The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Unlike every other email program on the planet, Mozilla Thunderbird requires one to use mime related instead of mixed mode to embed images within email attachments using the cid stuff.  This has caused me great pain this week.  Outlook worked, iphones worked, windows mail in vista, web based mail, gmail, ... everything except Thunderbird. 

Our implementation sends embedded mails using the javamail api.  Use  final Multipart mp = new MimeMultipart("related");

        // now do the image file attachments
            Set keys;
            keys = images.keySet();

            for (Object key : keys)
            {
                String hashkey = (String) key;
                final MimeBodyPart mbp2 = new MimeBodyPart();
                final DataSource source = new FileDataSource( images.get( hashkey ) ) {

                    @Override
                    public String getContentType()
                    {
                        return "image/jpeg";
                    }
                };
                mbp2.setDataHandler( new DataHandler( source ) );
                mbp2.setHeader( "Content-ID", "<i" + hashkey + ">" );
                mbp2.setFileName( hashkey + ".jpg" );  // temporary hack
                mbp2.setDisposition( Part.INLINE );
                mp.addBodyPart( mbp2 );
            }

I just realized I had a permissions error causing bind to fail since stargazer went down for most of my domains.  Holy crap.

 http://www.gnu.org/server/server.html

According to this website, the GNU runs Debian Linux on servers.  They mention the use of non- Free software in Debian.  They justify the use citing the removal of this software.  However, the GNU recommends not using the software because other users are too stupid to know what non-Free software is.  

I find it amazing they don't drink their own kool-aid.  If you're going to recommend Linux distros to others, use them yourself.  It would be like me not running MidnightBSD on my webserver.  

Actually, their website should be running on GNU/HURD right now and not Linux.  

I've also noticed they're starting to call it the GNU Operating System now.  I've heard this rhetoric before.  When GNU HURD is usable, then they can claim they have an operating system.  The core of any operating system is it's kernel and they don't have one.  They have a dream of a kernel that they've restarted on at least three times.  The kernel is the most important part of any operating system.  Without a kernel, you have nothing. Your computer cannot do any useful function.

In other areas, they've also shown a defensive.  They stopped working with BSD projects on support for software components.  It's so bad that the BSD community is working on alternate compilers, assemblers, linkers, replacements for autoconf, etc.  The other day I read about an alternative to diff! 

Once again, the GNU has proven that the "GNU is not UNIX".  

 Wow I haven't blogged for a month.  My trip to germany went OK.  I found that I like German beer more than I should.  I also got a chance to meet another BSD developer in Germany.  That was nice.  It's good to talk to someone that understands all the work to build an operating system.  

I've spent the last week working on a newsletter that will never get complete.  The client hates it.  It's a large automotive company.  Next week I must rewrite the mail send code to selectively attach images because their ancient Lotus Notes environment can't handle IMAGES in HTML email.  Cheap bastards, call IBM.  

MidnightBSD progress has been slow.  I just want 0.3 out the door so I can start on something new.

Last November, I bought an Iomega Prestige USB 1.5 TB HDD at Best Buy.  It was used to backup the new hard drive I had to buy for my iMac.  The drive has been disconnecting or powering off when in use.  I've tried connecting it to my PC running Vista and Caryn's Mac Pro with no luck.  I contacted Iomega and they sent me a new power adapter.  That did not work.  I suspected the enclosure.  Last night, I gave up and pulled the drive from the enclosure and ran a Samsung tool on it.  The sector scan passed.  The drive itself is fine as far as I can tell.  I'm just going to order a new enclosure for it.

I'm writing this blog entry from javajj running on MidnightBSD on top of OpenJDK6.

This is awesome.

http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/ 

Skipfish is a  "

 fully automated, active web application security reconnaissance tool"

It is a c program used for checking web apps for issues.  I've managed to compile it on MidnightBSD and FreeBSD.  Here are a few required changes:

malloc_np.h is required on FreeBSD and MidnightBSD.  

