A Clever Hack

Once in a while you see things and think "Seems so simple, Why didn't I think of that?". This Hack by Aza Raskin belongs to that Category. He created a simple and smart way to read user browser history. In the example here, Aza is maintaining an array all the social networking sites he is aware of and checking which of those site the user has visited. How can he do that? By checking the color of link referring the Site. In his own words:

By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.

Why we need to care for Net neutrality

iPhone like Android Demo

Darren Waters of BBC interviewed Andy Rubin Google's director of mobile platforms who provided a demo of Android Phone. The phone is based on touch screen and shows features similar to Apple iPhone running on 300MHz (Compared to iPhone which is a 600MHz phone) and also running on 3G Network (3G iPhone is still in the works). Looks like iPhone killer phones may be based on Android.

I have been playing with Android API for a while now and I have to say though there are improvements to be made, Android API is superior Java API compared to any phone in market today based on JavaME.

Go Daddy: Configure Apache HTTPd as a reverse proxy for Tomcat

Configuring Apache HTTPd as reverse proxy is one way to re-route requests to Tomcat from Apache. This post addresses how to do that for Dedicated Virtual Hosting at GoDaddy.com. Doing this requires simple configuration changes as described below:

1. Find httpd.conf file (usually located at /etc/httpd/conf).
2. Make sure the following lines are not commented in the file (by default they are not commented).
LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
3. Add the following lines to enable the proxy to http.conf assuming you want to enable the servlet-examples webapps that comes with Tomcat installation (better to add at the end of the file):
ProxyPass /servlets-examples http://localhost:9080/servlets-examples
ProxyPassreverse / http://localhost:9080/
4. Restart Apache (using /usr/sbin/apachectl).

Now type http://www.yoururl.com/servlets-examples/ in your browser and you will be able to execute the Servlet samples.

Java is everywhere

Not sure how this is missed but SUN seem to have started posting to YouTube on how Java is Everywhere. Good PR to the minimum:

RIP Netscape Navigator

AOL has announced that its discontinuing support for Netscape Web Browser. Though it was just matter of when, somehow I still have nostalgic feelings and fond memories of Netscape. Without Netscape, Internet would not have been what it is today. Some of the contributions from Netscape are good and some are bad but when Internet history is being written Netscape would have a chapter of its own. Remember Netscape used to have "About the Internet" menu item instead of About Netscape?

Its sad that winners are out of business and losers are making Billions. When Microsoft started giving away IE free and embedded in windows it has 2 goals:
1. Destroy Netscape
2. Avoid paying to Spyglass (Spyglass's contract with Microsoft required Microsoft pay to Spyglass for using its code in IE only if Microsoft makes money on IE).
Microsoft accomplished both the goals and got sued by both Netscape and Spyglass. Both Netscape and Spyglass won in the court but are out of business today while Microsoft still makes Billions. The world is a strange place :-)

Amazon Kindle has JVM

Amazon Kindle seems to be heavy on Java. All the applications running seems to be developed in Java. From the look of the files existing on Kindle, it appears Kindle is using CDC and CVM. If Amazon opens up Kindle, it would become a great programming device for Java Developers soon and most widely available CDC device. According to Tritschler opening up kindle API's is a future direction.

Looking at contents of Kindle has the following files indicating its CDC based implementation:
/usr/java/bin/cvm
/usr/java/lib/jsse-cdc.jar


All the applications (Some of which are not made public exist as java applications based on existence of following jar files:

/opt/amazon/ebook/booklet:
AudiblePlayer.jar
AudioPlayer.jar
Browser.jar
ContentManager.jar
Demo.jar
Experimental.jar
Home.jar
MobiReader.jar
PictureViewer.jar
PrefBooklet.jar
Search.jar
XymlBooklet.jar
msp.jar


/opt/amazon/ebook/lib:
MobiCore-impl.jar
MobipocketCoreReader.jar
ReaderSDK.jar
SearchSDK.jar
framework-api.jar
framework-impl.jar
jdbm.jar
json.jar
kxml2.jar
xyml.jar