My two weeks in QA
We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce - not the quantity of the product, but the quality. [Lister, DeMarco: "...
Recent Posts
MS SMTP Pickup Doesn’t Strip BCC
...when a message containing a "Bcc:" field is prepared to be sent, the "Bcc:" line is removed even though all of the recipients (including those specified ...
UK county codes
If you have ever developed an application where users can enter US addresses, then you have probably implemented a state control. Maybe it was just a text f...
Regular Expressions Suck at Preventing XSS
Depending on who you listen to, XSS is now the top computer security vulnerability, having passed the venerable SQL injection in 2007. If you're a developer...
Deploying Jersey to JBOSS
I spent the afternoon playing around with Jersey in JBOSS. Jersey is a Java API for publishing REST web-services, and JBOSS is the application server we use...
Mint.com backup
Mint.com is a great personal finance tool. I started using it once I made the switch to Linux at home. I used to use Quicken, but I really didn't want to co...
blogger backup
Want to backup your Blogger posts? Here is a quick Python script that does just that. It will create an HTML file for each post, with the subject of the pos...
Java phone number format API
So, you have a database with millions of phone numbers with free-for-all formatting. Ie, the UI does not enforce any constraints and the users are typing in...
Keep those passwords safe
The easiest way to guess a password isn't to guess it at all, but to exploit the inherent insecurity in the underlying operating system. Bruce Schneier
Regular Expression: Negative Lookahead Part II
When we left off, I had set out to replace any ampersand outside a CDATA segment with the XML encoded version. Instead of ditching the regex approach and us...