Cross posted to Molecular Voices. Please comment there. Little strings of text are big business – both publicly and inside the corporate firewall. As we all know, Twitter is pretty big – TV and radio ads for major companies mention their Twitter sites and even business cards reference Twitter URLs nowadays. But Twitter cannot be … Continue reading Microblogging inside the Firewall
Running Ubuntu in VMWare
VMWare is a leading (if not the leading) virtualization solution. Unfortunately, it is also proprietary software, which means that distributions tend not to care too much about it (and in my opinion, rightfully so!). My employer is one such company that uses VMWare, and it recently instituted a policy that all VMs must have VMWare … Continue reading Running Ubuntu in VMWare
oEmbed
oEmbed is a relatively simple concept, which can be basically thought of as hyperlinking to the next level. According to oembed.com: “oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user … Continue reading oEmbed
Install JBoss 4.2 on Centos/RHEL 5
I was recently tasked with installing JBoss 4.2 on Centos/RHEL 5. I found the experience remarkably difficult, so I figured I should share it for my own future reference, and hopefully to also save the sanity of whatever other poor souls are tasked with the same project. Start off with RHEL 5 or Centos 5 … Continue reading Install JBoss 4.2 on Centos/RHEL 5
Compression (deflate) and HTML, CSS, JS Minification in ASP.NET
As I’ve already demonstrated, I like performance. So I cache and compress a lot. When I was put onto an ASP.NET project at work, I obviously wanted to optimize the site, so here’s what I did. Taking some hints from Y! Slow, I decided I wanted to: Get rid of all the MS AJAX/toolkit javascript, … Continue reading Compression (deflate) and HTML, CSS, JS Minification in ASP.NET
Hibernate Deep Deproxy
A common problem faced with using ORMs that use lazy loading is that the objects returned by the ORM contain (obviously) lazy loading references, so that you need an ORM session to access those objects. For example, if you have a “Person” class, that contains a “mother” property, when you do “person.getMother()”, the ORM will … Continue reading Hibernate Deep Deproxy
EhCache implementation of OpenJPA caching
I usually use Hibernate, which supports a number of caching implementations (such as EhCache, oscache, JBoss, etc). My most recent project had a dependency on a product which has a dependency on OpenJPA, and OpenJPA only has it’s own built in implementations of a query cache and a data cache. I like to have one … Continue reading EhCache implementation of OpenJPA caching
One HTTPS site per IP address… or may be not?
I randomly ran across SNI (aka RFC 4366) tonight. It’s a technology that has been under development since before 2000 that allows the client to tell the server what domain it’s visiting before the server sends the certificate. The history is fascinating! The situation today is that SNI is not here yet. OpenSSL will support … Continue reading One HTTPS site per IP address… or may be not?
Why would a cache include cookies?
Ehcache’s SimplePageCachingFilter caches cookies. And that baffles me… why would a cache include cookies in it? I ran into the interesting situation where servlets, interceptors, and all those other Java goodies were writing cookies for purposes like the current browsing user’s identifier so it could track that user on the site and keep track of … Continue reading Why would a cache include cookies?
One instance at a time with PID file in Bash
Often times, I only want a script to run one instance at a time. For example, if the the script is copying files, or rsync’ing between systems, it can be disastrous to have two instances running concurrently, and this situation is definitely possible if you run the script from cron. I figured out a simple … Continue reading One instance at a time with PID file in Bash