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• How to Make the Gnome Panels in Ubuntu Totally Transparent

  - by The Geek

  We all love transparency, since it makes your desktop so beautiful and lovely—so today we’re going to show you how to apply transparency to the panels in your Ubuntu Gnome setup. It’s an easy process, and here’s how to do it. This article is the first part of a multi-part series on how to customize the Ubuntu desktop, written by How-To Geek reader and ubergeek, Omar Hafiz. Making the Gnome Panels Transparent Of course we all love transparency, It makes your desktop so beautiful and lovely. So you go for enabling transparency in your panels , you right click on your panel, choose properties, go to the Background tab and make your panel transparent. Easy right? But instead of getting a lovely transparent panel, you often get a cluttered, ugly panel like this: Fortunately it can be easily fixed, all we need to do is to edit the theme files. If your theme is one of those themes that came with Ubuntu like Ambiance then you’ll have to copy it from /usr/share/themes to your own .themes directory in your Home Folder. You can do so by typing the following command in the terminal cp /usr/share/themes/theme_name ~/.themes Note: don’t forget to substitute theme_name with the theme name you want to fix. But if your theme is one you downloaded then it is already in your .themes folder. Now open your file manager and navigate to your home folder then do to .themes folder. If you can’t see it then you probably have disabled the “View hidden files” option. Press Ctrl+H to enable it. Now in .themes you’ll find your previously copied theme folder there, enter it then go to gtk-2.0 folder. There you may find a file named “panel.rc”, which is a configuration file that tells your panel how it should look like. If you find it there then rename it to “panel.rc.bak”. If you don’t find don’t panic! There’s nothing wrong with your system, it’s just that your theme decided to put the panel configurations in the “gtkrc” file. Open this file with your favorite text editor and at the end of the file there is line that looks like this “include “apps/gnome-panel.rc””. Comment out this line by putting a hash mark # in front of it. Now it should look like this “# include “apps/gnome-panel.rc”” Save and exit the text editor. Now change your theme to any other one then switch back to the one you edited. Now your panel should look like this: Stay tuned for the second part in the series, where we’ll cover how to change the color and fonts on your panels. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The Legend of Zelda – 1980s High School Style [Video] Suspended Sentence is a Free Cross-Platform Point and Click Game Build a Batman-Style Hidden Bust Switch Make Your Clock Creates a Custom Clock for your Android Homescreen Download the Anime Angels Theme for Windows 7 CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• Thinking differently about BI delivery

  - by jamiet

  My day job involves implementing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions which, as I have said before, is simply about giving people the information they need to do their jobs. I’m always interested in learning about new ways of achieving that aim and that is my motivation for writing blog entries that are not concerned with SQL or SQL Server per se. Implementing BI systems usually involves hacking together a bunch third party products with some in-house “glue” and delivering information using some shiny, expensive web-based front-end tool; the list of vendors that supply such tools is big and ever-growing. No doubt these tools have their place and of late I have started to wonder whether they can be supplemented with different ways of delivering information. The problem I have with these separate web-based tools is exactly that – they are separate web-based tools. What’s the problem with that you might ask? I’ll explain! They force the information worker to go somewhere unfamiliar in order to get the information they need to do their jobs. Would it not be better if we could deliver information into the tools that those information workers are already using and not force them to go somewhere else? I look at the rise of blogging over recent years and I realise that what made them popular is that people can subscribe to RSS feeds and have information pushed to them in their tool of choice rather than them having to go and find the information for themselves in a tool that has been foisted upon them. Would it not be a good idea to adopt the principle of subscription for the benefit of delivering BI information as well? I think it would and in the rest of this blog entry I’ll outline such a scenario where the power of subscription could be used to enhance the delivery of information to information workers. Typical questions that information workers ask might be: What are my year-on-year sales figures? What was my footfall yesterday? How many widgets have I sold so far today? Each of those questions includes a time element and that shouldn’t surprise us, any BI system that I have worked on includes the dimension of time. Now, what do people use to view and organise their time-oriented information? Its not a trick question, they use a calendar and in the enterprise space more often than not that calendar is managed using Outlook. Given then that information workers are already looking at their calendar in Outlook anyway would it not make sense then to deliver information into that same calendar? Of course it would. Calendars are a great way of visualising information such as sales figures. Observe: Just in this single screenshot I have managed to convey a multitude of information. The information worker can see, at a glance, information about hourly/daily/weekly/monthly sales and, moreover, he/she is viewing that information right inside the tool that they use every day. There is no effort on the part of him/her, the information just appears hour after hour, day after day. Taking the idea further, each one of those calendar items could be a mini-dashboard in its own right. Double-clicking on an item could show a plethora of other information about that time slot such as breaking the sales down per region or year-over-year comparisons. Perhaps the title could employ a sparkline? Loads of possibilities. The point is that calendars are a completely natural way to visualise information; we should make more use of them! The real beauty of delivering information using calendars for us BI developers is that it should be so easy. In the case of Outlook we don’t need to write complicated VBA code that can go and manipulate a person’s calendar, simply publishing data in a format that Outlook can understand is sufficient and happily such formats already exist; iCalendar is the accepted format and the even more flexible xCalendar is hopefully on its way as well.   I’d like to make one last point and this one is with my SQL Server hat on. Reporting Services 2008 R2 introduced the ability to publish data as subscribable Atom feeds so it seems logical that it could also be a vehicle for delivering calendar feeds too. If you think this would be a good idea go and vote for it at Publish data as iCalendar feeds and please please please add some comments (especially if you vote it down). Work smarter, not harder! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• Resolving collisions between dynamic game objects

