iWindow - Information with a technical slant

Testing Network Security

2008-04-09T12:44:00.001-06:00

Download Nessus and make sure your setup is really secure. Many compliance consultants use Nessus to perform the audits and re-label the reports. The software is free and the very best on the internet today.

Wordpress Improvements

2008-03-27T10:50:00.001-06:00

http://coalhillmedia.com/tutorials/makewordpressgooglefriendly.php

Wordpress, without any modification, is not exactly Google-friendly - especially if you're talking about duplicate content issues. To get the best search engine rankings, you'll need to make a few modifications. But don't worry, these only take about 10 minutes to put in place.

Dealing With Duplicate Pages

Did you notice how Wordpress organizes your content? It is complete with pages of recent posts, monthly archive pages, and category pages. These pages are full of the exact same content! (And Google hates duplicate content!)

So we want to avoid letting any search engines index those extra pages. To do that, we just have to paste a bit of code into the header.php file. Note that it has to go between the head tags. I've provided the code below:

<?php if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page()){ echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />'; } else { echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';} ?>

To edit your template through the Wordpress admin panel, just click "Presentation" then "Theme Editor." Make sure your current theme is selected and click "Header.php" to edit that file. Now just copy and paste the code and click "Update File."

This code means that only your home page, Wordpress pages, and individual posts get indexed. Your archives and category pages, which are just duplicates, will not be indexed. However, all links will still be followed (a good thing.)

The Title Tag

You don't want the same title tag for each page. The ideal title tag will use the blog post title as the page title, and include the blog name if you wish. To accomplish this, replace your current Title tag with this:

<title><?php wp_title(' '); ?><?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' - '; } ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

The Meta Description Tag

Less important than the Title tag but still worthwhile is the Meta Description tag. It would be best for each page to have a unique description. And the easiest way to do that is by using the Head Meta Description Plugin.

301 Redirects via .htaccess

This is something you should be using on any website, but since Wordpress has tons of pages under various categories, it is very important. The code below needs to be placed in your .htaccess file. You don't need to understand it, you just need to paste it in there.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

The code will redirect any non-www pages to pages with the www, and it will add trailing slashes to all directories. (Trust me, it will help your search engine rankings.)

Disallow Useless Pages via Robots.txt

You'll want to keep the spiders from visiting all your useless pages, like the archives and your feed. This will help with duplicate content issues, and hopefully keep your site out of Google's supplemental results (you don't want to be stuck in there.)

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

Note: That code works if your blog is installed in the root directory. If your blog is at yoursite.com/blog/ you'll need a robots.txt file like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-
Disallow: /blog/search
Disallow: /blog/feed
Disallow: /blog/comments/feed
Disallow: /blog/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /blog/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /blog/*/*/*/trackback/$

Again, don't worry what it means, just put it in your robots.txt file. It's good for you! (Check this out to learn more about robots.txt)

Use a Sitemap

While we're at it, let's talk sitemaps. Having one will help your blog get indexed fully, so it's worth doing. I'd recommend this cool Sitemap Generator plugin to help out.

That's it! Enjoy your improved Google rankings!

Website Archiving

2008-01-14T10:10:00.001-07:00

Bookmarks and favorites are great, but I don’t want to rely on someone maintaining information for me. The main reason I bookmark a site is because it has information that I have found useful and want to reference in the future. Many sites will change their layout or CMS and that will leave me high and dry when trying to revisit information. This lead me to a brainstorm that there needs to be a product that archives a website as opposed to just bookmarking it. Before I write one myself, there are two products worth trying that are free:

www.archive.org

www.zotero.org

I will see if they are the answer to my problems. I would like to have a product that saves information to my personal web server as opposed to a community server since you never know when a company will be bought or will go belly up – leaving me with the same problem I had before with bookmarks that no longer work. I haven’t tried these products yet but I assume they will only be a partial solution.

Install OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on an older Apple Macintosh

2007-10-29T13:26:00.000-06:00

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071029000757347

Run Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) on pre-867MHz systems

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) requires Mac with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 processor running at 867MHz or faster, and will refuse to install on any systems running at a lower clock speed (even dual 800 MHz systems are excluded). However, there's an easy way to trick your lower-than-867 MHz Mac into running Leopard: install the operating system on an external FireWire hard drive using a computer that does meet the minimum clock speed requirements. You can then use that drive to boot a Mac running at less than 867 MHz (see the screenshot below for proof).

