Speeding up development by splitting a webapp into parts

I love tagfiles: they feature a well known syntax (EL from JSP), they allow for reusable UI components, they are well supported by my favourite IDE and, most importantly, modifications are instantly visible because the servlet container does not have to restart. At least in theory, because reality often looks different: after a few edits … Continue reading Speeding up development by splitting a webapp into parts →

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 →