  - by TheBroodian

  I've been building a 2D platformer for some time now, I'm getting to the point where I am adding dynamic objects to the stage for testing. This has prompted me to consider how I would like my character and other objects to behave when they collide. A typical staple in many 2D platformer type games is that the player takes damage upon touching an enemy, and then essentially becomes able to pass through enemies during a period of invulnerability, and at the same time, enemies are able to pass through eachother freely. I personally don't want to take this approach, it feels strange to me that the player should receive arbitrary damage for harmless contact to an enemy, despite whether the enemy is attacking or not, and I would like my enemies' interactions between each other (and my player) to be a little more organic, so to speak. In my head I sort of have this idea where a game object (player, or non player) would be able to push other game objects around by manner of 'pushing' each other out of one anothers' bounding boxes if there is an intersection, and maybe correlate the repelling force to how much their bounding boxes are intersecting. The problem I'm experiencing is I have no idea what the math might look like for something like this? I'll show what work I've done so far, it sort of works, but it's jittery, and generally not quite what I would pass in a functional game: //Clears the anti-duplicate buffer collisionRecord.Clear(); //pick a thing foreach (GameObject entity in entities) { //pick another thing foreach (GameObject subject in entities) { //check to make sure both things aren't the same thing if (!ReferenceEquals(entity, subject)) { //check to see if thing2 is in semi-near proximity to thing1 if (entity.WideProximityArea.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.WideProximityArea.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle)) { //check to see if thing2 and thing1 are colliding. if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(subject.CollisionRectangle) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(subject.CollisionRectangle) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(entity.CollisionRectangle)) { //check if we've already resolved their collision or not. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(entity.GetHashCode())) { //more duplicate resolution checking. if (!collisionRecord.ContainsKey(subject.GetHashCode())) { //if thing1 is traveling right... if (entity.Velocity.X > 0) { //if it isn't too far to the right... if (subject.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || subject.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(entity.CollisionRectangle.Right, entity.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, entity.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = entity.CollisionRectangle.Right - subject.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the left, and thing2 to the right. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //if thing1 is traveling left... if (entity.Velocity.X < 0) { //if thing1 isn't too far left... if (entity.CollisionRectangle.Contains(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height)) || entity.CollisionRectangle.Intersects(new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Rectangle(subject.CollisionRectangle.Right, subject.CollisionRectangle.Y, 1, subject.CollisionRectangle.Height))) { //Find how deep thing1 is intersecting thing2's collision box; float offset = subject.CollisionRectangle.Right - entity.CollisionRectangle.Left; //Move both things in opposite directions half the length of the intersection, pushing thing1 to the right, and thing2 to the left. entity.Velocities.Add(new Vector2((((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); subject.Velocities.Add(new Vector2(-(((offset * 4) * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)), 0)); } } //Make record that thing1 and thing2 have interacted and the collision has been solved, so that if thing2 is picked next in the foreach loop, it isn't checked against thing1 a second time before the next update. collisionRecord.Add(entity.GetHashCode(), subject.GetHashCode()); } } } } } } } } One of the biggest issues with my code aside from the jitteriness is that if one character were to land on top of another character, it very suddenly and abruptly resolves the collision, whereas I would like a more subtle and gradual resolution. Any thoughts or ideas are incredibly welcome and helpful.

