Microsoft folks relaunched the Internet Explorer Developer Center. Too much noise about Firefox made it.
You can find this at the relatively easy to remember URL http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie and is a portal for developers using Internet Explorer technologies.
There is a Visual Studio 2005 Beta Documentation online. There they come… and JScript 8.0 is out there: check how this scripting language fits in the .NET platform.
It seems that Struts 2.0 (code-name Shale) is going to be based on JSF. Here you can read a detailed proposal. It’s not surprising as Craig McClanahan created Struts and is a co-spec leader of JSR-127 (JSF). And he has spoken out about the pros of using both technologies together.
HTTP GET/POST
When I interview somebody for a web-related technical position, I use to ask what the differences between GET and POST are. I have heard almost all creative (but wrong) answers about that, but very few guys have answered it quiet well.
Besides the HTTP specification where it is stated that the capital difference between those methods (GET is semantically idempotent, POST isn’t) and a lot of consequences, fortunately today I found an article (a finding they call) from the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) that will help to understand those consequences about the intrinsic difference by exposing well documented examples as to reinforce the specification points regards this topic. The whole TAG findings list is also available.
Architecture of the World Wide Web as a W3C Proposed Recommendation
These guys stated that the Architecture of the World Wide Web was a Proposed Recommendation. This is a very well documented reference for those who want to get the benefits of a number of recommendations from the W3C on their web sites or applications. This is also a TAG work.
XML Binary Characterization Use Cases
A lot have been said about the overhead XML impose to the communication layer in a number of architectures. Well, W3C is working on an initiative that goals in provide an alternative serialization method in order to alleviate this issue. Currently they are grouping all the different XML use cases, and ask the community to provide some cases they are missing. Personally, I found that they miss EDI/XML and ASN.1 XML use cases. I already emailed this observation.
We should promote its use among our peers…
The World Wide Web Consortium today released XML Schema Second Edition as a W3C Recommendation in three parts: Part 0: Primer, Part 1: Structures and Part 2: Datatypes. The second edition is not a new version; it corrects errors found in the XML Schema first edition. A modular approach well-suited to distributed applications, XML schemas define shared markup vocabularies and the structure of XML documents using those vocabularies. Visit the XML home page.
Double data rate (DDR) memory is coming. DDR2 is the name given to the latest memory technology used in IBM NetVista desktop PCs and IBM eServer xSeries servers.
The primary benefit is the potential for faster throughput. Currently DDR2 operates at data transfer rates starting at 400 MHz (the upper limit for DDR) and 533 MHz. Support for 667 MHz and 800 MHz transfer rate is expected in 2005. In addition, the DDR2 improves the power consumption of the DIMM because it works on a lower voltage. DDR operates at a range of 2.5 to 2.8 V, whereas DDR2 only requires 1.8 V.
More about this is the original article.
From SourceForge rmanocha let us know the following:
PopGavaMail is a POP3 proxy server for the famous Gmail webmail service. It opens up a port on your localhost which can then be connected to read your mail from your favorite mail client. It uses the g4j library to talk with Gmail. Release 0.1.3 bring major feature enhancements to PopGavaMail. Primary among them is the option to specify a port to start the server on. Other options have been added too. Read the Release notice at: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=120786&release_id=278083 You can download the Package from: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=120786 On a side note, I have started writing the IMAP server. Some very initial code has been written. If you are interested, you can check it out at: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gavamail/imapGmail/ If you think you can help me, please contact me(rmanocha@users.sf.net). Best rmanocha
Pero también recibir -a menos que uno tenga o bien, un serio problema de soberbia o una autoestima increíblemente baja- es súper agradable. Claramente también te sientes muy contento, muy pleno? sobretodo porque te sientes muy rico. No tanto por el detalle o el regalo, sino porque sabes que cuentas con un amigo. El detalle puede ser desde una sonrisa o una amabilidad que te desagobie de alguna faena cansada y aburrida. También puede ser un regalo más concreto y físico. Cualquier cosa dada y recibida así, sin más protocolo que el gusto de compartir y ver a tu amigo contento es motivo de celebración. La amistad existe, y yo lo considero un tipo de amor. Y por ello y sin duda, es algo que hay que celebrar como lo más intenso y positivo que uno puede encontrarse por su paso por esta vida.
