Onyxbits

I just noticed something funny. Normally, the daily routine of a website owner is all about getting more visitors (preferably from search engines) and getting less spam.

Now, I made a mistake with this project, resulting in getting hit hard by a spambot. The project in question features a bugtracker module and I honestly thought, limiting posting bug reports to registered users and protecting the signup form with a math CAPTCHA would suffice to lock spammers out. I could not have been more wrong about it.

Well, Java is cross platform, granted. But if you want your application to look native to the user's desktop environment, you have to jump through a lot of hoops (and some of them are burning, too). Take icons, for example. Nowadays, an application is expected to use icons in menuentries and on the toolbar to increase usability. Nothing wrong with that, except that Swing does not ship with any. You have to provide your own and you have to bundle them with your application. For Windows and MacOS, that's ok.

Hooray! I finally opened my ScenePainter website up for the public, did some minor SEO for it and after only about a week or two, my most diligent user is a russian spambot. It visits me about once every half an hour and tries to publish it's crap in a "head against the wall fashion": It first tries to log in, then attempts to add a new node eleven(!) times, but fails on several required fields.

Know what I really hate about Java? This half-assed attempt at establishing a virtual filesystem. On one hand, you have the java.io package by which you can access the native filesystem of the host OS, on the other, you are suppose to load every application resource via ClassLoader.findResource(). Got a resource, you can't reasonably bundle in a JAR file (e.g. because you have to update/modify it occasionally)? Tough luck!

Seems like Java developers shun the idea of having to do anything out of their cozy virtual machine, so I couldn't find any good code examples for doing this problem: Fork a new JVM from your current JVM and capture it's stdout/stderr stream to a JTextArea. Allow the user to kill the subprocess at any time.

Well, here's my solution:

import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.io.*;
 
public class ForkDemo implements ActionListener {
 
  protected JTextArea output = new JTextArea(10,20);

I have this love/hate relationship with SATA hard disks. Today, my father had this problem again, of his PC not booting. It happens once every few months and the problem always has the same symptoms: the computer slowly crawls through the BIOS POST, has trouble detecting the hard drives, and then ultimately fails at the bootloader.
Every time, I keep telling (and showing) him, it's due to a loose contact in the SATA data cable and fixing the problem is as easy as shoving the plug properly back into it's socket. Yet, every time, I have to get involved in this.

I hereby proclaim that I now officially hate Twitter. The usability of that microblogging "service" is absurd to put it mildly. It's beyond me, why people would even want to use it, let alone, feel the need to tell the world about when they get up, eat dinner, and go to bed again. Making heads or tail out of individual tweets, without knowing their context, is a horse of a different color altogether. But does that mean that Drupal's twitter module (v6x-3.0-beta3) has to be equally braindead in design!?

Drupal informs me that my blog account is now 2 years and 22 weeks old. When I initially setup this website, I had the choice of going either with a dedicated server again or to try out a virtual private server. I opted with the later and I guess now would be a good time to take stock of hosting plans.

Cost

I keep repeating the same stupid mistake over and over again: A friend needs a tool to accomplish $FOO, so I quickly hack together a simple BAR application that should do the trick. I test it and after deciding that it can't possibly break, my friend manages to break it in an instant. Now, the fun starts. I pretty much know that an exception must have been thrown somewhere. The only problem is accessing it. These days, users are just so incapable of running a program from the commandline, in order to copy and paste whatever got written to the console.