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• Don’t string together XML

  - by KyleBurns

  XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade.  It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies.  Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML.  This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended to take a Contact object and return an XML string): return string.Format("<Contact><BusinessName>{0}</BusinessName></Contact>", contact.BusinessName);   In the code example, I created (or at least believe I created) an XML document representing a simple contact object in one line of code with very little overhead.  Work’s done, right?  No it’s not.  You see, what I didn’t realize was that this code would be used in the real world instead of my fantasy world where I own all the data and can prevent any of it containing problematic values.  If I use this code to create a contact record for the business “Sanford & Son”, any XML parser will be incapable of processing the data because the ampersand is special in XML and should have been encoded as &amp;. Following the pattern that I have seen many times over, my next step as a developer is going to be to do what any developer in his right mind would do – instruct the user that ampersands are “bad” and they cannot be used without breaking computers.  This may work in many cases and is often accompanied by logic at the UI layer of applications to block these “bad” characters, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out that other applications allow for them and will want the same.  This often leads to the creation of “cleaner” functions that perform a replace on the strings for every special character that the person writing the function can think of.  The cleaner function will usually grow over time as support requests reveal characters that were missed in the initial cut.  Sooner or later you end up writing your own somewhat functional XML engine. I have never been told by anyone paying me to write code that they would like to buy a somewhat functional XML engine.  My employer/customer’s needs have always been for something that may use XML, but ultimately is functionality that drives business value. I’m not going to build an XML engine. So how can I generate XML that is always well-formed without writing my own engine?  Easy – use one of the ones provided to you for free!  If you’re in a shop that still supports VB6 applications, you can use the DomDocument or MXXMLWriter object (of the two I prefer MXXMLWriter, but I’m not going to fully describe either here).  For .Net Framework applications prior to the 3.5 framework, the code is a little more verbose than I would like, but easy once you understand what pieces are required:             using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())             {                 using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw))                 {                     writer.WriteStartDocument();                     writer.WriteStartElement("Contact");                     writer.WriteElementString("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName);                     writer.WriteEndElement(); // end Contact element                     writer.WriteEndDocument();                     writer.Flush();                     return sw.ToString();                 }             }   Looking at that code, it’s easy to understand why people are drawn to the initial one-liner.  Lucky for us, the 3.5 .Net Framework added the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object.  This object takes away a lot of the complexity present in the XmlTextWriter approach and allows us to generate the document as follows: return new XElement("Contact", new XElement("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName)).ToString();   While it is very common for people to use string manipulation to create XML, I’ve discussed here reasons not to use this method and introduced powerful APIs that are built into the .Net Framework as an alternative.  I’ve given a very simplistic example here to highlight the most basic XML generation task.  For more information on the XmlTextWriter and XElement APIs, check out the MSDN library.

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• Webcast On-Demand: Building Java EE Apps That Scale

  - by jeckels

  With some awesome work by one of our architects, Randy Stafford, we recently completed a webcast on scaling Java EE apps efficiently. Did you miss it? No problem. We have a replay available on-demand for you. Just hit the '+' sign drop-down for access.Topics include: Domain object caching Service response caching Session state caching JSR-107 HotCache and more! Further, we had several interesting questions asked by our audience, and we thought we'd share a sampling of those here for you - just in case you had the same queries yourself. Enjoy! What is the largest Coherence deployment out there? We have seen deployments with over 500 JVMs in the Coherence cluster, and deployments with over 1000 JVMs using the Coherence jar file, in one system. On the management side there is an ecosystem of monitoring tools from Oracle and third parties with dashboards graphing values from Coherence's JMX instrumentation. For lifecycle management we have seen a lot of custom scripting over the years, but we've also integrated closely with WebLogic to leverage its management ecosystem for deploying Coherence-based applications and managing process life cycles. That integration introduces a new Java EE archive type, the Grid Archive or GAR, which embeds in an EAR and can be seen by a WAR in WebLogic. That integration also doesn't require any extra WebLogic licensing if Coherence is licensed. How is Coherence different from a NoSQL Database like MongoDB? Coherence can be considered a NoSQL technology. It pre-dates the NoSQL movement, having been first released in 2001 whereas the term "NoSQL" was coined in 2009. Coherence has a key-value data model primarily but can also be used for document data models. Coherence manages data in memory currently, though disk persistence is in a future release currently in beta testing. Where the data is managed yields a few differences from the most well-known NoSQL products: access latency is faster with Coherence, though well-known NoSQL databases can manage more data. Coherence also has features that well-known NoSQL database lack, such as grid computing, eventing, and data source integration. Finally Coherence has had 15 years of maturation and hardening from usage in mission-critical systems across a variety of industries, particularly financial services. Can I use Coherence for local caching? Yes, you get additional features beyond just a java.util.Map: you get expiration capabilities, size-limitation capabilities, eventing capabilites, etc. Are there APIs available for GoldenGate HotCache? It's mostly a black box. You configure it, and it just puts objects into your caches. However you can treat it as a glass box, and use Coherence event interceptors to enhance its behavior - and there are use cases for that. Are Coherence caches updated transactionally? Coherence provides several mechanisms for concurrency control. If a project insists on full-blown JTA / XA distributed transactions, Coherence caches can participate as resources. But nobody does that because it's a performance and scalability anti-pattern. At finer granularity, Coherence guarantees strict ordering of all operations (reads and writes) against a single cache key if the operations are done using Coherence's "EntryProcessor" feature. And Coherence has a unique feature called "partition-level transactions" which guarantees atomic writes of multiple cache entries (even in different caches) without requiring JTA / XA distributed transaction semantics.