Ayer Javier -djleon- , así como lo describimos, me regaló un celular activado y con crédito (incluso con la batería ya cargada todo un día). Yo había dejado este asunto del celular a un lado durante mucho tiempo. Pero claro que me hacía falta, con una esposa y una hija de las que soy responsable, seguro que necesito estar 100% comunicado a toda hora. No sólo eso, sino también a nivel profesional cada vez era mucho más indispensable un instrumento de comunicación como ese.
Muchas gracias, Javier. Pero sobretodo gracias por ser un amigo y saber serlo de la mejor manera.
There are vulnerabilities on both, the dark and the bright sides (Who are on the bright side?). It’s software. The difference resides on how long does a company or an open source group have taken security for real.
Martin has reported a vulnerability in Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain knowledge of sensitive information.
Read the original Secunia - Latest Secunia Security Advisories post.
Well, I think Doom is the one and only computer game I played, and played too much. I can’t wait for the premiere.
Lord Prox writes "Doom: The motion picture is now in production from Universal Pictures for a release date of August 5, 2005. According to IMDB the cast includes The Rock, Rosamund Pike, Razaaq Adoti, Ben Daniels, and Karl Urban. The plot and setting is right from the game."
Read the original Slashdot post.
US presidential candidate John Kerry has received the official backing of the influential Washington Post.
Today (although I’m sure it isn’t a very new concept) I discovered what is known for podcasting. Here you can find a very illustrative guide to podcast.
The simple idea behind it is to post MP3 as a RSS 2.0 enclosure. A very cool thing about postcasting is that it allows individuals to publish (podcast) radioshows, that interested listeners can subscribe to. Before podcasting you could of course record a radio show and put it on your website, but now people can automatically receive new shows, without having to go to a specific site and download it from there. Or instead of remembering a conversation you can podcast it.
As almost any bad idea about security, this one also comes from the Bush Administration: Promoting RFID Passports. A RFID passport would broadcast your ID. It will be readable by any RFID reader. Read more about it on this post of the Bruce Schneier blog.
Thanks Arcadi for the typo observation.
This has been published by The SANS Institute.
A new Critical Vulnerability has been detected over IE 6.0 + XP SP2. One of Microsoft's patches from last week already has been worked around by hackers, at least on some platforms.
HIGH: Internet Explorer Drag and Drop Vulnerability
Affected:
Internet Explorer 6.0 on fully patched XP SP2
Description: A variation of the "drag and drop" vulnerability has been reported that may be exploited to compromise a Windows client via a malicious web page or an HTML email. The exploitation proceeds as follows:
(a) A specially crafted HTML "style" sheet is used to access a local folder on a Windows client.
(b) An IMG element with its "src" set to a filename (without any extension) is dragged and dropped to the local folder opened in step (a). IE's cumulative patch MS04-038 released last week prevents an IMG element with its src set to an executable file from being dragged.
However, the patch does not prevent the "drag and drop" of an image with the src attribute set to other file formats such as pdf, xml etc.
Further, if no extension is used for the IMG element's src file, IE automatically creates a file with the file type extension after the drag and drop operation. Thus, an attacker can create a malicious file with a ".htm" extension on the client's local file system.
(c) The malicious HTML file is invoked via the HTML Help ActiveX control (hhctrl.ocx). This leads to execution of arbitrary code on the client system.
A proof-of-concept exploit has been publicly posted. The PoC exploit demonstrates how to use "ADODB.recordset" object to write arbitrary files on the client's local system. Although this exploit requires user interaction, it may be possible to rewrite the exploit such that no user interaction is required. Note that the Akak Trojan exploited the earlier variation of this vulnerability in the wild.
