On quite another note, this is hilarious: Sex Scandal Rocks Wonka Factory.
[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] On quite another note, this is hilarious: Sex Scandal Rocks Wonka Factory.
I'm looking for a Java Web Server that can be easily embedded into applications. Basically, it doesn't need any features, just a doGet() or something that can be overriden with my own stuff, and I just don't want to code the basic HTTP stuff all over again. Most important is size (a jar of < 200 KB is okay, I guess) and memory footprint. Open source, of course. Freshmeat and Sourceforge spits out a million projects, so I'd like to hear if anyone had any preferences.
Anyone have any ideas? Mail me. Thank you!
I stumbled onto this while actually looking for Java implementations of Bayesian classification. Very cool: Thinking Machine 4.
(via BadMagicNumber)
What's with all those phony plastic cards? During the last seven days, both Financial Times and BusinessWeek has sent me silly plastic card that says "Subscriber Privilege Card" with my name on them, on an attempt to get me to sign a discounted subscription for 50 (BW) or 90 (FT). And in their sell-in letters they call me "Dear Executive" and so on. So I've obviously gotten my postal address onto some stupid snailmail mailing list that has been shared far and wide. That's no surprise; I am registered with on quite a lot of "businessy" places and there are many official records where you can get information about me and my business. But what's hitting me is that I assume FT and BusinessWeek are presumably looking for "execs" that please their advertiser, and they think sending out a silly plastic "privilege card" is going to help? I, for one, know that if there's one thing the average european exec doesn't need, it's more plastics. The black execy FT subscriber card sure does look elite, but so does my Monday Bar membership card, and the height my stack of plastics never used is approaching three inches now.
So I hacked PieSpy to feed it with data from the Lunarstorm community instread of IRC. I wrote a brief description in Swedish about it all. The main story is that I made a big-ass PieSpy social network graph out of guestbook data from Lunarstorm, and the current result can be viewed here, and a friend used Zoomify to throw together a Flash zoomification of the same image, which can be viewed here. Pretty cool. In hacking termes, most of my work went into changing PieSpy to draw a labeled grid onto the image and append an index to the image, containing an alphabetical list of all the nodes with pointers to each node's coordinates on the image. A smaller example can be viewed here. A package with source and required libraries is available here (it's the PieSpy distribution changed to use my own main class instead of the standard IRC bot thing).
I hope this year will prove more satisfying than the last.
Not much has been happening lately, as I yesterday came back home after spending five days in Sälen, skiing, drinking glühwein and in general having a darn good time. I learned the beauty of off-pist skiing - getting away from the public pistes and ski lifts and to the untouched, deep snow was really cool.
For my Swedish audience: yesterday, I reluctantly decided to publish all my diary postings from a certain web community here. Reluctantly, because some of these are really personal and may contain information that I might not want to publish publicly on the web - the diaries on the community are only available to registered members, and you can always see who has read your diary, which gives a comforting sense of control when writing about personal things. But I wanted to have somewhere to post the things that aren't of interest to non-swedes and the techie audience of Advogato, and didn't want to end up with three diares/blogthingies. To export all my diaries from the community, I made a small command-line version of my program Nular that uses basic screen-scraping techniques to retreive the data, and hacked a function that allows a user to save all diary entries to a directory. Then, I created a cron job that does this once a day so I can continue posting on the community as usual and all posts will show up on my web page as well (and complemented with a script that I can easily trigger manually when I want to force an update). The program and cron job runs on my coLinux Gentoo installation on my Win2K box at home, and uses rsync to transfer the data my real web server, which in turn contains a simple JSP page that reads the file structure to generate indexes, display the data and so on.
A few days ago, I was experimenting around with compiling static binaries with gcj to see if I could easily distribute programs such as md5i in native form to people who don't have or don't want Java. It turned out that the executable size was somewhere around 4 MB - for a Java program which has a bytecode of a few kilobytes. It would be nice to be able to tell GCJ to only link those classes that are referenced in the code - and perhaps be able to supplement that list if you use dynamic class references in the code. For example, I use the Sun MD5 implementation by invoking MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5"), so the compiler/linker would need a hint as to which classes I actually need as it is not explicitly reference syntactically. But one should be able to easily produce a list of needed classes by running the program and passing -verboce:class to the JVM. For all I know, gcj may already do this, and my small program really depends on over four megabytes of runtime class code. Anyway, another thing I'd like is to be able to suppress the WARNING: could not properly read security provider files when the program is run in machines without a GCJ installation, as in most cases, the standard GNU security provider will work fine.
If you are in Sweden, please consider sending an SMS with the text "ASIEN" to 72105. This is a very easy way of contributing 20 SEK to the Red Cross Sweden's aid work in the areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami. Or give to Swedish Médecines Sans Frontieres, even though their donation pages require Internet Explorer. Much help is needed.
md5i - yet another MD5 file integrity checker.
"This Java program creates an MD5 database of all files in a directory structure, and then allows you to easily recheck the contents of the directory and notify you if any files has changed. It does not (currently) detect removed files. It only computes MD5 sum if the "last modified" timestamp of the file has changed since the last run, unless the -nomtime option is used."
I just finished a personal hackfest in which I integrated all posts from the Advogato diary, my first blog-hack and my now off-line SnipSnap blog, which means that the archive on my homepage now covers all by posts since february 2003. I won't give out all the gory details (they are way too gory for public inspection this time), but I ended up reading the raw file structure created by SnipSnap as well as my own blog page, and creating a generic BlogEntry interface that old and new code was adapted to, so I could treat the different blog sources somewhat equally. The SnipSnap entries contains lots of SnipSnap-specific tags, some of which still aren't handled at all since I grew tired of trying to construct regexps for each and every one. On the bright side, the SnipSnap file format was very straight-forward, and they even use standard Java Properties files for the metadata, which I could simply pass to Properties.load() to extract the data I needed. The actual postings were plain-text UTF-8 files.
No, I won't really take part in this flameparty re code signing (since most of it misses the target anyway), but I just thought I'd mention my own limited experience with trojans and spyware: the only times I've encountered trojans or spyware in the real world (that is, outside my geek universe), they have all been delivered as signed executables. Generally, up pops a window telling me that the code is signed, and who has signed it, followed by an arbitrary string provided by the signee that usually says something like install this cool software now to utilize all the really hot functions on this web site.
So, away went the credibility of code signing?
I do recognize the need for code authenticity, of course. It's just that when told so, grandma will always click "Yes", "Install" or whatever seems the most productive option at the time. "No" and "cancel" are actually scarier - even if they are the default. And by the way - what kind of notion of a "default choice" does the average home user have anyway? Do they really distinct between the default and non-default button in a dialog like this? I recall the good old days when I was young and had enough time to skip studies and instead spend it on compiling my Linux kernel, and when running make config, the last line of every configuration description was something like If unsure, select 'N' or 'N' should be a safe bet. I actually followed that advice when I really was unsure. Internet Explorer, in this example, never give such a straight-forward direction - instead, it tries to explain the domains of code signing and "trusted publishers". Ol' granma will think "of course I trust this publisher! my grandson told me to click on this link!" even if the link her grandson told her to click on was twenty clicks away.
Also, if IE actually had made it clear to its users that they really shouldn't run unsigned code, a lot less people would have tried Firefox (and the poster is right that there is a point in signing the Firefox installable anyway). And that would have been a bad thing. I don't have a good solution for this whole thing, in general. Many people believe in Trusted Computing and it really gives me the shivers. But something has to be done, I guess.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