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• Frame Buster Buster ... buster code needed

  - by Jeff Atwood

  Let's say you don't want other sites to "frame" your site in an <iframe>: <iframe src="http://yourwebsite.com"></iframe> So you insert anti-framing, frame busting JavaScript into all your pages: /* break us out of any containing iframes */ if (top != self) { top.location.replace(self.location.href); } Excellent! Now you "bust" or break out of any containing iframe automatically. Except for one small problem. As it turns out, your frame-busting code can be busted, as shown here: <script type="text/javascript"> var prevent_bust = 0 window.onbeforeunload = function() { prevent_bust++ } setInterval(function() { if (prevent_bust > 0) { prevent_bust -= 2 window.top.location = 'http://server-which-responds-with-204.com' } }, 1) </script> This code does the following: increments a counter every time the browser attempts to navigate away from the current page, via the window.onbeforeonload event handler sets up a timer that fires every millisecond via setInterval(), and if it sees the counter incremented, changes the current location to a server of the attacker's control that server serves up a page with HTTP status code 204, which does not cause the browser to nagivate anywhere My question is -- and this is more of a JavaScript puzzle than an actual problem -- how can you defeat the frame-busting buster? I had a few thoughts, but nothing worked in my testing: attempting to clear the onbeforeunload event via onbeforeonload = null had no effect adding an alert() stopped the process let the user know it was happening, but did not interfere with the code in any way; clicking OK lets the busting continue as normal I can't think of any way to clear the setInterval() timer I'm not much of a JavaScript programmer, so here's my challenge to you: hey buster, can you bust the frame-busting buster?

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• Session variables with Cucumber Stories

  - by Matthew Savage

  I am working on some Cucumber stories for a 'sign up' application which has a number of steps. Rather then writing a Huuuuuuuge story to cover all the steps at once, which would be bad, I'd rather work through each action in the controller like a regular user. My problem here is that I am storing the account ID which is created in the first step as a session variable, so when step 2, step 3 etc are visited the existing registration data is loaded. I'm aware of being able to access controller.session[..] within RSpec specifications however when I try to do this in Cucumber stories it fails with the following error (and, I've also read somewhere this is an anti-pattern etc...): Using controller.session[:whatever] or session[:whatever] You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! The error occurred while evaluating nil.session (NoMethodError) Using session(:whatever) wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) (ArgumentError) So, it seems accession the session store isn't really possible. What I'm wondering is if it might be possible to (and I guess which would be best..): Mock out the session store etc Have a method within the controller and stub that out (e.g. get_registration which assigns an instance variable...) I've looked through the RSpec book (well, skimmed) and had a look through WebRat etc, but I haven't really found an answer to my problem... To clarify a bit more, the signup process is more like a state machine - e.g. the user progresses through four steps before the registration is complete - hence 'logging in' isn't really an option (it breaks the model of how the site works)... In my spec for the controller I was able to stub out the call to the method which loads the model based on the session var - but I'm not sure if the 'antipattern' line also applies to stubs as well as mocks? Thanks!

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• Problem in IE8 with GET Parameters in opening a new windows with javascript.

  - by amfa95

  Hi, I have a problem with IE8 and the opening of a new window with javascript and submitting parameters with special characters. <a href="javascript:oWin('/html/de/4664286/printregistrationcontent.html?12-security question&#61;Wie hei&#223;t Ihr Lieblingsrestaurant','PRINT',800,600);" class="print">Seite drucken</a> The Problem is the letter 'ß' (sharp S). As you can see the string above is encodes due to anti XSS. This link works in FF and IE6 but IE8 is transmitting the URL Parameter as character with code 65*** (don't know the exaxt value). In the opening window you will only see a square (because character with 65000+ is not printable). I also tried to use URL Encoding instead of HTML encoding <a href="javascript:oWin('/html/de/4664286/printregistrationcontent.html?12-security question%3DWie hei%C3%9Ft Ihr Lieblingsrestaurant','PRINT',800,600);" class="print">Seite drucken</a> If i click on this Link in FF or IE6 it works as expected, but IE8 will fail to transmit the "ß" to the server and therefor will also get it back in the wrong way. If i paste this url to the IE8 it will work too, but not if the window is opened by javascript. The Javascript function oWin is defined as follows function oWin(url,title,sizeH,sizeV) { winHandle = top.open(url,title,'toolbar=no,directories=no,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=no,width='+sizeH+',height='+sizeV); if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 3",0)==-1) id = setTimeout('winHandle.focus()',1000); } If someone has an idea where to look for the reason please answer to this. Thank you amfa

