SwitchBL8’s gebazel – Page 33 – Whatever keeps me busy, annoys me, what I like and love or just find interesting, but often a place to put my mind at rest.

Flex 3 has a bright future

Jul 172007

Last year I wrote in a comment that Flex is proprietary. One of the new features of Flex 3 (currently in beta) is that it will be Open Sourced, see this (old) press release. I think this is great news, since the degree of penetration of Flash on the desktop is extremely high, and the GUI’s you can create are stunning nonetheless. Have a look at what Laszlo already did by integrating Flash components into their AJAX framework, now Adobe makes its move!

So, I take back what I said about Flex. Flex is great. I’ll see whether I can whip up a demo on my server (if I can find the time, so bear with me)…

Ubuntu taskswitching

2 Responses »

Jul 142007

To switch a task in Ubuntu, you could do it the Windows way: ALT-TAB. You could also go to the taskbar in the bottom of the screen, and click the right icon. But there’s another way. Move your mouse to the taskbar so it’s visible. Now use the scrollwheel of your mouse. It “scrolls” through your running applications, just like ALT-TAB would do, but faster. And without touching the keyboard.

Drilling at night?

3 Responses »

Jul 132007

Just about 10-15 minutes ago, one of my neighbours decided it was time to drill a hole in the wall. Since the walls are made of concrete, I don’t have to tell you what kind of noise could be experienced in our house. At about 23:00 (11:00pm for you Americans). What are people thinking when they start drilling holes in walls at 23:00? “It’s just one hole, nobody will notice”? Please tell me, because I can’t think of anything stupid enough that would make me want to go to the garden-shed, get my drill, get the proper screws, drill a hole, hang something on that wall, and stow away all my tools again, when it’s night. What’s so urgent it can’t wait until tomorrow???

So people, when it’s dark, or getting dark, think about what you do. Does it make a lot of noise? Think about what you would want to hear from your neighbours at 23:00 hours. Nothing? Great, than don’t do the loud activity. Postpone until tomorrow. Still have an urge to drill? Well, get a hammer! Can’t drill with a hammer you say? Correct, I say. Now bang yourself on the head as hard as you can. Did that? Now do it again! Urge gone? No?? Repeat until it is. Something to stop the bleeding? Why? I think the world is a better place without you (since at this very moment, that fuck is drilling again)!

Thank you for listening. Now go do something quiet. Sleep in that pool of blood, or something.

Free JavaME database?

No Responses »

Jul 072007

I want to develop a little application for my mobile (and/or PDA) in JavaME, and it needs to store data. The data is not too complex, so I could revert to XML-files, but can you point me to some good, free JavaME databases? Open-source is a pre, but the “free” part has more priority 😉

The application will be created using Netbeans, so a Netbeans plugin (if applicable) is another pre.

Update: found McObject’s Perst, will try!

7-7-7

No Responses »

Jul 072007

Today is 7-7-7. Fortunately I missed the 7:07 timemark!

No more excuses: use ODF!

No Responses »

Jul 042007

If you still use Microsoft Office, now is your change to silenty (so your coworkers won’t know) use the ODF document format everybody else outside your company is using. Without losing formatting. Go here and download the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office.

Or better yet: be a rebel, and use OpenOffice.org…

Netbeans 6.0 M10

No Responses »

Jul 022007

Netbeans IDE 6.0 milestone 10 is here, but the server obviously has a lot to endure, since I keep getting an Access Denied. Just try again later!

mod_proxy

2 Responses »

Jun 252007

Thanks to my colleague Wijnand for pointing me out that the XMLHTTPREQUEST security problem can be solved by using mod_proxy. As I was trying to show an Oracle Mapviewer map inside an APEX HTML region, I needed to proxy the mapviewer in the APEX Apache configuration.


    ProxyRequests On
    # Set to one of: Off | On | Full | Block
    ProxyVia On
    ProxyPass /mapviewer http://l-rsprinkhuizen:8888/mapviewer
    ProxyPassReverse /mapviewer http://l-rsprinkhuizen:8888/mapviewer

At first I proxied to /mv to keep the typing (-errors) to a minimum, but that didn’t seem to work. Parts were showing, others parts were not. Then I changed the /mv to /mapviewer and everything worked. So there you have it: Mapviewer has a hardcoded path in some of its core!

FireFox signed scripts

1 Response »

Jun 252007

FireFox implemented a scripting-security feature that should do its work better than a question “Do you allow this script to run” or something along that line. Because users will press YES, since they are browsing and don’t want to be annoyed with pop-ups…
One of the items that can’t be done from scripting anymore is an XMLHTTPRequest (to another site). Basically the thing that runs AJAX. Without it, you would not have AJAX.

Now FireFox is asking us to sign our Javascript, so it will know the script is what it’s supposed to be. But wait….not only the Javascript (or external .js file), but the whole page.

WTF?

APEX generates pages on the fly, and you can include javascript in the page definition. But there is no complete page to sign. So how do I solve a “Permission denied to call method XMLHTTPRequest.open”? Any framework that dynamically generates pages will suffer from the same problem, so….any thoughts on this one? I can’t just alter the framework to do some server-side proxying only to overcome the fact that the client can’t request an URL.

xkcd

No Responses »

Jun 182007

When you have some (understatement) time to spare, just surf to XKCD. Drawn like you gave your youngest some pencils, but each time the message is unmistakenly clear.

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