Programming

I Kludge Therefore I Am

1608: A Roman law establishes that bakers who intend to sell vermicelli must belong to the Guild of Vermicellari. I hacked together a FileMaker Pro 6 database application for Mac OS 9 this weekend with my wife M.C. Moewe. She began a job two weeks ago covering real estate and land development for the Florida Times-Union, and she'll be working on a weekly Pipeline feature that's better suited to a database than a word processor. The application must output records as a word processing file with ... (read more)

2004/08/29

Java applet takes forever to run

One of my favorite works of art was executed as a Java applet. I bought Every Icon by John Simon Jr. in May 2000 and have been meaning to put it on my Web site ever since. The display of the work takes several hundred trillion years from start to finish, so I don't feel so bad about taking almost four years to share it on Workbench. ... (read more)

2004/03/04

How virus writers catch the coding bug

Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a cover story by Clive Thompson on the symbiotic relationship between virus writers and script kiddies in the underground programming community. The piece suffered from the normal journalistic conceit of overexaggerating the newness of its subject. Virus-authoring toolkits are at least as old as the Dark Avenger Mutation Engine, which was being hyped to the gills 12 years ago, but you wouldn't know that from reading the story -- Thompson makes it sound like ... (read more)

2004/02/10

Peer into the future with JXTA

My November 2003 Java Matters column for Linux Magazine is now available online. It covers JXTA, a set of XML protocols for peer-to-peer network programming created as an open source project by Bill Joy and Mike Clary at Sun Microsystems. JXTA's an extremely ambitious project with a steep learning curve. A quote from the column: The formulation of networks on the fly, with or without a central server, through firewalls and with authentication and encryption, atop the Internet and other networks ... (read more)

2004/02/10

Logging stack traces with Log4J

The Dining.Name Web application uses Log4J, Apache's logging library for Java, to log the behavior of classes that import XML data into a MySQL database. Log4J is a simple class library -- the basics take no more than a half-hour to learn, as I described in a Linux Magazine article in 2002. It supports four levels of logging and external configuration. Right now, I'm building Dining.Name at debug level and getting verbose output. When I'm confident that it works, I'll change it to fatal level ... (read more)

2004/01/16

Regular expressions are beautifully ugly

For several years, I've been unable to find a suitable Web server log statistics program for this server, which hosts several dozen virtual domains for myself and a few friends and relatives. The commercial options such as WebTrends and Wusage cost more than I want to pay for a server-wide solution. The open-source and free-beer programs I have found are either skimpy on stats or can't handle sites that get millions of hits a year. I've decided to write my own program in Java, a project I'm ... (read more)

2003/12/12

Creating MD5 hashed passwords in Java

I found a much-needed Java programming tip in a LiveJournal XML-RPC client programming discussion this afternoon: How to create an MD5-hashed password from a string. Radio UserLand only presents hashed passwords when publishing via XML-RPC, storing the plain text version in the object database. The following class method can be used to create a hash from a string: public static String hashPassword(String password) { String hashword = null; try { MessageDigest md5 = ... (read more)

2003/10/09

I'm getting naked in Linux Magazine

I just finished a 3,500-word column on Naked Objects for an upcoming issue of Linux Magazine. Naked Objects, unveiled at OOPSLA in November 2002, is a groovy open source framework for developing Java software that exposes objects and their methods directly to users. Using reflection, the objects and their methods are discovered and made available in a generic user interface (screenshot). The goal is to create software that consists of "behaviorally complete" objects which genuinely embody the ... (read more)

2003/07/30

RSS Validator advice changed

Sam Ruby has fixed the RSS Validator, which was responding to duplicate elements in a way he didn't expect. It no longer suggests an element to remove in response to invalid RSS 2.0 (and perhaps other versions). He also says this about the validator, which is an open-source project: The RSS validator has always been neutral in the RSS wars. In particular, it provides valuable feedback on the quality of RSS 1.0 feeds as well as RSS 2.0. In fact, most of the code is common between the two. If ... (read more)

2003/07/03

Is the RSS Validator acting funky?

As a followup to yesterday's entry, a look at the source code of the RSS Validator reveals the elements it considers to be duplicates: Item elements: author and dc:creator category and dc:subject pubDate and dc:date Channel elements: copyright and dc:copyright creativeCommons:license and cc:license generator and admin:generatorAgent language and dc:language lastBuildDate and dc:termsModified managingEditor and dc:creator pubDate and dc:date webmaster and dc:publisher I haven't tested each one, ... (read more)