Http is a stateless protocol. To work around the problems caused by this, web applications have the concept of a session. When a user requests a webpage for the first time the user is assigned a unique 32 character string. This string can be send along in subsequent requests to indicate that these requests are […]
Password protecting web applications in tomcat.
A few days back I wanted to take an existing application, deploy it to a staging environment and password protect it without having to change the application code. How hard can it be right? As it turns out it’s not that hard but way, way harder than it should be. There doesn’t seem to be […]
Disabling the Firefox DNS cache
If you, like me, make frequent changes to your host file, for instance because your staging and production environment both listen to the same vhost. You will have probably noticed that it takes Firefox a while to pick up on the alterations you made. This is because in order to improve performance by default Firefox […]
JIRA firefox plugin
For all the JIRA users out there. I just created a very simple JIRA plugin that allows you to add your JIRA instance as a search site in the Search Bar in the upper-right corner of Firefox. Who knows you may find it useful. You can find out more about it here
Crashing notepad
Even though it’s kind of cheap to point and laugh at Microsoft’s “industrial strength” products I didn’t want to deny anyone this screenshot. I created a shortcut that automatically opens my hostfile using notepad by specifying the following target : %windir%\system32\notepad.exe %windir%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts and then tried to save my hostfile under a different name using save […]
Making Putty and Tortoise CVS remember your password.
Every time I do a fresh install of my pc I spend at least 30 minutes figuring out how how to set this up because neither of these programs come with password caching and the workaround is neither obvious nor simple. So I decided to document the process on my blog 1) Downloading the tools […]