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• identation control while developing a small python like language

  - by sap

  Hello, Im developing a small python like language using flex, byacc (for lexical and parsing) and C++, but i have a few questions regarding scope control. just as python it uses white spaces (or tabs) for identation, not only that but i want to implement index breaking like for instance if you type "break 2" inside a while loop thats inside another while loop it would not only break from the last one but from the first loop as well (hence the number 2 after break) and so on. example: while 1 while 1 break 2 end end #after break 2 it would jump right here but since i dont have an "anti" tab character to check when a scope ends (like C for example i would just use the '}' char) i was wondering if this method would the the best: i would define a global variable, like "int tabIndex" on my yacc file that i would access in my lex file using extern. then everytime i find a tab character on my lex file i would increment that variable by 1. when parsing on my yacc file if i find a "break" keyword i would decrement by the amount typed after it from the tabIndex variable, and when i reach and EOF after compiling and i get a tabIndex != 0 i would output compilation error. now the problem is, whats the best way to see if the identation got reduced, should i read \b (backspace) chars from lex and then reduce the tabIndex variable (when the user doesnt use break)? another method to achieve this? also just another small question, i want every executable to have its starting point on the function called start() should i hardcode this onto my yacc file? sorry for the long question any help is greatly appretiated. also if someone can provide an yacc file for python would be nice as a guideline (tried looking on google and had no luck). thanks in advance.

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• Apache unresponsive on Vista [closed]

  - by William Hudson

  I had been running Apache on Vista for around a year, but recently upgraded my workstation. I did a clean install of Vista Ultimate and installed the latest version of the Apache server for win32 (2.2.11, no SSL). The service runs fine and there were no errors reported during the install, nor are there any errors in the Apache logs. However, any attempt to access the web site on localhost (or 127.0.0.1) just hangs the browser. I have used netstat to check who is listening to port 80 and it shows httpd.exe. I have also tried adjusting the .conf file to use port 8080 but this had no effect either (except to change the netstat output). This is a development system with quite a few other pieces of software installed. However, when I tried installing IIS, it worked fine (I removed it soon after before reattempting the Apache install). Using the older 2.0 version of Apache has no effect. Windows firewall is not running. I have disabled my NOD32 anti-virus. Any ideas what is going on? Regards, William

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• Soft Paint Bucket Fill: Colour Equality

  - by Bart van Heukelom

  I'm making a small app where children can fill preset illustrations with colours. I've succesfully implemented an MS-paint style paint bucket using the flood fill argorithm. However, near the edges of image elements pixels are left unfilled, because the lines are anti-aliased. This is because the current condition on whether to fill is colourAtCurrentPixel == colourToReplace (the colours are RGB uints) I'd like to add a smoothing/treshold option like in Photoshop and other sophisticated tools, but what's the algorithm to determine the equality/distance between two colours? if (match(pixel(x,y), colourToReplace) setpixel(x,y,colourToReplaceWith) How to fill in match()? Here's my current full code: var b:BitmapData = settings.background; b.lock(); var from:uint = b.getPixel(x,y); var q:Array = []; var xx:int; var yy:int; var w:int = b.width; var h:int = b.height; q.push(y*w + x); while (q.length != 0) { var xy:int = q.shift(); xx = xy % w; yy = (xy - xx) / w; if (b.getPixel(xx,yy) == from) { b.setPixel(xx,yy,to); if (xx != 0) q.push(xy-1); if (xx != w-1) q.push(xy+1); if (yy != 0) q.push(xy-w); if (yy != h-1) q.push(xy+w); } } b.unlock(null);

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• Has the recent version of subversion dealt with "Access Denied" errors from windows services that mo

  - by Eric LaForce

  Does anyone know if this subversion "bug" has been dealt with? https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/tags/1.6.9/www/faq.html#windows-access-denied I'm getting occasional "Access Denied" errors on Windows. They seem to happen at random. Why? These appear to be due to the various Windows services that monitor the filesystem for changes (anti-virus software, indexing services, the COM+ Event Notification Service). This is not really a bug in Subversion, which makes it difficult for us to fix. A summary of the current state of the investigation is available here. A workaround that should reduce the incidence rate for most people was implemented in revision 7598; if you have an earlier version, please update to the latest release. Currently I am experiencing this same behavior in version 1.5.6 when I try and do a SVN switch (I have suspected McAfee as the culprit for a while and when I saw this I feel it validates my suspicions). I read through the link given but it seems pretty old, so I didn't know if this FAQ was just outdated and the issue has actually be resolved. Thanks for any help. Configuration: SVN 1.5.6 TortoiseSVN 1.5.9 Build 15518 Windows XP SP3 32-bit

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• Java - Is this a bad design pattern?

