Introduction to Java's Reflection

What is and how do I use Java's Reflection?

Have you ever wondered what is Java's Reflection and how do you use it?
If so, you may have interest in reading this article that gives you a brief introduction on the subject with examples.

Digital Security & Privacy - For human rights defenders

Bruce Schneier posted a link to a pdf with 164 pages about Digital Security & Privacy - For human rights defenders.

The book is written by Dmitri Vitaliev and is about:

Security and Insecurity

Security awareness

Threat assessment and the security circle

Windows Security

Password Protection

Information Backup, Destruction and Recovery

Cryptology

Internet Surveillance and Monitoring

Circumvention of Internet censorship and filtering

Encryption on the Internet

Malicious software and Spam

Identity Theft and Profiling

... and more

From RAW to print (danish text)

I have made a colorprofile for my monitor, but the printing of images look different!

The way you can fix that, is by using colorprofile for the printer as well.
This article tells you how: (a danish site)
http://www.digitalmagasinet.dk/%5Cshow.asp?ID=1093

Choose (and remember) great passwords

A secure, memorable password is easy for you to remember, and hard for others to guess.

This article gives you some good hints on how to create your password.

• Don't use the same password for everything.
• Remember 100 different passwords with 1 rule set.

Sounds too good to be true?
Actually no - read the article...

Debugging webservices

Nowadays everything in this SOA age (Service Oriented Arhitecture) is developed as webservices.
There's a lot of frameworks that hides the specific implementation so often you ask:

What do I send to that webservice, and what do the service return?

For that sake, there's a fantastic tool called tcpmon, which can be started as Java Webstart.
Here you make a proxy where you specify a localport where tcpmon listens, and which server/port the real service is implemented. Tcpmon then shows exactly what is transmitted to the service and what is received.

Right now I have the problem that we're using a proxy, so tcpmon can't see the destination service (it's through VPN).
I can see the server in my browser, so I looked up the proxy in my browsers configuration (was webproxy:8080) and tried starting up tcpmon with -Dhttp.proxyHost=webproxy -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080, but still it won't work...

The solution is actually very simple:

1. Start the application with: -Dhttp.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=8888 (Now we use tcpmon as proxy)


2. In tcpmon start a new connection with: (the proxy now uses a proxy :-)
   

   Port	8888
   Server Name	Proxyserver (in my case webproxy)
   Server Port	Proxyserverport (in my case 8080)

You now don't have to change the endpoint of the service, because it automatically routes though tcpmon!
Voila! Mission accomplished!

Fire onChange in Javascript programmatically

I want to fire onChange method on an object programmatically in Javascript.

FireFox and Internet Explorer handles this very differently.
If you for example sets the value on an object you might expect that the onChange method is fired, but sorry... no firering...

The solution is this in Javascript:

function newValueForObject {
    var myObject = document.getElementById(nameOfObject);
    myObject.value = 'a new value';

    if (myObject.hasAttribute) { // Firefox
        if(myObject.hasAttribute("onchange")){
            myObject.onchange();
        }
    } else if (myObject.onchange) { // IE
        var newEvt = document.createEventObject();
        myObject.fireEvent("onchange", newEvt);
    }    
}

WindowsDevCenter.com -- How to Remove Startup Programs

This article tells you how to remove Windows Startup programs.

Please help me speed up my Windows startup time!

For example look into:

%userprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Or in the registry:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx

ONJava.com -- Profiling Your Applications with Eclipse Callisto

This article describes how to profile your application using Eclipse's Test & Performance Tools Platform (tptp)

HOWTO: Pick an open source license

This article is about how to choose an open source license.
It can be boiled down to this decisiontree, but check the link to see examples.

How should I choose an open source license?

Do you want to release any control over how your code is used and distributed?

• YES: Don't copyright it. Put it in the public domain, and you're done.


• NO: Copyright the code (paste copyright notices all over it)
  
  Do you want to allow people to use your code in non open-source programs?
  
  • NO: Release your code under the GPL licence
  
  
  • YES: If somebody uses your code in their program and sells their program for money, do you want some of that money?
    
    • YES: Two choices:
      
      1. Don't release it as open source
      
      
      2. Dual license
    
    
    • NO: "Commercial friendly" license
      
      If somebody uses your code and improves it (fixes bugs or adds features) do you want to make them give you the improvements back so you can use them too?
      
      • YES: Use a "reciprocal" license.
      
      
      • NO: Use a "non-reciprocal" license.
      
      

See:
HOWTO: Pick an open source license (part 1) | Ed Burnette's Dev Connection | ZDNet.com
http://www.opensource.org/licenses

Regular Expression Examples

When using regular expressions (a very brief description):

• .* = (any character)
• $ = end of line
• ^ = start of line
• \1 first group in replacement.

Example:
Text: Hello my friend
Search for: (.*) my (.*)
Replace with: \2 is \1
Result: friend is hello

Javascript: Show all properties for an object

I would like to see all the properties of a given object.

