Archive for August, 2009

Turn your newsletters into spam!

August 19, 2009 at 17:10 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged , , ,

You have a company and you send newsletters to your customers, subsribers, whatever? I offer you easy way how to turn them into spam! Oh… you don’t want that!

It has been some time I’ve heard about Acclaim and their free-to-play MMORPG 9Dragons. I tried it, I didn’t like it so much so I quite playing the game. Long time before PWI – more than a year, maybe even two. I never received any emails from them – except maybe some registration that is deleted already – as I clean up my mails here and there.

I don’t mind, I was surprised (“what the hell is that?”) but then I recalled about the game and I consider it OK. I scrolled down… “unsubscribe, unsubs… there is no unsubscribe!” I don’t know what happens if you report the mail as a spam and you’re alone – it’s probably no big deal. I don’t know what happens when many people on Gmail do that. I guess that at least on Gmail future recipients wouldn’t see that mail in their Inboxes at all. Is that what you want?

I deleted it for now, next time forgotten service with their newsletter without unsubscribe option goes to Spam.

BTW: Please… don’t make me login (like some other service wanted me to) just to confirm that process. It means I have to request forgotten password first!

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How I did NOT buy Corel VideoStudio

August 15, 2009 at 9:19 · Filed under software, virtual-life ·Tagged , , ,

While my Steam client is turned on most of the time, I have also Impulse client that is mostly turned off. Last time I need is to have billions of game/SW delivery clients running at the same time. I run Impulse only when I play Sins Of a Solar Empire. I check up on weekend deals on both stores – for instance http://store.steampowered.com/ offers 66% off of all Half-Life titles this weekend! Too bad I have them already. ;-) Back to Impulse. I’m still in search for video editing software. My needs are simple and I currently evaluate Sony Vegas 9.1, but the time is running out. What I don’t like is that Sony is somewhat slow on my computer – I don’t know why. Otherwise I can do what I want with it, so far so good. I’m just not sure yet.

Impulse came with Corel products on sale – one of them Ulead Video Studio 11.5 Plus for 42,24€. “Hm, I never heard of this one.” So I googled reviews, they were generally positive although users reported crashes – now what do you do? I downloaded the demo to find out by myself. What I don’t like is when I can’t try exactly what I want – demo was Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 (version 12). Now how do I know what I get in 11.5 PLUS? There is some comparison chart on Corel’s site – during this process I found out that Corel itself offers the sale until August 30th – and that the Pro X2 version is available for $60. That is still very good price, let’s just check out if I can order it – you never know if they are willing to deliver it (even online only) to your country. This screen changed my decision in seconds:

Instantly I recalled my experience with EA Store. It has been two years I’ve registered on Steam and bought Orange Box and I still can imagine I want to install some part of it – why to keep it on disk all the time? Or install it on another computer. I didn’t even check what’s the default time frame for download in case of Corel – EA offered half-a-year. That’s ridiculous. I’m going to delete the downloaded demo of this video software right away and I say it loud and clear:

You know what, Corel? Fuck off… I’m finished with you for years at least. Doesn’t matter that I haven’t even started.

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Google Chrome with perspective

August 8, 2009 at 8:08 · Filed under java, software ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

I can hardly believe that it’s almost a year I started to use Google Chrome browser! While I still use it at home I decided to switch back to Firefox at work – for a simple reason. Chrome is very stubborn when accessing https sites without proper certificate. We have a few on our corporate intranet and while I can simply accept any certificate forever with Firefox, it’s not so easy with Chrome. I’ve found some blog posts how to import certificate permanently in Windows, but somehow I failed to do so (maybe I messed up, maybe something else is wrong). I like to tweak things, but sometimes I’m just lazy to fix things that should be easy. That are easy somewhere else with something else. Like Firefox in this case.

I still use Google Chrome at home though, but I’m closer and closer to abandon it there as well. Do you use Google Docs? I do. When I open the document (I write now), I click on its title, little dialog box appears with the label “Enter new document name:” and the input box with the title of the document. It seems to be selected, so CTRL+C, go somewhere else, CTRL+V and guess what appears: “Enter new document name:” Hm, strange… I go there again, I select few characters from the title, copy/paste… again, the same result. I found out when I wanted to copy title to the WordPress. But I clearly remember it to work! But yeh, wait… in which browser? In Firefox it works like a charm. Well not a charm actually, it simply works like it SHOULD in the first place.