Status: Microsoft has not confirmed. An unofficial fix has been posted that sets the kill bit for the "Shell.Explorer" ActiveX control. This control is responsible for displaying the folders in IE. Setting the kill bit prevents displaying any folders, and prevents exploitation via the published attack vector. The fix can be downloaded from: http://www.pivx.com/research/freefixes/neutershellexplorer.reg
References:
Posting by http-equiv
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/ntbugtraq/2004-q4/0078.html
Posting by Thor Larholm
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-10/0754.html
SecurityFocus BID
Regarding the presidential election I’ve found this collection of cartoons from Electoral Vote. I think you will enjoy them as I did. BTW, I read Electoral Vote on a daily basis (through its RSS feed), and like it a lot. On Friday, at the bottom of their daily post-article they published a very simple, but informative, sensibility analysis about the undecided voters and their impact on the election result. In the same article they talk about the Supreme Court and the age of its members and the high probability of the vacancies within the next four years. They comment about the appointments that the next president will make to the SC. Just think about the appointments Bush have make to the appellate courts…
Some of these 100 facts feed my opposition to Bush reelection. I support 100% the opinion stated at the bottom of the article.
Well, I thought I will never blog about XP SP2. Whether it has slowed down (dramatically) my PC or not, I think is a matter of coincidence of configuration plus software installed on my PC, I need more data in order to blog something worthy to read. But, this is a fact and a guess (I don’t think it’s a very clever one, all software have bugs [both from design and implementation]) I did some moths ago: SP2 won’t alleviate all the problems MS claims to. On Wednesday, eWeek published an article letting us to know some flaws in it.
There is a huge discussion about XP SP2, so I won’t enlarge it anymore. But we should know that according to Microsoft, there have been 106 million copies of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) distributed since August 6.
I really like this company.
In first report as public company, search giant posts third-quarter profit of $52 million, thanks to booming online-ad revenue.
Read the original article at CNET News.com
The FDA has approved for medical use the world's first implantable radio frequency identification microchip for use on humans.
About the size of a grain of rice, VeriChip cannot be seen by the human eye and contains a unique 16-digit verification number that is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the insertion site. The number links to the database via encrypted Internet access.
Graham Hamilton blogged about this topic. His answer is no –at least considering the multithreading techniques available today–, but we should use events.
Here at JackBe we are developing a new version of our JackBuilder, a RAD for the development of JackBe-based web applications. The GUI is 100% browser based, built in JavaScript and DHTML. Some days ago, I was considering whether to promote more multithreading within our tool or to stay event driven. With the ridiculous threading support of this platform (there are two ways of generate more than one thread, and no way to lock them at all) of course we remain event driven. Although we have a multithread tool for the runtime, in order to send a number of requests concurrently to the server (we call it JBPacemaker), the responses are rendered by the browser inside the threading model that it has to attend them. The problem arises when a JackBe programmer uses two different JBPacemakers and happens that the response code within that document affects the same object within the original document. But this is a platform lack, it is so much event driven that we are very exposed to any race condition raised by quasi-concurrent responses.
Great work, absolute success. Just enjoy the fact: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Mauricio Castro let me know about an Open Letter to President Bush on U.S. Economic Policy. It is already signed by two Nobel laureates among 113 Business and Economics emeritus professors from a number of the most important schools along USA. It’s a great letter that everybody, at least in USA, should read.
Craig McClanahan the creator of Struts and co-specification lead of JSF talks in his
Two other worthyreadings about this topic are:
Apache Wiki entryabout StrutsMoreAboutJSF.
It's an old friend but, on some rainy days, I like to see this identity a lot of times. It's very cool that Google Calculator know how to calculate it.
Ya es vieja conocida, pero siempre es grato ver esta identidad reconocida por Google Calculator.
Dawid Kurzyniec has announced that he has written a backport of JSR 166 to Java 1.4.
"I am happy to announce availability of a backport of java.util.concurrent API to Java 1.4. The backport is based on sources from JSR 166 CVS repository (September 2004), and dl.util.concurrent 1.3.4. The backport is nearly complete; unsupported functionality is limited mostly to the following classes: 1) requiring explicit JVM support (e.g. nanosecond clock), 2) some non-essential functions described as "designed primarily for use in monitoring in system state, not for synchronization control", 3) functionality that would affect performance, or 4) functionality that would require development of substantial amount of new code."
