flash in chrome. You have to use the '--enable-user-scripts' startup option to enable user scripts and then download a block flash javascript file. Full details here.

Hope someone finds this stuff useful :)

I'll probably continue to use both firefox and chrome for now.

what is my ip

admin — 2009-10-01T09:45:12GMT-08:00

I've been trying to figure out a way to be able to setup access to my folks' linux box remotely for a while now. They've been happily using it for a few years now and apart from the rare windows office incompatibility, they really haven't run into any big issues.

They don't have a static IP ( like pretty much everyone else on a non business plan these days) so I looked into Dynamic DNS as an option but couldn't get it going quite right. It needs to be setup on the Verizon router which supposedly has options to set it up but it never really worked.

Being the lazy programmer that I am I started thinking about how I could re-purpose what's already available for my needs. A simple, brain dead solution I came up with is to run a script via cron ( say on the hour) which figures out what their computer's public facing IP is and then scp it over to my box:

IP=`curl http://whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp`
echo $IP > ip.txt
scp -P 22000 ip.txt nimret@nimret.org:~/some/folder/dadsip.txt

It could probably be improved upon by not sending anything if the IP hasn't actually changed or streaming the data instead of copying the file but this seems to work great for now! =)