Last problem I have with Google Chrome is more technical and is related to Google Web Toolkit we started to use. Biggest trouble here is that I probably have to tackle this one but so far I’m stuck without any idea. If you’re not a programmer, stop reading and consider the article finished. If you are…

GWT compiles Java code to JavaScript which means you can write an application in Java (Google’s special libs) and then run it in the browser as a nice rich application with AJAX support and much more. You can load the resulting JavaScript on the HTML page and it works somehow. Now I wanted to generate HTML page with JSF/Facelets and power the server-side with JBoss Seam. Resulting HTML page is exactly the same, HTTP response headers are a bit different, but nothing serious. The application works fine in Firefox, IE, anything… except Google Chrome where it throws funny exception:

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<a Document> has no method 'write'

The script with the problem is generated and this particular part is some service stuff – not the result of my Java code. Problem is on the third line here:

function computeScriptBase(){
var thisScript, markerId = $intern_8, markerScript;
$doc.write($intern_9 + markerId + $intern_10);

Now how can anyone starting with GWT probably resolve this? Honestly I have no idea what is happening there and why it works fine in anything but Google Chrome. Now I hosted the SAME script in plain HTML, I ran telnet to my application server and this is how it looks (uff, now I had a problem to copy/paste this as well as it removed all my new lines from a plain text – in Chrome, so I’m now finishing it in Firefox :-) ):

$ telnet xxx 8080
Trying xxx...
Connected to xxx.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /comasutra/main.seam?cms HTTP/1.1
Host: xxx:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=8727F8532EA49A8FAB7E967245D5F27C; Path=/comasutra
X-Powered-By: JSF/1.2
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 823
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:39:07 GMT

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 <meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=sk" />
 <title>Comasutra</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="screen" />
 <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="cms/cms.nocache.js"></script>
 </head>
 <body>
 <iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" tabIndex="-1" style="position:absolute;width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe>
 <div>
 </div>
 <div>
 <h1>Main page</h1>
 <div>
 <h2>Articles</h2>
 <div id="cms-c1"></div>
 </div>
 </div>
 </body>
</html>

GET /comasutra/bubu.html?cms HTTP/1.1
Host: xxx:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=650F5FDDED9EC66D0C810B6C2D69B1CC; Path=/comasutra
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"823-1249478709000"
Last-Modified: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:25:09 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 823
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:48:29 GMT

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 <meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=en" />
 <title>Comasutra</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="screen" />
 <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="cms/cms.nocache.js"></script>
 </head>
 <body>
 <iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" tabIndex="-1" style="position:absolute;width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe>
 <div>
 </div>
 <div>
 <h1>Main page</h1>
 <div>
 <h2>Articles</h2>
 <div id="cms-c1"></div>
 </div>
 </div>
 </body>
</html>
Connection to xxx closed by foreign host.

Just to be complete: We use JBoss Seam 2.2.0.CR1, JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA, GWT 1.7, Windows XP SP 3, Google Chrome 2.0.172.39.

Obviously, the first GET request is JSF/Seam one, the other one uses plain HTML. HTMLs are exactly the same, headers are different. I don’t know if subsequent request for “cms/cms.nocache.js” is different, but the whole thing blows out in the JS execution after all. I really don’t know where is the problem. And I’m quite sick to even have a problem like this. Maybe it’s not the Chrome only, maybe it’s the JS engine. Will I have the same trouble with Safari on Mac? I don’t know because I can’t try it any time soon. But in the end there are more little usability problems with Chrome than I expected. I’ll probably give it a try again after some update, but for now I’m switching my default browser back to Firefox. And I’ll probably have to add a note that “this application is not supported in Google Chrome”. I’d be ashamed, but I’m rather pissed off really.