Hace unos días llegaron Juan y Fabiola, dos de mis mejores amigos a México. Léase este primer párrafo a manera de resumen. Pasaron 7 años fuera del país: sus 7 años de matrimonio. Durante este tiempo él estudió una maestría y ella terminó su carrera. Después trabajaron unos años en NY. Hubo visitas varias y recíprocas. Entre otras pudimos ir juntos a ver todo el Anillo del Nibelungo al MET en una semana muy intensa. Además de México, los Sadurní pudieron visitar algunos otros países en suertudos viajes que se echaron en los pasaportes. Sin embargo, antes de llegar a México, pasaron por más de 30 países en un viaje de 7 meses, ese detalle tampoco puede pasar desapercibido en este post (aunque no es, ni de broma, el tema del mismo). Sí, todos podemos caer en la tentación de juntar tanto 7 y restar 111. Está bien, si tienes esa obsesión, venga: tienes todo el derecho de jugar con lo que tú gustes. Pero mejor, entremos en materia.
Llegaron y reflexiono sobre la ausencia de unos amigos y la experiencia de tenerlos cerca, aquí, a todas horas. Sin duda, todo ser humano relativamente inteligente aprende a adaptarse a cualquier pérdida. Finalmente hace 7 años todos sufrimos de ellos. En un sentido, perdíamos a unos amigos. Claro que no se tome literal, por favor. No se pierde en todos los sentidos, pero sí en el sentido de la convivencia diaria o quasidiaria, en ver crecer y vencer obstáculos a tus amigos y estar ahí por si algún hombro se requiere. Y verdad es que la amistad se cultiva con la convivencia, sin duda alguna. Algo más, aprendí que yo soy un amigo muy distante en la distancia: no escribo con frecuencia. De hecho, escribo ridículamente poco.
Juan y Fabiola, como buenos amigos, entendieron esa parte de mí y eso, por supuesto que se los agradezco mucho. Hace 7 años (y un mes) se casaban y Juan era muy adelantado en ese terreno que el resto de nosotros. Ahora, ellos siguen sin hijos: han sabido disfrutar su pareja envidiablemente. Sin embargo, muchos de nosotros además de casados ya somos padres. Ellos están en proceso de mejorar su actitud ante esa realidad. Están en proceso de comprender que la vida pasa y que las etapas que nos hacen ser quienes somos pasan y más vale aprovecharlas en su momento lo más y mejor posible, para aprender lo que está ahí dispuesto a ser asimilado, a ser parte de uno mismo. Y entre esas etapas está la de que sus amigos son padres y aman a sus hijos. Ahora bien, está claro que vamos a platicar mucho de cómo es que uno termina amando a sus propios hijos. De hecho, ese tema será materia de otro post, pero sobretodo de conversaciones, que las anticipo, muy interesantes con mis amigos.
Regresan y la verdad que uno no lo cree o por lo menos uno tarda en darse cuenta de las consecuencias que eso significa. Hoy es sábado, ya entró la nochecita y sé que ellos están aquí. Casi siento que es fantasmagórico creer que tendremos el tiempo de cenar y pasar mucho tiempo juntos esta o cualquier otra noche. Durante 7 años los encuentros se sabían casi únicos en esa visita. Uno se acostumbra. Y quizá yo sea quien más lo pueda sentir de todos los amigos que Juan y Fabiola quieren más. ¿Por qué? Pues porque por mucho, y a diferencia de todos los demás amigos muy queridos de ellos, la mayor parte del tiempo en que hemos sido amigos ha sido en este mood de visitas express, de vacaciones volando.
Claro que ahora viene un periodo de aprender a compartir mucho nuestro tiempo y eso me emociona. Cuando un par de amigos regresan, sabes que no eres el mismo. No se es el mismo, más allá de la parte sentimental, que no negamos que importa muchísimo (uno está contento de pronto no más así, porque hay una realidad ahí que te pone de buenas, en medio del tráfico o de lo que sea), porque uno, como diría Borges, está hecho de tiempo. Y cuando amigos están ahora disponibles para compartir con uno, pues sabemos que nuestro tiempo, que es la vida, será distribuido de forma diferente. Sabemos que nos vamos a nutrir mutuamente, que vamos a reír mutuamente y que nos vamos a re-conocer mutuamente. Ese periodo de re-conocimiento creo que es de las más emocionantes. Claramente uno tiene expectativas de cómo esos amigos han crecido y tienes ganas de disfrutar eso, porque quizá estuviste lejos cuando tus amigos fueron dando esos "estirones". Y lo mismo, uno se siente más grande, más fuerte, más ser humano y quiere ofrecerle esos "bienes" a los que más quieres, a estos amigos que regresan y cambian en algún porcentaje importante tu horizonte.