Better yet, you can hook a pre-867 MHz Mac up to a Mac that does meet official Leopard requirements and boot it in Target Disk Mode, then install Leopard directly. This should (we haven't yet tested this method) allow you to boot Leopard from the system's internal hard drive.

For more information on installing Leopard on a FireWire drive, see this article.

Obviously, performance for some features will be somewhat sluggish on older processors, but we've already received reports indicating normal operation.

MacFixIt reader Jim writes:

"(I) hooked a Leopard drive to a 533 Mhz G4. It boots and runs fine. I don't know why Apple limited it to 867 or above. Maybe something will show up down the road but so far I don't see any slowdown in speed or any anomalies. QT movies and trailers play, Flip4Mac plays fine. It has only been a short while on it, but so far I don't get why they cut it off where they did."

Change the Internet Explorer Title Bar

2007-10-16T14:56:00.000-06:00

The other day I was asked how to remove the "by Dell" text from the title bar in Internet Explorer.

To Remove a Custom Internet Explorer Window Title

Using Registry Editor, delete the following value in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Window Title

When you delete this value, "Microsoft Internet Explorer" becomes the default window title.

The official instructions from Microsoft are here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176497

Another untested solution is:

Go to Start, choose Run, and type or paste "rundll32 iedkcs32.dll,Clear" without the quotes.

Helpful Python Information

2007-09-28T14:22:00.001-06:00

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/py430/python/

reST to S5 convertor

rst2s5 is a Docutils writer for S5, a Simple Standards-based Slide Show System. This means simple text files with reStructuredText (reST) markup can be converted to nice looking slideshows that can easily be viewed with the webbrowser. See presentation.txt in the archive below for an example and instructions.

It's now part of the official Docutils distribution (starting from version 0.4) please use that version. (Download old version: rst2s5.zip)

Single File Executables

There are several solutions out there, here's the next one...

Based on Pyco (broken link) and py2exe. It is possible to make command line tools or GUI tools. It is realy only one file and it can be run without any installation. It unpacks the files to a temporary directory which is cleaned up afterwards.

Download: py2exe-pyco.zip

Arbitrary file size Hex Editor

YaHEbwinPy - Yet An Other Hex Editor, But Written In Python

Tested with file sizes up to 1267650600228229401496703205376 Bytes (2**100B). Runs on Linux and Windows. Features Undo/Redo, find, replace, copy&paste, save selection, edit devices on WinNT/2k/XP and Linux, decode selected text as Unicode or in a codepage and more. It has a plugin system where Python modules can register additional functions. It nerver loads the entire file, just a few megabytes, which means its capable of opening large files on network drives and such.

Sources: hexedit.zip (130kB, requires: Python 2.3 and wxPython 2.4) Win32 Installer, standalone version: install-YaHEbwinPy-0.7.exe (2.1MB)

Win32 Screensaver

This is a complete rewrite of my old screensaver module. This one is pure Python with the help of ctypes and py2exe. It is intended to make it easy to write windows screensavers in pure Python. Screensavers using the pyscr module can be implemented with ctypes (a little wrapper class around a DC already exits) or win32all. The pyscr_pygame module also gives the opportunity to write the screensaver with pygame.

The Win32 parts are implemented using ctypes.

Requires Python 2.3, ctypes, py2exe. Download archive with the library and examples: win32screensaver-0.3.2.zip.

VNC Viewer

This is a simple VNC viewer implemented in Python, using Twisted and PyGame. Please read the readme.txt in the archive for usage and limitations.

pyvncviewer.zip (18kB)

Samba tunnel over SSH

Note: Newer Putty clients should be able to bind forwarded ports to non-localhost addresses, which makes the tool below obsolete.

It happens that people want to forward Samba (SMB/Windows shared drives) connections though an encrypted SSH connection. The problem is just that one can't tell to Windows on which target port such a connection should be made (it only work on port 139). On the other hand, you can't tell SSH on which interface it should bind it's local ports (only 127.0.0.1 which happens to be used by the local server). SMB_reroute.py solves these two problems. Start with "python SMB_reroute.py username host", enter the SSH password when prompted.

it connects 127.0.0.2:139 (listening) to 127.0.0.1:1390 by forwarding all data between these ports, only local connections are accepted
it starts ssh so that it forwards local connections from 127.0.0.1:1390 to the target host:139

It currently uses "ssh" which can be found in the cygwin distribution, but it should also work with putty. Note that for some reason tunneled SMB connections are slow... maybe because only a TCP conenction is tunneled and o UDP packets that are used for discovery - don't know... There are better ways to securely exchange files between two machines, e.g. with scp the secure copy of ssh.