  - by Walter White

  Hi all, In our application, I have seen code written like this: User.java (User entity) public class User { protected String firstName; protected String lastName; ... getters/setters (regular POJO) } UserSearchCommand { protected List<User> users; protected int currentPage; protected int sortColumnIndex; protected SortOder sortOrder; // the current user we're editing, if at all protected User user; public String getFirstName() {return(user.getFirstName());} public String getLastName() {return(user.getLastName());} } Now, from my experience, this pattern or anti-pattern looks bad to me. For one, we're mixing several concerns together. While they're all user-related, it deviates from typical POJO design. If we're going to go this route, then shouldn't we do this instead? UserSearchCommand { protected List<User> users; protected int currentPage; protected int sortColumnIndex; protected SortOder sortOrder; // the current user we're editing, if at all protected User user; public User getUser() {return(user);} } Simply return the user object, and then we can call whatever methods on it as we wish? Since this is quite different from typical bean development, JSR 303, bean validation doesn't work for this model and we have to write validators for every bean. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this design pattern or am I just being picky as a developer? Walter

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• How to determine if "html" or "body" scrolls the window.

  - by David Murdoch

  The code below is used to find the element that can be scrolled (body or html) via javascript. var scrollElement = (function (tags) { var el, $el, init; // iterate through the tags... while (el = tags.pop()) { $el = $(el); // if the scrollTop value is already > 0 then this element will work if ( $el.scrollTop() > 0){ return $el; } // if scrollTop is 0 try to scroll. else if($el.scrollTop( 1 ).scrollTop() > 0) { // if that worked reset the scroll top and return the element return $el.scrollTop(0); } } return $(); } (["html", "body"])); // do stuff with scrollElement...like: // scrollElement.animate({"scrollTop":target.offset().top},1000); This code works perfectly when the height of the document is greater than the height of the window. However, when the height of the document is the same or less than the window the method above will not work because scrollTop() will always be equal to 0. This becomes a problem if the DOM is updated and the height of the document grows beyond the height of the window after the code runs. Also, I generally don't wait until document.ready to set up my javascript handlers (this generally works). I could append a tall div to the body temporarily to force the method above to work BUT that would required the document to be ready in IE (you can't add a node to the body element before the tag is closed). For more reading on the document.ready "anti-pattern" topic read this. So, I'd love to find a solution that finds the scrollable element even when the document is short. Any ideas?

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• IIS, Web services, Time out error

  - by Eduard

  Hello, We’ve got problem with ASP.NET web application that uses web services of other system. I’ll describe our system architecture: we have web application and Windows services that uses the same web services. - Windows service works all the time and sends information to these web services once an hour. - Web application is designed for users to send the same information in manual behavior. The problem is when user sometimes tries to send information in manual behavior in the web application, .NET throws exception „The operation has timed out” (web?). At that time Windows service successfully sends all necessary information to these web services. IT stuff that supports these web services asserts that there was no any request from our web application at that time. Then we have restarted IIS (iisreset) and everything has started to work fine. This situation repeats all the time. There is no anti-virus or firewall on the server. My suggestion is that there is something wrong with IIS, patches, configuration or whatever? The only specific thing is that there are requests that can least 2 minutes (web service response wait time). We tried to reproduce this situation on our local test servers, but everything works fine. OS: Windows Server 2003 R2 .NET: 3.5

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• DirectShow Filter I wrote dies after 10-24 seconds in Skype video call

  - by Robert Oschler

  I've written a DirectShow push filter for use with Skype using Delphi Pro 6 and the DSPACK DirectShow library. In preview mode, when you test a video input device in the Skype client Video Settings window, my filter works flawlessly. I can leave it up and running for many minutes without an error. However when I start a video call after 10 to 24 seconds, never longer, the video feed freezes. The call continues fine with the call duration counter clicking away the seconds, but the video feed is dead, stuck on whatever frame the freeze happened (although after a long while it turns black which I believe means Skype has given up on the filter). I tried attaching to the process from my debugger with a breakpoint literally set on every method call and none of them are hit once the freeze takes place. It's as if the thread that makes the DirectShow FillBuffer() call to my filter on behalf of Skype is dead or has been shutdown. I can't trace my filter in the debugger because during a Skype call I get weird int 1 and int 3 debugger hard interrupt calls when a Skype video call is in progress. This behavior happens even with my standard web cam input device selected and my DirectShow filter completely unregistered as a ActiveX server. I suspect it might be some "anti-debugging" code since it doesn't happen in video input preview mode. Either way, that is why I had to attach to the process after the fact to see if my FillBuffer() called was still being called and instead discovered that appears to be dead. Note, my plain vanilla USB web cam's DirectShow filter does not exhibit the freezing behavior and works fine for many minutes. There's something about my filter that Skype doesn't like. I've tried Sleep() statements of varying intervals, no Sleep statements, doing virtually nothing in the FillBuffer() call. Nothing helps. If anyone has any ideas on what might be the culprit here, I'd like to know. Thanks, Robert

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• Open Source: Why not release into Public Domain?