Y si no ha quedado claro, lo que este texto ha querido decir en cada una de sus sílabas es que les damos la bienvenida en el corazón y en el espacio a Juan y a Fabiola, que se queden mucho tiempo por aquí y que quiero que reciban un abrazo que por lo menos dure 7 días seguidos para comunicar no con palabras todo el gusto que nos da que estén por aquí de vuelta y lo mucho que los queremos.
I think that it's very interesting, whether you like Microsoft (its products or strategies) or not, to know the compensation of the top executives there.
Now, we should understand some Ballmer's scenes and dances : those numbers (more than) justify so.
Four months ago, this news title was shocking. Was this for real? Have you heard recently about it?
NYT: Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft. "Google is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers."
Now my feed is published in a number of formats. It was possible because of FeedBurner.Please update your subscription to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gustavo. Do not take this new URL as my blog home page (it remains the same), it's just the feed for syndication. By the way, if you don't know what syndication is or RSS, you should read about it and get some RSS or Atom reader or aggregator.
Anonymous commented that (s)he couldn't subscribe to my feed because (her)his reader didn't support Atom, now this problem is knocked.
It's very common that whenever you need to synchronize on a String value (for example, a username) you must synchronize on a common single object for all the intances of Strings that are Object.equals(Object) among them (you need to synchronize concurrent access to the system for the same user). Also it's very common to choose this common single object as the value of a Hashtable with the keySet being the String values.
Lets code it:
This won't work because if two thread with the same username has just one line of difference they could return different "common" objects. The following doesn't work either for the same reason. Two different threads with the same value can enter into the if.
So it seems that the only solution is to synchronize the whole method, whether on the lockMap object or on the instance of our code (suppose it's a singleton). The code should be something like:
And you maybe ask: what's the problem here? Well, the problem is that in some point of our system we are synchronizing (pausing) all threads when we just wanted to pause the threads that have the same username value. And we are doing this with all the users that want to use the system. So we are in a bottleneck scenario, so the problem here is performance.
So, what to do? Well, for a very unknown reason there is a String method that is almost unknown among all Java developers. This method have been in the String class at least since JDK 1.1 (but I'm almost sure I saw it in the very old 1.0.2, but at the moment of writing this post, this version wasn't available in the Archive: Java Technology Products Download page) The method documentation says
Returns a canonical representation for the string object.
A pool of strings, initially empty, is maintained privately by the class String.
When the intern method is invoked, if the pool already contains a string equal to this String object as determined by the equals(Object) method, then the string from the pool is returned. Otherwise, this String object is added to the pool and a reference to this String object is returned.
It follows that for any two strings s and t,
s.intern() == t.intern()is true if and only if s.equals(t) is true.
All literal strings and string-valued constant expressions are interned. String literals are defined in §3.10.5 of the Java Language Specification
Returns:a string that has the same contents as this string, but is guaranteed to be from a pool of unique strings.
So, we should code as the following:
I used this aproximation about three years ago on an entry point of a online e-banking application, and worked quite well. Now, looking in the web about this solution I found that this was the topic of the Question of the week Number 158 of the developers.sun.com more or less 30 weeks ago.
According to this article from CNet News, Firefox is drawing fans away from Microsoft IE. The most significant numbers are:
"The percentage of visitors to e-commerce and corporate sites that used Firefox or another Mozilla browser grew to 5.2 percent in September, from 3.5 percent in June 2004. Meanwhile, Microsoft's share of the users shrank from 95.5 percent in June to 93.7 percent in September, according to the company [WebSideStory]."
"W3Schools.com, a Web development tutorial site found that Mozilla-based browsers were used by 18 percent of its visitors in September, up from 8 percent in January. Internet Explorer use dropped to 75 percent from 84 percent in the same period.
Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors with the Firefox and Mozilla browsers jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, up from 8 percent in January."