One can now access the secure remote share with the path "\127.0.0.2". This script is intended to be used by Windows users. On Linux is this hack not needed as the port can be specified as option to the Samba programs.

NSIS Python Plugin

You use the Nullsoft NSIS installer and want some advanced scripting or you're deploying a Python application and want to execute some Python code during setup? Here is a solution. With this NSIS Plugin you can do all this.

Supported commands are eval, exec and execFile. A special module "nsis" is exposed to Python which supports writing to the log, display a message box and get/set the NSIS variables. The win32 parent handle of the installer can also be read so it's open for extensions that use win32all or ctypes.

Download it here: NSIS-Python22.zip (for Python 2.2) NSIS-Python23.zip (for Python 2.3)

Python License.

MySQL table viewer

This is a simple wxPython application. It has a TextField that lets you enter SQL commands that it executes and a ListCtrl to display the results.

Get it here: question.pyw.

Find the Mines

Yup, yet an other minesweeper clone. Here's a pygame version. You may want to delete the highscores file ;-) mines_pyg.zip

Unittest GUI

A simple, not finished but usable, frontend to run unittests. Using wxPython. unittestgui.py

Functional games

Some simple functions written in functional style. functional.py

Befunge Interpreter

You don't know Befunge? Well you missed something :-) It's an esotheric programming language that runs in a two dimensional space. This is an Interpreter written in Python and a unfinished viewer/debugger with pygame. befunge.zip

Here is the home of Befunge: http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge/

Unix Daemon

You need to run a Python script as a daemon? So why don't you take this script, change the logfile location and call your main(). It takes care of the console detachement (double fork) and writes a PID file so that it can be killed. daemon.py

And here is a sample init.d script: daemon. It goes in /etc/init.d with an appropriate name, an then create links in the rc directories, like: ln -s /etc/init.d/daemon /etc/rc.2/S30daemon the location of the directories may vary between Linux distributions. Usualy Sxxname are starter, Kxxname stopper scripts. This one is from Debian.

Observer Pattern

Allways handy. Especialy for GUI programming but not exclusively. observerpattern.py

wget - comand line http tool

2007-09-28T12:08:00.001-06:00

Mastering Wget

by Gina Trapani (http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--mastering-wget-161202.php)

Your browser does a good job of fetching web documents and displaying them, but there are times when you need an extra strength download manager to get those tougher HTTP jobs done.

A versatile, old school Unix program called Wget is a highly hackable, handy little tool that can take care of all your downloading needs. Whether you want to mirror an entire web site, automatically download music or movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly on a slow or intermittent network connection, Wget's for you.

Wget, the "non-interactive network retriever," is called at the command line. The format of a Wget command is:

wget [option]... [URL]...

The URL is the address of the file(s) you want Wget to download. The magic in this little tool is the long menu of options available that make some really neat downloading tasks possible. Here are some examples of what you can do with Wget and a few dashes and letters in the [option] part of the command.

Mirror an entire web site

Say you want to backup your blog or create a local copy of an entire directory of a web site for archiving or reading later. The command:

wget -m http://ginatrapani.googlepages.com

Will save the two pages that exist on the ginatrapani.googlepages.com site in a folder named just that on your computer. The -m in the command stands for "mirror this site."

Say you want to retrieve all the pages in a site PLUS the pages that site links to. You'd go with:

wget -H -r --level=1 -k -p http://ginatrapani.googlepages.com

This command says, "Download all the pages (-r, recursive) on http://ginatrapani.googlepages.com plus one level (--level=1) into any other sites it links to (-H, span hosts), and convert the links in the downloaded version to point to the other sites' downloaded version (-k). Oh yeah, and get all the components like images that make up each page (-p)."

Warning: Beware, those with small hard drives! This type of command will download a LOT of data from sites that link out a lot (like blogs)! Don't try to backup the Internet, because you'll run out of disk space!