There are a few preprocessor directives checking for FreeBSD.  These will need to be altered to include MidnightBSD or else the code will not compile.  This was only tested on MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT 

I just spent the last few hours updating firefox on MidnightBSD.  It's always a tiresome experience.  It's great to have a newer browser with some level of security available though.  mports/www/browser35 for those interested

One of the tasks I've been given at work is to write and maintain a newsletter generation tool.  Most people think of it as a simple application that sends and email with some canned text, maybe customized with the persons name similar to the "mergemail" feature in word.  

Well that's only part of what this application does.  It generates four different formats of newsletter, HTML, Text, PDF and a special HTML version to send with the PDF.  The PDFs are 50 pages long for one client everyday.  Today, I had to add stock price monitoring to the newsletter tool.  It checks the price of the stock on regular intervals (hourly) and includes the current price when the newsletter is sent out for this client.  I spent way too much time on this, but I have a feeling it will come up again.

Like everyone else on the Internet, I used Yahoo! Finance data as a source.   You can output a CSV directly from their web app and even query multiple symbols.  I limited it to hourly lookups and then only during market hours using a cron job.  This is probably the 7th cron job running.  They're all Java apps right now.  

I'm really torn on the whole Java thing with this. I think Perl or C would be better choices.  However, since the database schema changes constantly, I just used a jar file containing all the database stuff and pop it in when I do a schema change.  It really simplifies updating them.  

I hate spec changes, but it's common place at my company.  You can never get someone to tell you the whole story at any time or even half the story.  When you do get the story, you find it's changed from the week before.  

Anyway, the stock fetcher is pretty simple and slick.  I just used a Java Url class to fetch the data and then an open source library (LGPL) to parse the csv.  It's easy to parse CSV files yourself, but I didn't feel like taking the time.  

It runs through a loop and checks for each symbol stored in the database with a 30 second pause so as to not klll Yahoo's service.  

I had a fun bug today using html clean and jtidy together.  It seems jtidy was re-encoding the HTML entities again like ampersand so it was screwing up non breaking space, greater than, less than and apostrophe characters in the HTML output.  I have to run both because jtidy sucks.  It doesn't fix several types of invalid HTML.  If I ever get time, I'll try to fix it and upstream it. 

According to this BBC article, U2 brought in the most money last year. I can't speak for others, but the Chicago concert rocked.

I've noticed a new pattern among game developers.  Software has always been licensed, but now we're only buying unkown length licenses to these products.  With a game like World of Warcraft, I know I'm subscribing month to month, but I don't know if they will keep running the server indefinetely.  Eventually the game will die.  WIth a MMORPG, this is acceptible and inevitable.  However, other games like the new Assassin's Creed 2 require a constant Internet connection to play.  They actually download part of the game engine on each load.  If they decide to turn off the servers or go out of business, you lose access to the game forever.  This is the same problem that happened on the Xbox.  I bought an Xbox to play games online.  Soon, EA started turning off sports titles servers.  They want you to buy the new title each year.  That means I'm paying $50 a year to keep playing and the game experience changes each year.  Perhaps with an NBA game, I want to play the Pistons in 2004 instead of 2010.  I realize it costs some money to run servers, but this is rediculous.  Either they build in the cost to run the game servers for several years into the game or they warn people that the servers are only guranteed up for a year. 

I'm in favor of explicit minimums on the boxes (by date).  I want to know if the game comes out March 2010 that it will work until at least March 2011.  I also want to know in February 2011 that I have a month to play possibly.  It dramatically changes how much I'm willing to pay for a title.  If it's so important, they can add a sticker if they extend the time frame to the box.  This is only reasonable.  With other subscription models, I know how long I have.  SInce I'm obviously paying for server time now, I should know how long it lasts. 

I often buy games on Steam.  I know that if Valve decides to pull the plug, I could lose all those games.  It's a risk I've chosen to take.  WIth some games, I don't know how long i have now and in a retail box from a store like best buy, I expect to play the game for several years.  I still play age of empires 2.  I love it.  The game doesn't even run on 64bit windows, but I still play!  I even run 32bit windows just to play.  What if I like a game?  Will I be cut off forever?