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Bound Cheerleaders

August 6, 2009 at 14:26 · Filed under video ·Tagged ,

Time for a post about movies again! :-) When I played one online game I talked a lot with a clever girl that taught me a lot about the game. And we discussed the life too and so we got to the fact that she liked girls. Not that it is important but it made sense that she recommended me two movies – Bound and But I’m a Cheerleader. Both are about lesbian girls and while in Bound it’s not really the most important part of the plot in Cheerleader movie it’s all about it. I saw Bound some time ago and I watched the latter just the other night. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten to this post if I hadn’t cried at the very end of it. The fact itself amused me – I’m not one of those hard men who never cry, I cried lately even hearing one beautiful song (and not even for the first time). I cry at the end of the movie here and there, Hollywood is good at it after all, and there are topics I simply can’t resist. Mostly naive, romantics, but it’s not that often. Kate and Leopold for instance didn’t drive me to tears although I like it and the happy end was definitely nice. I can’t explain when and why it happens, it simply happens sometimes.

Let’s discuss Bound first – no crying part here. ;-) You can read the plot on IMDB, so I’ll not focus on it. There are two girls that happened to be neighbors. They are quite different and their common ground is obviously their mutual attraction and later their plan to gull a mafioso – partner of one of them. There is a cool erotic scene with two girls that doesn’t involve any stupid covers up to their necks. But otherwise it’s semi-thrilling story that reminded me The Sting with the idea – but you may find it different entirely. Doesn’t really matter. What’s interesting about the movie is that it’s made by Wachovski brothers – three years before their Matrix. I’d say you can see it on the visual style too – but it’s easy to see what you want when you already know who made it. Plus I’m rather unaware of the artistic style unless it’s really striking. The atmosphere of the movie sucks me in if the movie is OK or better but I don’t notice there is a different filter on the camera for instance. ;-) To wrap it up – Bound is cool movie and I recommend it to general audience, it has fine plot with a scam that doesn’t go exactly as planned but you can expect happy end. Nothing about meaning of life though. Who wants to watch the philosophical and difficult stuff all the time after all?

But I’m a Cheerleader is different kind of movie. It’s a bit bizarre and surrealistic – mainly on the artistic style that is intentionally full of synthetic colours and scene sometime looks more like for a fairytale. Edward Scissorhands came to my mind. It definitely wasn’t so pink and blue though. :-) So the cheerleader girl is suspected to be a lesbian by her boy, friends and parents and sent to a homosexual deprogramming camp called “True Directions”. The whole story is half-half funny and romantic – although the topic is quite a serious one. I like the construction of those ex-ex-gays and the idea of the whole lying game in order to get out of the camp – but after graduation. Mostly for the sake of their parents, but sometimes even themselves were convinced they have to change. Again – our main hero, cheerleader, is attracted to other girl that is completely different, attraction is mutual and there is happy end, although there is no scam this time. :-) What made me cry was the final kinda desperate attempt of our cheerleader to convince the girl of her choice – and of course the result too. But I’m a Cheerleader is movie I find hard to generally recommend because it’s so over-played, over-coloured and exaggerated – probably for the idea of “healing gays”. But if you are open minded give it a try. It’s not even long after all.

“5-6-7-8 God is good, God is straight!”

So that’s me crying for two lesbians in the movie. Doesn’t really matter that I’m straight like the aforementioned God in the song the Cheerleader has to write in order to fight her direction. The story is about two people who fight the odds, it’s naive – and man, if something is naive, I simply love it. Not naive as stupid, but naive as nice. And if I hadn’t met one nice girl I probably wouldn’t have seen these movies. Whatever direction she had. :-) Maaan… I didn’t wanna by philosophical by no means.

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Skimming Java based CMS world

August 3, 2009 at 23:24 · Filed under java, real-life, software ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

This is not a real review, it’s rather personal experience and it’s based on some very specific needs and starting points. We needed sorta Content Management System for our customer, nothing big, nothing complicated, just some articles, personal blogs, 4 authors total I guess. And then there are those parts that are not from the CMS world. Some kind of online auction. Simply put – there is also something like custom application. Not big, not difficult, but it should be integrated into the site and – in the best case – users of this application should be the same as CMS users – just with some other roles. Is it extended CMS? Is it custom site with CMS features? Whatever… I had to search for a solution from the CMS world that is easy to grasp, extensible… bla bla. That sort of things. FAST evaluation. You can imagine.