Resume large file downloads on a flaky connection

Say you're piggybacking the neighbor's wifi and every time someone microwaves popcorn you lose the connection, and your video download (naughty you!) keeps crapping out halfway through. Direct Wget to resume partial downloads for big files on intermittent connections.

To set Wget to resume an interrupted download of this 16MB "Mavericks Surf Highlights 2006: Wipeouts" short from Google Video, use:

wget -c --output-document=mavericks.avi "http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=qgAAAJCWpcRd5eI2k3sm3LWJZMjLyLFiTxk_KqUrRYbrzLTEw8hwMV30m3MRz6rYMTxGqWIfWMQjNJsP0fNXUMc34jzoPcy6z-qHde5UVD29Po6_9b_-d3J5AQpVROUPRqzkJriangEl2IMkKBJd08Q7TTJIAC_r6XID-fNYPLKHm1KRvx0smOslivNLGmyZsCsZmVNVN0jaw5-dloWtzPlI86zIubh1XvJsTg2u_YaHcaAB&sigh=-BbV2h_bIFVuVg4D-h6MUTxuErM&begin=0&len=139433&docid=6059494448346363884"

(Apologies for the humungous, non-wrapping URL.)

The -c ("continue") option sets Wget to resume a partial download if the transfer is interrupted. You'll also notice the URL is in quotes, necessary for any address with &'s in it. Also, since that URL is so long, you can specify the name of the output file explicitly - in this case, mavericks.avi.

Schedule hourly downloads of a file

The nice thing about any command line script is that it's very easy to automate. For instance, if there was a constantly-changing file that you wanted to download every hour, say, you could use cron or Windows Task Scheduler and Wget to do just that, or if there was a very large file you wanted your computer to fetch in the middle of the night while you slept instead of right this moment when you need all your bandwidth to get other work done. You could easily schedule the Wget command to run at a later time.

As proof of concept, yesterday I scheduled an hourly download of Lifehacker's daily traffic chart to run automatically. The command looked like this:

wget --output-document=traffic_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H).gif "http://sm3.sitemeter.com/rpc/v6/server.asp?a=GetChart&n=9&p1=sm3lifehacker&p2=&p3=3&p4=0&p5=64\%2E249\%2E116\%2E138&p6=HTML&p7=1&p8=\%2E\%3Fa\%3Dstatistics&p9=&rnd=7209"

Notice the use of %Y and %m datetime parameters which result in unique filenames, so each hour the command wouldn't overwrite the file with the same name generated the hour before. Note also that the %'s have to be escaped with a backslash.

Just for fun I threw together a little animated gif of the hourly chart image, that displays the movement of traffic yesterday from 2PM to midnight:

Automatically download music

This last technique, suggested by Jeff Veen, is by far my favorite use of Wget. These days there are tons of directories, aggregators, filters and weblogs that point off to interesting types of media. Using Wget, you can create a text file list of your favorite sites that say, link to MP3 files, and schedule it to automatically download any newly-added MP3's from those sites each day or week.

First, create a text file called mp3_sites.txt, and list URLs of your favorite sources of music online one per line (like http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3 or stereogum.com). Be sure to check out my previous feature on how to find free music on the web for more ideas.

Then use the following Wget command to go out and fetch those MP3's:

wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i mp3_sites.txt

That Wget recipe recursively downloads only MP3 files linked from the sites listed in mp3_sites.txt that are newer than any you've already downloaded. There are a few other specifications in there - like to not create a new directory for every music file, to ignore robots.txt and to not crawl up to the parent directory of a link. Jeff breaks it all down in his original post.

The great thing about this technique is that once this command is scheduled, you get an ever-rotating jukebox of new music Wget fetches for you while you sleep. With a good set of trusted sources, you'll never have to go looking for new music again - Wget will do all the work for you.

Install Wget

Wanna give all this a try? Windows users, you can download Wget here; Mac users, go here. An alternative for Windows users interested in more Linuxy goodness is to download and install the Unix emulator Cygwin which includes Wget and a whole slew of other 'nixy utilities, too.

For the full take on all of Wget's secret options sauce, type wget --help or check out the full-on Wget manual online. No matter what your downloading task may be, some combination of Wget's extensive options will get the job done just right.

