Published January 15th, 2006 by Jim O'Halloran
Google Search Map
This image shows where where in the world Google searches come from
Internet
Published September 1st, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran
Hula Email and Calendar
Calendaring is one of those applications that just never felt right to me as a web app. I’ve always used desktop calendars (Outlook and Evolution), and the web apps just felt a little klunky somehow. With all the nice work with JavaScript, DHTML and Ajax going on recently I thought it’d be really cool if someone was able to build a decent, interactive web based calendar that worked a lot like a desktop app.
Then someone pointed me to this demo of Hula. Hula is an open source calendaring and email server project coming out of Novell/Ximian. The demo looked cool, and based on other DHTML stuf I’d seen previously looked pretty plausable, but even so I had to wonder how much of this was possible in HTML. Then I found the developer’s blog and instructions for getting the source from svn. Its only a prototype, with no storage support at this stage. However, after playing with it I can definately say that the demo is 100% for real. This thing does with HTML exactly what you see in the demo. Awesome. Can’t wait to see a real calendar app make use of this prototype interface.
See hula-project.org for more information about Hula.
Published September 1st, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran
Drupal Content Management System
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently with various Content Management Systems. The CMS that’s really caught my eue though is Drupal. I first tried to install Drupal 2 or more years ago, and could not get things up and running at all. Since then though things have changed considerably, I played with Drual a bit on OpenSourceCMS.com, and liked what I saw. Then downloaded a copy and tinkered with it some more.
The more I play the more I like it, but I was having problems getting some sort of navigation happening. The Drupal site had two examples of using taxonomies to create a block containing navigation information from a taxonomy.
- Block containing all items from a certain term. - Create a term to house all pages of a certain type (e.g. News), and this blck will list all items belonging to that term.
- Block containing all terms and nodes in a taxonomy. - Create a taxonomy describing your entire site, and this block will build a nice hierachial menu. This does require a patch to the taxonomy module, which I had to apply by hand, but that wasn’t a major hasle.
These’s also quite a few modules I’ve found handy:
- AdminBlock - I’m looking at moderation features, and this creates a block containing all of the items awaiting moderation.
- Diff - Diff shows the differences between revisions of a node. Very cool, some PHP5 issues though.
- Scheduler - Allows for scheduled publication/removal of items.
I really need to wrap my head around the taxonomy stuff a little more, but I’m starting to understand it. Features I like, multiple sites on one installation, moderation/access control is very good. I’m yet to experiment with themeing in any meaningful way.
Published August 29th, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran
IT Conversations with Phil Zimmermann
A few days ago I listened to the IT Conversations chat with Phil Zimmermann for the first time. Phil was the original author of the PGP encryption program back in the early 90’s, and suffered through a long legal battle for doing so. The chat with IT Conversations talks about this, and many other things related to encryption. Its about 30 minutes long, but well worth the listen.
Published February 3rd, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran
AwStatus Vulnerability
Note to self: Upgrade awstats. This is why:
AwStats exploit by Thunder, molnar_rcs@yahoo.com
This exploit makes use of the remote command execution bug discovered in
AwStats ver 6.2 and below. The bug resides in the awstats.pl perl script.
The script does not sanitise correctly the user input for the
`configdir` parameter. If the users sends a command prefixed and postfixed
with | , the command will be executed.
It appears this exploit is in active use, its already affected Jeremy and Russell. Looks like my box was also probed for the vulnerability over the weekend.
82.174.146.210 - - [30/Jan/2005:07:52:28 +101800] “GET /awstats/awstats.pl?configdir=|echo;uname%20-a;w;id;pwd| HTTP/1.1″ 404 405 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)”
They didn’t find awstats (it was on a different vhost). Until I can upgrade awstats requires authentication, which should keep anyone away from it in the interim. If you use an awstats earlier than 6.3, you need to be aware of this.
Published January 24th, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran
Phishing Quiz
How aware of phishing attacks are you? The MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test gives you an idea how aware you really are.
Published December 20th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Google Suggest Dissected
Chris Justus has dissected the JavaScript behind Google Suggest. Chris’ analysis can be found here.
People have been contributing their two cents to how this works, but I have un-compressed (ie. re-written) Google’s compressed javascript, so that the average web developer should be able to get a detailed understanding of how this works…. My final rewrite is available from my website here.
Published November 5th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Rich DHTML Interfaces
PHP Everywhere links to a number of tools for Building Rich DHTML User Interfaces.
There are quite a number of tools out there to help you build rich user interfaces using Javascript and HTML. Some are free and others are commercial. Here’s a short list i compiled a while back:
Could be quite handy.
Published October 15th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Two XUL Demonstrations
While browsing some slashdot comments, I stumbled across two demonstrations of XUL. XUL is Mulzilla’s XML User Interface Language Project.
Robin is a demo of a desktop environment written in XUL, including several games such as Snake and Pacman. Pretty awesome demonstration.
Not quite as visually impressive, but still unbeleivably good is MAB, the Mozilla Amazon Browser. MAB allows you to search Amazon, and buy online using a traditional “desktop application-ish” interface. There are no page reloads, the whole thing just happens in the browser. Awesome!
Looks like its time I checked ou the XUL Tutorial. and learnt much more about XUL!
Published August 29th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
More on How SSL Works
A commenter on my previous How SSL works post, pointed me towards the SSL explanation from Chris Shiflett’s HTTP Developer’s Handbook chapter on SSL which is a really nice explanation of SSL (including public/private and symetric key encryption.
An elegant solution to these types of problems is SSL, Secure Sockets Layer. In 1994, Netscape released the specification of Secure Sockets Layer. By 1995, version 3.0 of SSL was released, and it has since taken the Web by storm. SSL has dramatically changed the way people use the Web, and it provides a very good solution to many of the Web’s shortcomings
