Yacoblog - Technology

Setup Linksys WRT54G as a bridge

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:55:00 -0600

I have a bunch of networkable devices in my entertainment center in the living room. I wanted to find out of I could buy a cheap wireless router and then set it up as a bridge to our primary wireless router, instead of running an Ethernet cable to the living room. I found a way to do this. As the title says, I did this using a Linksys WRT54G (I found a cheap one on ebay). The primary router can be any brand/model, because you just connect to it like a normal WiFi client (you don't make any settings changes on the primary router). To make this work, you have to download and flash a 3rd party firmware called DD-WRT. This is free, and it adds some extra features to your WRT54G (it also supports some other routers on the market, btw). After you've flashed the DD-WRT firmware, you can follow this tutorial for configuring the second router as a client-bridge.

Upgrading my wife's PC = My wife ROCKS

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:35:00 -0600

Ok, that title may sound cryptic until you hear this story. First a little background. When I met my wife, I was instantly attracted to her because of her brain. She told me she is interested in sci-fi/fantasy books, likes computers and games, and had a job doing PC support stuff. So I'm telling myself...how can I ever expect to find another girl like this? I've got to snatch up this opportunity! Our courtship was actually a lot more complicated than that, but you guys probably don't care to hear all the extra details. :) Also, Dyany is not really passionate about nerdy PC stuff. She mainly uses her PC for games and web surfing/email. She never reads technical mailing lists/forums, doesn't keep up with the latest trends, and doesn't even have an IT job anymore (but she had one for a few years, a few years ago). But, her brain retains information like a sponge, so every little IT fact she's ever learned is still in there, for the most part. I have tried to talk her into learning ColdFusion, but she's not interested. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. So anyway, last month my wife's PC hard drive was showing signs of imminent death. So we launched the process of getting a replacement and migrating all the data between hard drives. The reason I put "My wife ROCKS" in my post title is because of how this all went down. First of all, she tells me she wants a 1 TB hard drive. Now that in itself is amazing. How many of your wives would even know what that means, let alone know that this is the amount of space she needs? I should note here that we use my wife's PC as our home "server", and we store all of our music, pictures, and videos on there, so that's why she asked for 1 TB. So we buy the drive from newegg, and while it's in route my wife starts planning how we're going to migrate the data. Again, this fact alone is astounding compared to most other women out there. She knew that her old drive is SATA, and the new one we bought is SATA. So she asked me if we had an extra SATA cable. We did, but when the drive shows up I found out that her mobo only has one SATA port. So Dyany goes out and finds a free imaging utility and takes an image of the old hard drive (she stores it on a second hard drive in the machine). I swap out the drives for her (she's not a hardware person). Then she puts the image on the new hard drive. She even did some partition reorganization, with a little help from me. So I ask you guys, how cool is my wife? :D

Do Computer Illiterate People Scare You?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:32:00 -0600

My post title might make you believe I'm going to bash non-techies, or maybe I'm trying to be funny. But I'm dead serious. Thinking about people that don't use computers scares me. Literally. Let me explain. [More]

Lasso: Another CFML competitor

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:58:00 -0600

Many of you have probably heard of Lasso, but it was new to me. Which is sad considering that it was first released in 1996 (making it only 1 year younger than ColdFusion). Lasso is a web server language, similar to ColdFusion and PHP. One thing it shares with ColdFusion is that it's tag based, similar to HTML. However, with Lasso you use [] brackets instead of <>. Also, Lasso has a full blown scripting version of the language, for those that prefer coding styles similar to PHP and asp.net. Another thing that Lasso shares with ColdFusion is that it's not free. In fact, Lasso has similar prices as ColdFusion. They don't have an Enterprise version, but the Professional version costs $649. However, they have a development studio (like ColdFusion used to) that costs $199. One big difference between Lasso and ColdFusion is platform support. Lasso is cross platform, but it doesn't support as many operating systems as ColdFusion. Also, it doesn't support as many databases out of the box, but you can access any ODBC/JDBC datasource. I also found it interesting that Lasso has ImageMagick built in to give full image manipulation capabilities, features that are just arriving in ColdFusion 8. Also, Lasso has built-in PDF generation capabilities. I'm not sure if you can work with PDF forms, as will be possible in ColdFusion 8. An interesting historical footnote about Lasso, is that it was originally based on a C/C++ CGI written by Vince Bonfanti (as referenced in the timeline on their site). For those who don't know, Vince is the President of New Atlanta, makers of BlueDragon (another CFML server language).