I’ve read some reviews and than I started with Alfresco. Installation (bundled with appserver/webserver) was OK, but I somehow didn’t get it. It’s also more than CMS so it seems, which made it too complex for our needs.

Magnolia, installation OK, seems OK, admin is nice – but after another restart it was not working, admin showed login screen on the main part of the screen, I could recursively enter Admin tool stacking menus on the left. Maybe bad luck, but I left the Magnolia right away. I really didn’t mess with it. It worked, I turned off the computer, returned after the weekend and after application server launch – it went bad. Maybe the Magnolia was sad to be alone during the weekend, I don’t know. I also wasn’t able to find out how I can access the public site. I want some public site, something the guest can see, and I can edit (in-situ or via admin section, whatever). I quickly went through manuals, but either I searched wrong or what… never mind, next.

InfoGlue, installation OK, admin is kinda from early 2000, don’t know how to get to the public page (again!). I felt dumb. I know I don’t understand CMS, but why I can’t get to page my visitor will see in a quick manner?

Next two candidates were OpenCms and dotCMS. On a first run I skipped these because of not exactly trivial installation (no unzip-run bundle). I remembered I kissed a girl and I wasn’t sure if I liked it – but I didn’t listen to that warning. And then the sex wasn’t any better. For that I’m willing to bother with complicated installations as a last resort unless someone recommended the solution (personally). First kiss (installation experience) must be smooth! :-)

Next… Jahia, installation OK, after that I can finally see some public page! After logout it’s more difficult though. Trouble here was the pricing. It really is quite serious for commercial usage, starting at roughly 2k EUR. That would be too much for our little site and customer’s budget. Too bad, Jahia seemed really cool! For non-commercial usage I’ll probably return to it.

This was the time when I risked a little PHP detour with Joomla! (exclamation is part of the name) – it was OK, but than I went through the idea of mixing Java application into PHP – with the same user base… hardly possible (only on DB access base, hard to cache, too many problems!). Otherwise it’s cool and definitely refreshing after previous Java experiences. Again – I could quickly see how visitors see my page. Somehow this became my favourite requirement. For any simple site (personal for instance) I want to edit without messing with HTML (I can write HTML code – of course!) I’d go for Joomla!! (Remember, first exclamation mark is part of the name. :-) )

Running out of options I installed dotCMS after all… and maybe I’ll try to go beyond not-so-perfect kissing with girls the next time as well. It felt better than previous products, but when I wanted to add blog post without proper relation, error message was really confusing. Also the switch to edit mode was unintuitive because ordinary access to the page always opened the edit sidebar and I wasn’t able to get rid off it (no, logout is not the answer I’m looking for). Documentation would probably help, but… I guess easy things should be easy and content should be editable on place like in Joomla – of course not only, but optionally. Still one of those better CMS for someone who is not CMS expert. Maybe.

Time to install OpenCMS as well. The results were quite similar to dotCMS but I didn’t dig deep enough this time because suddenly I had some spare time to do other things as well. And I decided that I have enough of all CMS solutions. I seemed to me that these solutions are meant for companies who need CMS for their own needs, not for companies delivering sites with CMS features. Nor Wiki or pure Blog are good enough either – although the blog idea is quite close.

I’m really lazy to study things so it seems. It’s only half of the truth because when something grabs me I can devote the time to it. But as a CMS outsider I have to say – nothing really grabbed me. If something it was PHP. Is there any good Java-based CMS? I don’t know – probably yes. But I can’t go through them all. I read the blogs, I searched for the stuff, maybe I was unlucky, the result is… well, I’m a programmer. So yes, I’m creating CMS functionality now – half/half for fun and for work. Because I know a few things for sure. When you want to bend a wheel, sometimes it’s easier to do so with the wheel you invented. Life is full of sayings and truths – but no truth is universal after all. :-) I am probably mistaken with my current stand, but it’s hard not to be when you lack the proper experiences. At least I’ll learn some new technologies along the way. And I’ll not fight other’s solutions (however great they are) but I’ll do what I like – software development. That’s also something.

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