HTTP: The importance of declaring non-cachable resources as such

It works fine with Chrome and it fails on an Android 2.3 browser - the page is performing an XmlHttpRequest to the server for a resource that just changed for sure and yet it gets back an older version. That's the result of a. the browser assuming a resource is cachable even if no Etag … Continue reading HTTP: The importance of declaring non-cachable resources as such →

sshfileuploader: uploading large files over ssh over an unreliable connection

I'm having for the last month a very bad internet connection which makes it almost impossible to upload files anywhere: drive, facebook or WARs to my toy server. Especially the latter one is really annoying as the SSH connection will really abort with an ugly network error. I suspect a misconfiguration in the TCP/IP settings … Continue reading sshfileuploader: uploading large files over ssh over an unreliable connection →

mdadm woes

After migrating a software RAID 5 to Ubuntu LTS 12.04, the system wouldn't come up again after rebooting. I believe Chris Siebenmann to splendidly have analysed [1] the problem: a race condition with udev losing the race. His solution is to: Change /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/mdadm-functionsas follows: degraded_arrays() { + udevadm settle mdadm --misc --scan --detail --test >/dev/null … Continue reading mdadm woes →

Internet Explorer: Disabling clicks on a page

Disabling clicks on a webpage should be easy: put a div in front of it with a fixed position which should get all clicks. With IE that is not easy because a completely transparent element will forward clicks to the underlying element. Some solutions I found: Alpha filter with background Adding these CSS properties (IE8 … Continue reading Internet Explorer: Disabling clicks on a page →

Internet Explorer, zooming and resize events

My current project (cat4trad) for the European Parliament, which involves heavily GWT and javascript in bringing a seamless user experience to translators, we frequently run into issues with different browsers. The one I run into today was about a window resize event not being detected by IE8 and IE9. This simple test should always print … Continue reading Internet Explorer, zooming and resize events →