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Customize Photodropper images

by Duck Ranger on December 23, 2010 · No Comments

Me and *This* Army

Creative Commons License photo credit: EJP Photo

Photodropper is an excellent plugin that lets you find creative-commons photos in Flickr and add them to your posts.

On my blog, I use those images only to display at the top left of the post. If you like the way the images look here, you might want to make the following change to the plugin, so that it creates the right code (and not center the photo automatically).…

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Display a generated PDF from within Spring webflow

by Duck Ranger on December 21, 2010 · 2 Comments

Not just a pretty face..

Creative Commons License photo credit: law_keven

In a recent Spring webflow project, I had a requirement to generate a PDF on the fly and display it as part of a web page.
The containing web page is part of a Spring webflow, and the PDF generation service already exists.

After some poking around, I came up with the simplest solution ever: Spring MVC…

All you have to do is define a Web MVC controller to handle pdf requests, like so:

<!– This is

…

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Start your web flow with a decision point

by Duck Ranger on December 17, 2010 · 3 Comments

ducklings

Creative Commons License photo credit: lanier67

This one took a while to find out, maybe it’s poor Google-fu or maybe the documentation is just not clear enough – but anyway – Thought I’d write it down in case anyone else spends some hours in the dark over this.

Most of the times, your Spring webflow’s flow will start with a view – you present something to your user, and define transitions to other views in the flow. These transitions are based on the …

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Printing from CakePHP to Ms-Word

by Duck Ranger on November 30, 2010 · 4 Comments

You caught me...

Creative Commons License photo credit: law_keven

Printing to Word from PHP is usually easy. Word can read HTML, so there you have it – you don’t have to change a thing! Just add the right headers to your page, and it all happens automagically, right?
Well – not so much.…

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Configure a custom 404 page in Glassfish

by Duck Ranger on August 12, 2010 · 1 Comment

Blackbirds at Dusk, Asheville, North Carolina

Creative Commons License photo credit: moonjazz

Setting up a custom 404 error page serves two purposes:

  1. It allows you to present your users a nice message rather than the ugly, server-generated default page.
  2. It serves to mask the server’s identity – so, security is a little better.

The first point is obvious. But the second point may need some clarification – why do we care about the server’s identity?
The reason is – when a potential attacker knows which server your application is …

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Securing your Seam application cookies

by Duck Ranger on August 3, 2010 · 2 Comments

Ok, what's the deal?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal

Seam is quite a good and secure framework as far as frameworks go. However, with a simple ServletFilter, it can be made just a little bit more secure, and maybe help you pass that next audit. In this post you’ll see how to define a Seam servlet filter to secure your website just a little bit more.…

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Protecting your cake site against timing attacks

by Duck Ranger on July 27, 2010 · 4 Comments

The Happy little Duck...

Creative Commons License photo credit: law_keven

Timing attacks are very difficult to pull off, but are possible nevertheless. However, it is quite easy to protect your Cake application against them, and as an aside – against incremental password crackers brute-forcing. This post shows you how.…

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Setting session timeout dynamically with Seam

by Duck Ranger on July 14, 2010 · 1 Comment

Curious minds...

Creative Commons License photo credit: young_einstein

In a recent application, the customer wanted to be able to change session timeout dynamically, without restarting the application.
This being a Seam application, I thought it was going to be quite straight-forward: either add it in the timeout= attribute in pages.xml, or just add it wherever we start a new conversation (conversation timeout is effectively what we were looking for anyway).

But, I was wrong.…

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Getting 404 with jquery.gritter?

by Duck Ranger on June 22, 2010 · 1 Comment

Domestic Goose / Oie domestique

Creative Commons License photo credit: Eric Bégin

You’ll probably never see it unless you use Firebug or look at Apache raw access logs, but jquery.gritter causes 404 errors repeatedly.
The problem with 404′s is that they are like visiting relatives. They don’t go away unless you do something about it, and you usually can’t be bothered to do something about them – because it’s really not that bad.
Of course, sometimes it is. Especially if you get it on every page load. These …

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Typography – more important than you may think

by Duck Ranger on June 16, 2010 · No Comments

You say'n it's HBW.....:O)))

Creative Commons License photo credit: law_keven

This post is part of the “Be nice to your users” web UI design series.

There are many things that contribute to the rise or fall of your website. Anyone, and Google especially, will tell you that content is king. You have to have good, original content. Your site needs to be original, provide good value for your users, etc etc.

But there are always those small things that can make or break it for you.

Design …

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