Actually, I like the W3Schools.com statistics about the browser market share. But it lacks of market, sites and web apps segmentations.
Todd Berman posted this blog and I wanted to link it here. To be honest I found it not just funny but also literal.
For those who have a Gmail account, I just found Gmail Notifier and it works just fine. It seems no to be listed in the Google Labs page.
Imaginemos a una madre de familia haciendo que diariamente todos sus hijos digan al unísono algo muy agradable a su padre con una invitación del estilo: "Todos digan: te amamos mucho, papá", justo cuando el papá llega a desayunar. Ahora añadamos a la escena el hecho de que el papá se la cree y de hecho realmente disfruta de que los niños hagan ese esfuerzo, aunque realmente como que los niños no hagan el esfuerzo de aprenderse exactamente las palabras que deben decir en ese momento. Pero eso no importa, el papá se la cree y realmente se siente amado por sus hijos.
Ok, ahora comparemos eso al hecho semanal de un sacerdote que dice en muchos momentos de la Misa: "Respondemos todos: Bendito seas por siempre, Señor". Imagínense qué clase de deidad debiera ser para creersela y pensar que está cool que todos repitan así la liturgia. Pues esa es la clase de deidad que promueve el catolicismo... o por lo menos un buen número de sacerdotes católico. Sinceramente me pregunto qué crerán los sacerdotes que gana para su dios y su gloria el hecho de que todos repitan después de él la frase correcta. Claramente es un asunto religioso, esto es, la que gana ahí es la religión y con ello el fortalecimiento del vínculo entre la conciencia y los estatutos morales que rigen los valores de esa religión. Pero la pregunta persiste: ¿qué tiene que ver una religión con una deidad? ¿qué podríamos saber de una deidad a través de religiones o ministros de ese calibre?
Sin duda, un asunto penoso. Sobretodo si se reflexiona sobre los elementos tan mezquinos con los que se amarran a las conciencias de los hombres y las mujeres que caen en ese trinomio culpa-arrepentimiento-perdón.
Todo Rey de JackBe es, por definición, un Rey Mago.
La pregunta persiste: ¿tenemos a Melchor o a Gaspar? Baltazar sin duda no coincide con nuestro Rey.
Sin embargo, ¿existía un cuarto Rey Mago que no venía del Oriente sino de Escandinavia?, ¿acaso es posible un Rey Mago bárbaro?
Tal como Juan Román informó al mundo, finalmente empezaré mi tesis de nuevo. Es la tercera vez que la empiezo y, aunque sea un lugar común, la verdad sí me gustaría que esta fuera la vencida. No me importa a qué dioses de la retórica me acerque, pero sí quiero terminarla.
Tal como Gustavo Preciado sugirió con toda intensión, Gabriel López Calva me guiará en este arduo camino. Es justamente porque él me la dirigirá que confío más en que yo sí la acabe. No tanto porque los anteriores asesores no hayan hecho un excelente trabajo (Grabinsky y Alfaro-González), sino que la neta el compromiso moral que adquiero con Gabriel es superlativo. Básicamente sé que le va a dedicar tiempo y sé sus niveles de compromiso, sé que está en su último año de doctorado y seguro tendrá una presión bien perra. Entonces claramente hacer que él invierta un poco de su tiempo y yo no responder como debo, sí sería de lo más mezquino. Así pues, supongo que la motivación la tengo de sobra.
Para empezar, tengo que leer casi toda la primera parte del Nocedal para diciembre. Así que tengo mucho que estudiar. La idea de la tesis es muy simple, entender los algoritmos y ver la forma de diseñar (y yo creo que también algo de implementar) alguna arquitectura flexible y altamente configurable para los solvers.
Ahora bien, sobre el lenguaje ya veremos en qué lo hacemos... una opción es, sin duda, C# y en ese caso el post de Juan tendrá sentido; sin embargo Java 5.0 también es un candidato fuerte. Más aún, si realmente quisiéramos montarnos en el Access Grid, entonces tendría que programar algo en Python.
Recently Alex Mancilla found, as long as I know, the best articles and sugar tools about JavaScript. Check them out in the JavaScript section of this page.