  - by Goosey

  I have recently been wondering why so little code is ever released as 'Public Domain'. MIT and BSD licenses are becoming extremely popular and practically only have the restriction of license propagation. The reasons I can think of so far are: Credit - aka Prestige, Street-cred, 'Props', etc. Authors don't want usage of the code restricted, but they also want credit for creating the code. Two problems with this reason. I have seen projects copy/paste the MIT or BSD license without adding the 'Copyright InsertNameHere' thereby making it a tag-along license that doesn't give them credit. I have talked to authors who say they don't care about people giving them credit, they just want people to use their code. Public Domain would make it easier for people to do so. License Change - IANAL, but I believe by licensing their code, even with an extremely nonrestrictive license, this means they can change the license on a later revision? This reason is not good for explaining most BSD/MIT licensed code which seems to have no intent of ever becoming more restrictive. AS IS - All licenses seem to have the SCREAMING CAPS declaration saying that the software is 'as is' and that the author offers no implied or express warranty. IANAL, but isn't this implied in public domain? Am I missing some compelling reason? The authors I have talked to about this basically said something along the lines of "BSD/MIT just seems like what you do, no one does public domain". Is this groupthink in action, or is there a compelling anti-public domain argument? Thanks EDIT: I am specifically asking about Public Domain vs BSD/MIT/OtherEquallyUnrestrictiveLicense. Not GPL. Please understand what these licenses allow, and this includes: Selling the work, changing the work and not 'giving the changes back', and incorporating the work in a differently (such as commercially) licensed work. Thank You to everyone who has replied who understands what BSD/MIT means.

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• I didn't say anything treasonous, quit putting words in my mouth

  - by You guys Lie

  Where at all did I say ANYTHING about organizing some kind of anti-government activity? Nowhere. I do not give a flying fuck about America in case you hadn't realized, I'm talking about what I'm going to do when Jesus Christ returns. Besides, why would I make it easy for them to throw me in a black site prison? Use common sense, sheeple. In the end I guess it doesn't matter anyways, since I do not recognize the government as my ultimate authority. Police/Army/Whatever-- funny outfits and a shiny badge don't make you better than me. Allah will do away with your kind. However, as long as they're with me (as they semi-currently are), we have no problems. I fear the government will have other plans to control the population when things start to further decline, and that is when they will run into problems with me and mine, and probably a large percentage of the public. You'd have to be a fucking fool to think we'd fall into anarchy immediately, given the vast resources and blind loyalty of this country. Saying there are practical limits to free speech for anything I have said in this thread is not only ignorant, it is unpatriotic. I should be being celebrated as the modern day Paul Revere for warning you people about our impending doom. You would do well to study the foundations of this country. Nothing I have said is treasonous at all. Besides, the DoD knows I'm harmless until shit pops off, they have bigger fish to fry right now, go forward. Keep in mind, I don't personally have to do anything to overthrow the government. I just said, I would not advocate for any paramilitary organizations at this time, only if/after we dissolve into (more) tyranny. I am not a terrorist, like some soldiers in Iraq. The machine is doing a great job of ruining itself, while I get to comfortably laugh at it on the nightly news knowing that I'm ready for it to shut down.

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• Avoiding anemic domain model - a real example

  - by cbp

  I am trying to understand Anemic Domain Models and why they are supposedly an anti-pattern. Here is a real world example. I have an Employee class, which has a ton of properties - name, gender, username, etc public class Employee { public string Name { get; set; } public string Gender { get; set; } public string Username { get; set; } // Etc.. mostly getters and setters } Next we have a system that involves rotating incoming phone calls and website enquiries (known as 'leads') evenly amongst sales staff. This system is quite complex as it involves round-robining enquiries, checking for holidays, employee preferences etc. So this system is currently seperated out into a service: EmployeeLeadRotationService. public class EmployeeLeadRotationService : IEmployeeLeadRotationService { private IEmployeeRepository _employeeRepository; // ...plus lots of other injected repositories and services public void SelectEmployee(ILead lead) { // Etc. lots of complex logic } } Then on the backside of our website enquiry form we have code like this: public void SubmitForm() { var lead = CreateLeadFromFormInput(); var selectedEmployee = Kernel.Get<IEmployeeLeadRotationService>() .SelectEmployee(lead); Response.Write(employee.Name + " will handle your enquiry. Thanks."); } I don't really encounter many problems with this approach, but supposedly this is something that I should run screaming from because it is an Anemic Domain Model. But for me its not clear where the logic in the lead rotation service should go. Should it go in the lead? Should it go in the employee? What about all the injected repositories etc that the rotation service requires - how would they be injected into the employee, given that most of the time when dealing with an employee we don't need any of these repositories?

