Andrius Miasnikovas's Blog

Quick Tip: Velocity Template Debugging

Andrius Miasnikovas — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:49:17 +0000

In this post I’ll try to share my recent experience with Velocity template debugging. There are a few ways to debug the templates depending on where you think the problem lies. But at times you have modify templates written by others and that’s when you need to do some exploring like finding out what variables are actually passed to the template. This is not always easily found in code, sometimes it’s simpler to print this stuff out when you’re already in the template. Below is a macro that I used to print out request and session attributes and parameters. It creates a new window and prints this data separate from your actual page layout, just make sure that your browser [...]

Experimenting with WebGL

Andrius Miasnikovas — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:01:29 +0000

I was experimenting with WebGL the other day and it’s pretty damn cool. Here’s a spinning 3d logo of the company I currently work for as an attempt at animating something in 3D. If you’re not in the loop, WebGL is a JavasSript API supported by modern browsers that allows interactive 3D graphics rendering in a browser’s window, specifically the canvas tag. The graphics rendering is GPU accelerated which means excellent performance (as long as you’re using it wisely). The API is designed by the Khronos Group and is based on OpenGL ES 2.0. If you ever used OpenGL then it will be easier for you to start, but similar to OpenGL ES the WebGL API doesn’t have the immediate [...]

SSH tunneling simplified (I think)

Andrius Miasnikovas — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:42:41 +0000

It’s been quite a while since my last post so I’ll try to ease back into blogging. For now I’ll just share a little something I created for myself to help with the SSH tunnels that I need to create on a seemingly regular basis. Sometimes I forget or mix up the parameters that need to be passed to SSH client, especially when interconnecting these tunnels. In this simple tool you can enter the missing info to form a logical sentence in English language and when you click the generate button you get a command line for the SSH client. Pretty user friendly And if you’re not sure what SSH tunnels are and why you need them, take a look [...]

A Story of Switching from Java to Developing for Mac OS X

Andrius Miasnikovas — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:16:47 +0000

A couple of months ago I’ve switched from Java development to developing for Mac OS X. Let me tell you, it’s a completely different world, but that was to be expected. The first thing is to get acquainted with the OS and it’s features. That actually didn’t take too long. I’m really pleased with the availability of a full-fledged UNIX console in the OS, so I’m able to leverage all of my linux knowledge. The eye candy and the elegant design of most of the applications really give you quite a difference experience of using the computer than it would be on another OS. And at the end of the day, I guess, that is the most important factor for [...]

Introductory PhoneGap Tutorial for Android

Andrius Miasnikovas — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:02:14 +0000

I haven’t posted in quite a while. Been busy with all the job switching, getting used to Mac things and such. On another topic while cleaning up my hard drive I’m finding various neat stuff, that I forgot about. Will try and share some of it with the rest of you. These are mostly things that you either need or don’t care about at all. One of those things is a screencast that I’ve forgotten I made. It was created for a competition hosted by NetTuts+ and touches on some of the basics of PhoneGap platform. I didn’t actually win and now it’s a shame I remembered it only a few months later, but perhaps it could still be useful [...]

Automatic Web Server Monitoring

Andrius Miasnikovas — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:23:33 +0000

Hi there! Here’s another quick suggestion for all of you out there who have to deal with a lot of web server environments and need to make sure that they’re all alive and responsive. Sure there are all sorts of tools for server monitoring and performance tracking, but I found that most of the time you just need to know if the server is up & running. And of course you should be notified if it’s not. Here’s my short Python script that does just that. You will need to tweak it a little to use in your environment. First of all I’ve set the content threshold to 2000 Bytes which means that the expected length of the page content [...]

Search for Files on Remote FTP Server

Andrius Miasnikovas — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:52:16 +0000

I’ll keep this one short. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always been frustrated about how most FTP clients won’t let you search for files on a remote FTP server. I remember I used some client that had this functionality, but this was quite a while ago so I can’t even remember the name of it. If someone else knows any lightweight tools that let you do that, please leave a comment. Recently I needed to do some quick searches on the servers that I have only FTP access to. And you know what they say… “when you can’t find the right tool for the job – write it yourself” Actually I don’t know if anyone says that but I [...]

Modifying Treepie To Display File Count

Andrius Miasnikovas — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:28:00 +0000

I’ve already talked a bit about managing large amounts of files in my post Disk efficiency when dealing with tons of small files so you can kind of tell that I’m a proponent of having as little files on disk as possible (but not less). In my everyday tasks I’m using this program called Everything by David Carpenter and I suggest you check it out if you don’t know it yet. The concept is simple, but the consequences are immense – the program indexes all the files and folders on all volumes connected to your computer i.e. your hard disk drives, flash drives, cd/dvd-roms, etc. And it tracks the changes so this index is always up-to-date allowing you very fast [...]

Online Tools That Make My Life Easier

Andrius Miasnikovas — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:18:02 +0000

Imagine a situation where you’re sitting in front of a colleague’s computer or one that is publicly used. By definition you’re missing all your favorite tools that you’re used to and you can’t install them even if you wanted to. Here’s a short list of online tools that help me a lot when I’m using a computer other than my own. These do not fully replace the desktop equivalents, but they’re good enough. Though it’s not a list of tools that replace desktop applications, but rather a list of online tools that complement them and some provide functionality that does not exist in desktop based applications. HTML / Javascript http://jsbin.com – this one allows you to write HTML and Javascript [...]

Private Key PFX to/from JKS Conversion Using OpenSSL and Jetty

Andrius Miasnikovas — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:35:46 +0000

Recently I’ve been watching quite a few screencasts which seem to be a really fun way to learn something. This made me want to create something of my own. So for this blog post I’m putting up my first attempts at creating screencasts while trying to explain something useful. When dealing with PKI based application security, one usually encounters different systems on different platforms and making sure they can interact with each other can be quite a hassle. Testing these systems usually means you create you own self-signed private/public key pairs. And of course there are times when for testing purposes you need to convert your private key to another format because you generated it on a different platform or [...]