gregs

I took it

gregs — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:07:40 +0000

Now you should too!

VMWare and keyboard input

gregs — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:07:03 +0000

This morning I fired my Windows XP VM on my mac and my keyboard input simply stopped working. After a couple of VM reboots, which had no effect, I did some googling. The first result suggested typing a few commands to determine what had disabled it:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

$ ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput
| "IOConsoleUsers" = ({"kCGSSessionSecureInputPID"=177,"kCGSSessionLoginwindowSafeLogin"=No,"kCGSSessionAuditIDKey"=0,"kCGSessionLoginDoneKey"=Yes,"kCGSSessionSystemSafeBoot"=No,"kCGSSessionOnConsoleKey"=Yes,"kCGSSessionUserIDKey"=501,"kSCSecuritySessionID"=11622192,"kCGSSessionUserNameKey"="gregstewart","kCGSSessionGroupIDKey"=20,"kCGSSessionConsoleSetKey"=0,"kCGSSessionIDKey"=256,"kCGSessionLongUserNameKey"="User"})
$ ps auxwwww | grep 177
user 177 7.8 9.2 652520 192788 ?? S 10:51pm 59:09.22 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -psn_0_110619
user 1155 0.0 0.0 599820 464 s001 S+ 10:44am 0:00.00 grep 177

According to the post the application that was blocking it was FireFox. "kCGSSessionSecureInputPID"=177 is the info you need to look for, where in my case 177 was the number I needed to use in the next command. Incredulous as I was, I closed FireFox and hey presto keyboard input was working again.

Hopefully this post will help others.

AJAX calls and expired sessions

gregs — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:12:44 +0000

I have been updating a bunch of code recently to make use of the new features in Prototype 1.6 and one of the great additions in this release was the introduction of Automatic JavaScript response evaluation. This allowed me to improve on my session checking code without having to fuff around with the response information sent back to the client. The problem was with XHR requests: i.e. if the user initiated such a request when his session had expired, then usually the response would fail or worse just hang.

The snippet below shows my new session checking code.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

The trick is to intercept the call when you do your session checking at the back end. Let's say you have a fuseaction called login.login (see below and yes this is fusebox 3 :S) where you display the login form when a user is not logged in, this is where I inserted the check for an XHR request, by looking at the http headers sent along with the request. The key here is a new header attribute passed in with Prototype "X-Requested-With". If this attribute exists then I know it's an XHR request and I can create a custom JSON header with an error struct that holds a key called session with a value of timeout. All I then need to do is encode the struct as JSON and pass that encoded struct back to the browser.

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CODE:

"login">
request = GetHttpRequestData()/>
(attributes.request.headers,"X-Requested-With")>
"false">
"attributes.jsonObj" default="#CreateObject('component','com.jehiah.json')#"/>
"error" default="#StructNew()#"/>
['session']='timeout'/>
(attributes,"jsonObj")>
"X-JSON" value="#trim(attributes.jsonObj.encode(error))#" />
(session,'login')>
login = session.login/>
"attributes.login" default=""/>
xfa.submitform='index.cfm?fuseaction=login.processlogin';
"#affiliate('dsp_login.cfm')#"/>

Now let's jump back to the JavaScript code and take a look at the onComplete function again:

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

onComplete : function(transport,json)
{
if(json && json['session'])
{
setSessionExpired();
} else {
//Code to run when the request has completed
}
}

If there's a JSON object and it has a key of session then I call my setSessionExpired function which redirects the users. Now the json session key only exists in these situations since the call normally just passes back the result of the call.

Goosh

gregs — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:43:15 +0000

The unofficial Google Shell... I like it!

Reflow

gregs — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:27:42 +0000

Or more appropriately what is it? Fascinating...

IIS virtualhosts and SSL

gregs — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:09:04 +0000

For posterity, if you are configuring several websites, that use the same IP/port combination for SSL and you are using host headers to identify them, then you'll need to follow these steps, particularly this one here. Always strikes me as odd that when you basically have everything in a GUI, for the final step you have to crak open the command line. Especially when you consider that you don't need to do anything for multiple hosts on port 80.

Embedded images an IE work around

gregs — Mon, 19 May 2008 02:13:04 +0000

A while back I posted about using the data:image/jpeg;base64 to directly embed the image in to the source attribute of an image tag, however this did not work with IE. Today I stumbled across this JavasScript solution. Certainly an option, though in my case it was overkill, however I thought others might find it useful.

Restricting FTP passive ports

gregs — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:18:16 +0000

After a full day of messages going backwards and forwards between myself and our firewall admins, here's a gem of a post with a script to restrict the port range used by passive FTP on Windows 2003 server (as well as telling Windows Firewall to leave those ports open). Who would have thought securing FTP would be so involved...

Bad Network Solutions, bad

gregs — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Courtesy of Slashdot, news that Network Solutions are front running domain names. I don't care much for their response that this is to protect us, the customer, from evil do-ers. Especially when they charge a premium ($34.99) for their domain names, whereas services like Go Daddy offer them for $9.99. Way to go Network Solutions!!

Happy New Year…

gregs — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:46:44 +0000

... to one and all.

New year, new look, search engine friendly URLs, fresh apache 2 install, ditto for MySQL. Add to that an additional 20% of RAM (thank you Linode!!), all in all a good start to the new year, promises to be a good one.