Recently I’ve seen unsolicited SPAM e-mails coming directly from other peoples’ e-mail and social networking accounts. They’ll often post messages afterwords claiming that their accounts had been hacked. I’ll usually ask these friends, “Do you use the same password on multiple websites?” and the ensuing “Yes” response from them is followed by, “Change your e-mail password, and also, you need to learn something about password security.”
(more…)

When writing J2EE web applications, web services, enterprise Java beans (EJBs) or other pieces of code that run on a Java application server such as RedHat’s JBoss, IBM WebSphere or Apache Tomcat, a developer typically doesn’t load database drivers or connect to the database directly. Instead, a context lookup must be made in order to get a DataSource, and from there a Connection. However what if one needs to run existing code locally, outside of the web server? This guide shows developers how to setup a local context so application server code can be run in a stand-alone application without modification.
(more…)

When creating new Java web applications within an IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans, the IDE creates a directory structure and uses its own internal builder to create WAR and EAR files. While these build tools may be convenient when starting to develop J2EE applications, when working on production grade projects, it’s important to create your own directory structure and build scripts to automate the building and deployment process. This tutorial will take you through automating the build process of a web application using Apache Ant as well as giving you a better understanding of exactly how web applications are laid-out and built within the EAR file.
(more…)

Anyone who has programmed with Java should be familiar with the concept of Checked Exceptions. Although C++ and OCaml have optional support for exception checking, Java seems to be the only major programing language where it is a built-in and required part of the language. Enforcing at compile time that certain exceptions need to be caught may have seemed like a good idea at the time Java was developed, however no major languages developed since have adapted the concept. Many view Checked Exceptions as a design flaw. In this article, I attempt to show how this flaw can be overcome using a base exception class to encapsulate exception handling.
(more…)

I’ve never been a huge fan of certification. Although I understand it is supposed to help gauge an industry benchmark in a given field, I often feel like it’s given the IT world a generation of good test takers who are not necessarily good designers. Still, I’ve programmed with PHP on my own for years and want to eventually move my career path towards that direction. I decided to get a one up and try for my Zend PHP5 certification. What I came away with was a massive sense in disappointment in Zend’s entire certification process.
(more…)

I just finished my latest web application project: TweeFlood. For those of you on Twitter, TweeFlood is a way to see how much you and your friends tweet. It displays statistics for how often your friends tweet per year, month, day and hour. Try it out and follow @TweeFlood.

(more…)

I’ve been using Media Temple for web hosting for a while. Like any other host, they have their advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest problems with Media Temples is that their basic grid-server (gs) package only allows for very simple statistics gathering using Urchin. It is so simple that it combines hit counts from all websites into one graph unless users purchase additional grid-server units. Although Media Temple provides raw access logs, the way virtual hosts have been setup causes difficulty when attempting to use their logs with a log analyzer.

The following tutorial goes through how to install and configure the free and open source web statistics program Awstats to be used with Media Temple’s grid-servers to provide analytic data from the Apache logs per each individual domain.
(more…)

I spent a couple of hours getting a proprietary software H.264 codec working in Linux and even published a writeup to help others. A day later I learned from one of the people I sourced in my article that nVidia started releasing Linux drivers last November for the hardware high definition decoders found on the 8xxx series of video cards as well as a customized version of mplayer to support the new drivers.

A mixture of emotions came across as I realized I wasted an entire day on a software decoder when a hardware solution was available for $30 to $40. The software solution was fairly disappointing, so I decided to try one of these new cards, an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT, to see if it provided a better solution. It took some work with my setup, but the results were worth it.

(more…)

I’ve got an old Pentium D 920. Over two years old, with the right ffmpeg options for mplayer and frame dropping enabled, this CPU can still play H.264 720p video at amazing quality in Linux. However, all 1080p and 1080i60 (camcorder M2TS files) choke horribly. The video drags, audio skips and the video is totally unwatchable. In my search for a better video codec, I came across CoreAVC, a closed source commercial codec for Windows, as well as the coreavc-for-linux project: an attempt to use those closed source drivers with various media players in Linux.

Unfortunately, the installation documents for coreavc-for-linux were months old, out-of-date and had few corrections for new bugs. The following are some of the common errors I found as well as the solutions I’ve found to get the trail version of the CoreAVC codec working on my Gentoo Linux system.
(more…)

My MacBook is about two and a half years old. Aside from upgrading the memory to 2GB when I initially purchased it, I’ve kept it stock and it’s been a fairly reliable laptop and the most convenient laptop I’ve owned. Currently it’s also the only computer I own that will let me edit and play HD content. Even then, the video becomes jumpy after about fifteen to twenty seconds during the editing process. Also, the battery no longer holds enough power to keep the laptop operational for over an hour. So a few weeks back I decided some upgrades were in order: upgrading to OS X 10.5, a new 500GB hard drive and new battery.
(more…)