OK - Here you go:

     function popUpProperties(inobj) {
        op = window.open();
        op.document.open('text/plain');
        for (objprop in inobj) {
        op.document.write(objprop + ' => ' + inobj[objprop] + '\n');
        }
        op.document.close();
    }

Ex.:

popUpProperties(document.forms[0]);

Nice...

Agile Testing: Should acceptance tests be included in the continuous build process?

The article discusses what kind of test that's needed in a project, and what the differences are between the different kind of tests.

Here's some hightlights:

Unit tests run fast. If they don't run fast, they aren't unit tests.

Other kinds of tests often masquerade as unit tests. A test is not a unit test if:

• It talks to a database.
• It communicates across a network.
• It touches the file system.
• You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing configuration files) to run it.

Read the complete article.

Secure your SOA

Enterprise-grade SOAs require a plan for addressing diverse security needs

Summary
This article is part of a series of short articles that introduce readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles provide a quick introduction to these standards, their backgrounds, underlying architectures, benefits, status, and industry adoption. As some of the content may be a depiction of the authors' viewpoints, readers are encouraged to refer to the links provided in Resources to gain a deeper understanding of a particular standard. This article focuses on the XML and Web services security standards that influence a service-oriented architecture. (3,200 words; April 10, 2006)"

Wireless Cracking Tools - IT Observer

Wireless Cracking Tools - IT Observer
By Bradley Morgan
Wednesday, 29 March 2006 10:44 EST

By familiarizing yourself with following software, you will not only have a better understanding of the vulnerabilities inherent in 802.11 networks, but you will also get a glimpse at how a hacker might exploit them. These tools can even be used when auditing your own network as we will see later.

• Aerosol
  
• Airjack
• AirSnarf
• AirSnort
• ASLEAP
• Auditor
• Dweputils
• Ethereal
• HostAP
• Hotspotter
• IKECrack
• Kismet
• NetStumbler
• WEPcrack

Another list of wardriving tools

(For a detailed description - click the link)

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel on Software

The quick way to check how good a software team is.

The Joel Test

1. Do you use source control?
   
2. Can you make a build in one step?
   
3. Do you make daily builds?
   
4. Do you have a bug database?
   
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
   
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
   
7. Do you have a spec?
   
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
   
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
   
10. Do you have testers?
    
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
    
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

For every yes you get a point.
12 points: Perfect!
11 points: Tolerable...
10 points or lower: Get startet!!!

Joel has a good description to every item, so check it out.

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

This article gives you a brief introduction on how-to use AJAX.

The author (Eric Pascarello) has kindly zipped the example:
http://radio.javaranch.com/pascarello/files/BasicAjaxExample.zip

Of course a good place to start is by this book:
Ajax in Action
See two sample chapters: http://www.manning.com/books/crane/chapters

Set classpath the smart way

Original: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/classpath.html

Isn't it annoying you have to specify all the jar files needed to run a javaprogram?

Nomally you would make a:

  SET CLASSPATH=jar1.jar;jar2.jar;jar3.jar...

But in stead you can simply specify the directory where you have all your jar files:

  javac.exe -Djava.ext.dirs=usualextdir;anotherdir... 

and

  java.exe -Djava.ext.dirs=usualextdir;anotherdir...

See the original page for more tips.

Diagnostic Tests with Ant

Diagnostic Tests with Ant

Suppose you have developed your Java application and distributed it to your users. If all goes well, the application just works on every computer. But if there's a problem, you have to begin troubleshooting. Users will call for all sorts of installation problems, expecting you to fix them. Moreover, the same problems will often come back: the wrong version of Java, a deleted file, too-restrictive file permissions, etc. Most of these problems can be solved by creating a checklist. However, instead of wasting time asking new users the same questions on the checklist over and over, you can create a diagnostic test that goes through the checklist, providing users with the information they need to solve the problem. If users can't solve the problem themselves, they can show you a clear checklist, so you can take a look at what's going wrong without asking a bunch of questions first.

What problems can users expect? First, things can already go wrong during the installation process if the user doesn't follow the installation instructions accurately. Even if the installation succeeds, problems can appear later. Changes in configuration (like the JAVA_HOME environment variable) or changes in the directory structure can indeed break things. In this article, we will develop an Ant script to run diagnostic tests for a Java application. We will look at a list of possible problems and how to deal with them. For our approach to work, Ant has to be installed on the user's machine. This may mean that your installer will have to provide Ant.

The article gets you through all kinds of environmenttest:

• Write out a checklist of the systemenvironment


• Check nessesary folders and required classes


• Task for checking minimum JDK-version


• MD5-checksum for configurationfiles and classes


• Restore original configuration

The VoipBuster! Free phone to 24 countries in Europe

Download the beta version of The VoipBuster!, and get free phone calls all around the world.



(You must pay 1 Euro for unlimited calls)

How to free up Windows XP system resources

How to free up Windows XP system resources
Situation:
You are having performance problems or conflicts on a Windows XP computer. You want to know what programs or services you can safely stop from loading when you start Windows.
Symantec gives here a list of recommondations.