CFFormProtect: invisible, accessible, automated spam bot killer

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 10:11:00 -0600

I just released a new version of CFFormProtect. CFFormProtect is a fully accessible, invisible to your users form protection system to stop spam bots, and even human spammers. CFFormProtect works like some email spam protection systems, in that it uses a series of tests to find out if a form submission is from a spammer or not. Each test is given an amount of points, and each test that fails accumulates points. Once a form submission passes the threshold of 'spamminess', the message is flagged as spam and is not posted. The points assigned to each test and the failure limit are configurable by you the developer. Click here to download CFFormProtect. CFFormProtect uses these tests to stop spam:

Mouse movement-Did the user move their mouse? If not, it might be a spammer. This test is not very strong because lots of people, including the blind, don't use a mouse when filling out forms. Thus I give this test a low point level by default.
Keyboard used-Did the user type on their keyboard? This is a fairly strong test, because almost everybody will need to use their keyboard when filling out a form (unless they have one of those form filler browser plugins)
Timed form submission-How long did it take to fill out the form? A spam bot will usually fail this test because it's automated. Also, sometimes spam bot software will have cached form contents, so the form will look like it took days to fill out. This test checks for an upper and lower time limit, and these values can be easily changed to suit your needs.
Hidden form field-Most spam bots just fill out all form fields and submit them. This test uses a form field that is hidden by CSS, and tests to make sure that field is empty. If a blind person's screen reader sees this hidden field, there is a field label telling them not to fill it out.
Akismet-All of the above tests can be easily bypassed if a spammer hires cheap labor to manually fill out forms. However, Akismet attempts to stop that as well. Akismet is a service provided by the folks that run WordPress. The free service (for personal use) takes form contents as input, and returns a yes/no value to tell you if the submission is spam. This test is disabled by default because you have to obtain an API key. This is easy to do, and CFFormProtect is easy to configure if you want to use Akismet.

The beauty of CFFormProtect is that any of the above tests can fail, and the spam bot can still be stopped. By default, CFFormProtect will stop spam if any two tests fail. One test, Akismet, is configured strong enough to flag form contents as spam by itself. And all of this is possible without making your users type in hard to read text, and without blocking the poor blind folks. And you don't have to maintain a black list or use an approval queue. You can view the project page here at RIAForge.

Microsoft doesn't recognize their own OS

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:01:00 -0600

I've got a new Windows Mobile smart phone. It's been crashing and freezing up a lot (no surprise, it's Windows). I thought MS might have Windows Update setup to show updates for Windows Mobile, so I fired up Internet Explorer on my phone and went to update.microsoft.com. This is the error message I got: You'd think Microsoft's website would be smart enough to recognize this useragent as their own operating system: HTC-8500/1.2 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)

Use Google Mobile for Accessibility Testing

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 18:17:00 -0600

Ever wonder how accessible your site is to blind people? Sure, you can follow all the rules out there, like adding alt text to images. But if you really want to see how well your site 'reads', you'd ask a blind person right? Well, there's an easier way. [More]

Should I Make CFQuickDocs Open Source?

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:37:00 -0600

I've been toying with this idea for a few months, and I decided to throw the question out to you guys. I have a lot of good ideas for CFQuickDocs, but I don't have time to implement them all. Also, I wrote the base code before I'd learned a LOT of better techniques, so it's a little cumbersome to work with. It's not horrible, I'm using CFCs and I tried to make maintenance as easy as possible. But particularly the code for scraping LiveDocs is pretty difficult to navigate. That piece needs some attention. [More]

1st impression means a LOT for developers

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:05:00 -0600

We all know that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but we also know that everybody does it. Programming languages/projects are no exception. ColdFusion has a reputation of being bloated and too simple for large projects. [More]