Use Apache to Add Code to HTML pages

2007-09-27T16:45:00.001-06:00

Insert Google Analytics

http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~kirill/analytics.html

Here I will present 3 ways how to get Apache to automatically insert the Google Analytics script into everypage on the fly using Apache. This will cause every webpage to get sent to this perl script. This way you don't need to edit any HTML, just add the perl script and every requested HTML page will include the correct code block for tacking users. If there are any performace issues you should use mod_perl
Here is a list of things you'll need before starting:

Linux Server (should work under Windows).
Apache.
Perl installed on said machine.
Some knowledge of Apache so you won't take down your own site.

Method 1 (Not compatible if you want your html code to also be parsed by PHP or something similar.)

How that we have the setup needed here is how to make it work:

Add the following perl (footer.pl) file to your cgi-bin and correct (to represent your google analytics account) the following line:
```
_uacct = "UA-000000-0";
```
You can download footer.pl here: Download
The Perl script does the following things:
1. Reads the HTML file requested by the user through Apache.
2. Finds the best spot to insert the footer and inserts it.
3. Prints the headers and html.
Make sure to 'chmod +rx footer.pl' so apache can execute it.
Add the following lines to your apache.conf file:
```
Action add-footer /cgi-bin/footer.pl  AddHandler add-footer .htm .html
```
You must include a trailing space after the Action command or the path won't get sent correctly to the script.
More help on handlers can be found on Apache's website.

Method 2 (This method won't interfere with anything else and you can add things to the Perl script at a later time.)

Add the following perl (footer.pl) file to your cgi-bin and correct (to represent your google analytics account) the following line:
```
_uacct = "UA-000000-0";
```
You can download footer.pl here: Download
The Perl script does the following things:
1. Reads the file from STDIN that was passed through Apache.
2. Finds the best spot to insert the footer and inserts it.
3. Prints the html back to Apache.
Make sure to 'chmod +rx footer.pl' so apache can execute it.

Add the following lines to your apache.conf file:

LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so
ExtFilterDefine insert-footer cmd="/usr/bin/perl /cgi-bin/footer.pl"
AddOutputFilter insert-footer htm html

You might need to correct the paths to make it work for you. More help on filters can be found on Apache's website.

Method 3 (The fastest and simplest but adds a lot of text to your Apache configuration)

Add the following lines to your apache.conf file:
```
LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so
ExtFilterDefine insert-footer cmd="/bin/sed s/<\/html>/the_footer<\/html>/ig"
AddOutputFilter insert-footer htm html 
```
You might need to correct the paths to make it work for you. You also have to replace $footer by the footer code google provides you. More help on filters can be found on Apache's website.

Conditional comments in HTML

2007-09-27T15:56:00.001-06:00

Explorer 5+ Windows only.

If you have multiple Explorers installed the conditional comments will view each install as the highest installed version (usually IE 6).

Conditional comments only work in Explorer on Windows, and are thus excellently suited to give special instructions meant only for Explorer on Windows. They are supported from Explorer 5 onwards, and it is even possible to distinguish between 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0.

Conditional comments work as follows:

<!--[if IE 6]> Special instructions for IE 6 here <![endif]-->

Their basic structure is the same as an HTML comment (). Therefore all other browsers will see them as normal comments and will ignore them entirely.
Explorer Windows, though, has been programmed to recognize the special <!--[if IE]> syntax, resolves the if and parses the content of the conditional comment as if it were normal page content.
Since conditional comments use the HTML comment structure, they can only be included in HTML files, and not in CSS files. I'd have preferred to put the special styles in the CSS file, but that's impossible. You can also put an entire new <link> tag in the conditional comment referring to an extra style sheet.

Example

Below I added a lot of conditional comments that print out messages according to your Internet Explorer version.

Note however, that if you use multiple Explorers on one computer, the conditional comments will render as if all these Explorer versions are the highest Explorer version available on your machine (usually Explorer 6.0).

Test

Below are a few conditional comments that reveal the Internet Explorer version you're using. If you don't see any, you're not using Internet Explorer.

According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer
According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 7
According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 5 and up
According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer greater than 6

Code

The syntax I use is:

<p><!--[if IE]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 5]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 5<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 5.0]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 5.0<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 5.5]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 5.5<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 6]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 6<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if IE 7]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 7<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if gte IE 5]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer 5 and up<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if lt IE 6]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer lower than 6<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if lte IE 5.5]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer lower or equal to 5.5<br /> <![endif]--> <!--[if gt IE 6]> According to the conditional comment this is Internet Explorer greater than 6<br /> <![endif]--> </p>

Note the special syntax:

gt: greater than
lte: less than or equal to

CSS hack?