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• How much of STL is too much?

  - by Darius Kucinskas

  I am using a lot of STL code with std::for_each, bind, and so on, but I noticed that sometimes STL usage is not good idea. For example if you have a std::vector and want to do one action on each item of the vector, your first idea is to use this: std::for_each(vec.begin(), vec.end(), Foo()) and it is elegant and ok, for a while. But then comes the first set of bug reports and you have to modify code. Now you should add parameter to call Foo(), so now it becomes: std::for_each(vec.begin(), vec.end(), std::bind2nd(Foo(), X)) but that is only temporary solution. Now the project is maturing and you understand business logic much better and you want to add new modifications to code. It is at this point that you realize that you should use old good: for(std::vector::iterator it = vec.begin(); it != vec.end(); ++it) Is this happening only to me? Do you recognise this kind of pattern in your code? Have you experience similar anti-patterns using STL?

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• Email not sent until application closes

  - by Tester101

  I have an application that uses SmtpClient to send E-Mail, but the E-Mails are not sent until the application closes. I have searched and searched to find a solution to the problem, but I am not able to find one. The system does have Symantec anti-virus installed, which could possibly be the problem. Does anybody have a solution to this problem? Here is the code I am using. public class EMail { private string server; public string Server {get{return this.server;}set{this.server = value;}} private string to; public string To {get{return this.to;}set{this.to = value;}} private string from; public string From {get{return this.from;}set{this.from = value;}} private string subject; public string Subject {get{return this.subject;}set{this.subject = value;}} private string body; public string Body {get{return this.body;}set{this.body = value;}} public EMail() {} public EMail(string _server, string _to, string _from, string _subject, string _body) { this.Server = _server; this.To = _to; this.From = _from; this.Subject = _subject; this.Body = _body; } public void Send() { System.Net.Mail.MailMessage message = new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(this.From, this.To, this.Subject, this.Body); message.IsBodyHtml = true; System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient client = new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient(this.Server); client.DeliveryMethod = System.Net.Mail.SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network; //I have tried this, but it still does not work. //client.ServicePoint.ConnectionLeaseTimeout = 0; try { client.Send(message); } catch(System.Exception ex) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(ex.ToString()); } message.Dispose(); } }

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• android & libgdx - disable blurry images rendering

  - by android developer

  i'm trying out libgdx as an opengl wrapper , and i have some issues with its graphical rendering : for some reason , all images (textures) on android device look a little blurred using libgdx . this also includes text (font) . however, for normal images , even though i show the entire image , i expect it to look as sharp as i see it on a computer , especially if i have such a good screen on the device (it's galaxy nexus) . i've tried to set the anti-aliasing off , by using the next code : final AndroidApplicationConfiguration androidApplicationConfiguration=new AndroidApplicationConfiguration(); androidApplicationConfiguration.numSamples=0; //tried the value of 1 too. ... i've also tried to set the scaling method to various methods , but with no luck. example: texture.setFilter(TextureFilter.Nearest,TextureFilter.Nearest); as a test , i've found a sharp image that is exactly the same as the seen resolution on the device (720x1184 for galaxy nexus , because of the buttons bar) , and i've put it to be on the background of the libgdx app . of course , i had to add extra blank space in order for the texute to be loaded , so the final size of the image (which will include content and empty space) is still a power of 2 for both width and height (1024x2048 in my case) . on the desktop app , it look ok . on the device , it looked blurred. a weird thing that i've noticed is that when i change the device's orientation (horizontal <= vertical) , for the very short time before the rotating animation starts , i see both the image and the text very well . can anyone please help me?

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• Zoom image to pixel level

  - by zaf

  For an art project, one of the things I'll be doing is zooming in on an image to a particular pixel. I've been rubbing my chin and would love some advice on how to proceed. Here are the input parameters: Screen: sw - screen width sh - screen height Image: iw - image width ih - image height Pixel: px - x position of pixel in image py - y position of pixel in image Zoom: zf - zoom factor (0.0 to 1.0) Background colour: bc - background colour to use when screen and image aspect ratios are different Outputs: The zoomed image (no anti-aliasing) The screen position/dimensions of the pixel we are zooming to. When zf is 0 the image must fit the screen with correct aspect ratio. When zf is 1 the selected pixel fits the screen with correct aspect ratio. One idea I had was to use something like povray and move the camera towards a big image texture or some library (e.g. pygame) to do the zooming. Anyone think of something more clever with simple pseudo code? To keep it more simple you can make the image and screen have the same aspect ratio. I can live with that. I'll update with more info as its required.

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