Joel Spolsky errors about SQL injection

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:30:00 -0600

Today Joel Spolsky mentioned SQL injection on his blog, and stated that if you are in the practice of directly dumping strings from user input into your DB, it would be easy to hack your DB if you close the string, insert a semi-colon and create a second SQL statement like so:


foo'; delete * from accounts

Just enter the above 'code' into the form and you've manually deleted the contents of their accounts table, right (assuming they have a table named 'accounts')? Only if you're using Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Server allows you to send multiple commands from an outside source. This is VERY insecure, for the above reason. In Joel's example, the error message he got shows that the site he is referencing is powered by MySQL. I have dealt with Oracle and DB2 and I know those DBs don't allow multiple sql statements in one 'session' from an external source (session means one cfquery tag in this case). ~~I'm assuming that MySQL won't allow this either (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).~~ Update: I just tested this, thanks to a comment left by Jacek, and MySQL will not allow multiple SQL statements from one cfquery tag. We in the ColdFusion community know that you should always CFQueryParam your variables in queries. Not only is this safer (it would stop the above attack), but it usually makes your queries quicker. This is because ColdFusion will create a "Prepared Statement", which is a fancy way of saying it will pre-compile the query. Then the DB just runs it without compilation. That said, Microsoft assumes that the developer is always going to use things like CFQueryParam in their code. Oracle and IBM, on the other hand, try not to let the developer make mistakes like this.

BlogCFC tip: HTML Tables in Your Entry

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:39:00 -0600

In my last post about CFQuickDocs stats, I had a table of the top 50 tag and function lookups. When I pasted the table into the body box, it was formatted with carriage returns and tabs. When I posted the entry, there was a LOT of vertical space above the table (3-4 pages worth). I figured out the problem. [More]

CFQuickDocs Stats: Top 50 Queries

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:28:00 -0600

3 weeks ago I added logging to CFQuickDocs so that I could see what people are looking for. The results are interesting, so I thought I'd publish them here. [More]

CFFormProtect: User Friendly CAPTCHA

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 09:33:00 -0600

I've released a new open source project called CFFormProtect, hosted at RIAForge. CFFormProtect attempts to be more user friendly than the obfuscated text CAPTCHA that is common in web forms. CFFormProtect displays three pictures of common objects, and the user is asked to click on the correct image. This is a variation of CAPTCHA I've read about, but haven't seen in use. Here is a screenshot of CFFormProtect in action:
Features:

Displays as a CSS div on top of the page, near the middle
Image names are obfuscated, so bots can't read them.
Images are displayed in random order.
If user selects wrong image, a new random set is created if they try again.
Any 3 images can be dropped in and CFFormProtect will automatically use them.
Works on any operating system (most CF CAPTCHA packages only work on Windows servers).
Drop into your web root and use for all sites.
Form action page is protected as well (spam bots often directly access the form processor).
Easily customize the display text and error messages.
Customize the formatting with CSS.

Head on over to the project page and check it out. If you have any feedback, please send it my way. It is an open source project, after all. :)

RIAForge: SourceForge for Adobe developers

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 04:56:00 -0600

I just saw an announcement from Ray Camden on CFTalk about a new open source hosting site for Adobe products like ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, etc. It's called RIAForge, and it's similar to SourceForge, or Google Code, but specific to Adobe products. This is awesome news for me, because I've been on the verge of releasing a new open source captcha type project, but I didn't want to build a new site for it.

Unit Tests Are the Answer for Duck Typing

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:18:00 -0600

Today in discussion about Static vs. Dynamic typing, Mike Moore (who runs the Boise Ruby on Rails group), posted a link to a blog post by Bob Martin where the case is made for using unit tests to catch any possible typing errors. I really liked this quote: "I tried writing some applications in Python, and then Ruby (well known dynamically typed languages). I was not entirely surprised when I found that type issues simply never arose. My unit tests kept my code on the straight and narrow. I simply didn't need the static type checking that I had depended upon for so many years." This makes sense. We know that ColdFusion is a dynamically typed language (as I think it should be), but if you throw static types out the window, you could run into data corruption problems. However, if you build solid unit tests, that shouldn't be a problem. The unit tests will catch any data problems you might run into.