Are conditional comments CSS hacks? Strictly speaking, yes, since they can serve to give special style instructions to some browsers. However, they do not rely on one browser bug to solve another one, as all true CSS hacks do. Besides, they can be used for more than CSS hacks only (though that rarely happens).

Since conditional comments are not based on a browser hack but on a deliberate feature I believe they are safe to use. Sure, other browsers could implement conditional comments, too (though as yet none have done so), but they're unlikely to react to the specific query <!--[if IE]>.

I use conditional comments, though sparingly. First I see if I can find a real CSS solution to an Explorer Windows problem. If I can't, though, I don't hesitate to use them.

Comment tag

A reader told me Explorer (Windows and Mac) supports the (non-standard) <comment> tag.

<p>This is <comment>not</comment> Internet Explorer.</p>

This is notInternet Explorer.

This tag might come in handily if you want to use tags or styles for all non-Explorer browsers. Unfortunately these situations are rather scarce, especially since both Explorer Windows and Mac support this tag and you usually want to serve special content or style to only one of them.

HowTo: including html in Java Server Faces (JSF) pages

2007-09-10T22:06:00.000-06:00

http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/java/jsf/include-html.jspx

Including HTML

You would have thought that including one page in another was a simple thing to do. You would be greatly mistaken if you held this notion for JSF (Java Server Faces). A number of querks with the way JSF is integrated with JSP make includes surprisingly difficult. Actually that's not strictly true. Includes are quite easy as long as you only want to include verbatim HTML with no JSF tags which I think is fairly unlikely.

The problem is a life-cycle one. If you want to mix HTML / JSP and JSF in the included page all the HTML has to be inside f:verbatim tags or it will appear below the results of the JSF tags. Basically, what is happening is the JSF tags are getting processed and output before any of the JSP tags (which includes passing though the HTML).

The solution is to wrap any HTML in f:verbatim tags but this doesn't work very well, if at all, if you are using XML JSP (files with a .jspx extension) because the page has to be valid XML and generally just wrapping f:verbatim round the (X)HTML will break that constraint.

Solution One

One solution is to try and translate the HTML into JSF tags which is a painful job at best because h:panelGrid and h:panelGroup don't support most of the useful shortcuts you can use when developing HTML (for instance align="center" on a td - see another article for a solution to this one).

Solution Two

The other solution is a complete hack but it works. Place your HTML in a CDATA section which is itself inside a f:verbatim tags thus: <![CDATA[<p>Some HTML</p>]]>. Not pretty but it may be a quicker way to develop a site.

Redirect tcsh output for - stdout stderr

2007-07-30T08:57:00.000-06:00

My team seems to always be using diffent unix shells for this and that. The other day a collegue of mine wanted to redirect output from her csh shell ( actually tcsh ) so I thought I would put it here as a keepsake. I don't care what shell you use as long as you are productive. I have samples of .login and .cshrc if you need a template to get started with. My personal favorite ksh and bash so I have those as well. Put a comment here and I give pass them along to you.

(cmd > /dev/tty) >& /dev/null

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

Dynamically load Python Modules

2007-01-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

Memory is a terrible thing to waste. Dynamically load your Python modules with this trick. It is usefull when you don't know how your script is going to be used. Use it to initiate special functionality. Post a comment if you would like some sample code.

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/436873

Video Codecs and Other Video Apps

2007-01-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

I got a call the other day from someone looking to manipulate some videos in Windows XP and Vista in different formats. Some how we got started on WMV and various wrappers that have been seen. Here are the results from that search. We were talking about audio and video splitting.

So you installed Vodia and then wondered why you needed it for such a primative wrapper. Remove Vodei here: http://www.vladd44.com/video/vodei.php

GraphEdit: http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/showsoftware_graphedit_141.html#downloads

GraphEdit Audio Filters: http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/audio-extract.htm

GSpot: http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Virtualdub: http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

Plot kit for Javascript charts

2006-10-24T12:18:00.000-06:00

I have been looking around for a good way to plot charts with Javascript. This seems to be a good chioce. If you would like to see my sample code leave a comment here and I'll give you a link.

http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/