However lately I believe companies are pushing us to reach new levels of our brain or something. I’ve been seeing more policies where you have to have numbers, letters, special characters and capitalized letters in it. Oh and to top it of it can’t be a password you had in the past, or a incremental version of that (eg: test1 to test10).

Now lets examine how usefull such a policy is. I used to have pretty strong passwords, hard to guess and difficult to crack. Now that my passwords have to be so complicated I’m resorting to putting post-its on my screen with the passwords again. Very insecure and very easy to hack.

This first version includes:

1. Custom drop down arrows for disabled / mouse over and default combobox states
2. Ability to change the border styles of the drop down part as well as the combobox itself
3. Supports translating the following elements in comboboxes:
   1. select element
   2. ul & ol element

Please note: as this is the first release there may still be some bugs in the code, please feel free to contact me if you find any and I will attempt to solve them as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately the work halted when I ran into serious issues with our beloved website full with frames. But I am continuing it in my spare time as a research project. So soon more on this adventure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

So I’ve been using HTC phones for several years now and so far I’ve liked every single phone I’ve had. But the Desire was my switch from Windows Mobile to the Android platform, and I was very worried about the switch to say the least.

First impression of the Desire

After switching on the phone for the first time I went through the setup procedure, which is as simple as 1, 2, 3. So thank god for that, it’s a huge step up from Windows Mobile 5.

I have to give HTC one thing, the phone response very well to any time you touch the screen. It’s probably the capacitive screen, but its a whole lot better then what I was used to.  Just after first boot you will probably play around a little with the widgets that are included.

As the Sense interface gives you 7 different tabs that you can put widgets on it will take you some time to configure it to your likings. Which is as much a blessing as a curse, especially in when you are just using the phone for the first time. Luckily the phone comes with several presets for the Sense interface.

My biggest concern was migrating all my data from Windows Mobile to the Android platform. And unfortunately my worries where right. So Google step up to the plate and make migrating from different phone platforms easier. It’s impossible to migrate text messages or call history without doing a lot of manual work.

The good the bad and the ugly

So what’s up with this phone. Is it a good thing to buy or good gift to get . Well it sorta depends on what you are expecting. If you want a phone that gives you a lot of access to your social networks, then yeah it might be something for you. If you want something that just enables you to call and send text message, then please don’t waste your money on the Desire.  It’ll do the job but at a high price.

Having said that here are some of the pro’s and con’s of the phone:

Screenshot of Captcha

Now I know I’m not an expert on the usability side of things, but why do you need to enter a captcha code after correctly entering both your username and the password. This sersiously makes me wonder if it would not be better to erase my LinkedIn account. Unfortunately that would require me to login, now if I were only able to read the damn image.

Note: some parts of this script rely on the ant-contrib library. Download this library and include it in the tomcat.xml with the following code:

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties">
 <classpath>
  <pathelement location="./ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar"/>
 </classpath>
</taskdef>

Starting tomcat

Though starting tomcat may seem easy. You could just use the development IDE (like Netbeans) to start and stop Tomcat, but what this lacks is the ability to control several instances with easy shortcuts. So I defined the following Ant macrodef in a file called tomcat.xml:

<macrodef name="tomcat-start">
 <sequential>
   <trycatch>
    <try>
      <if>
       <not><http url="http://localhost"/></not>
       <then>
         <java classname="org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap"
             fork="yes"
             dir="${tomcat.dir}"
             spawn="true"
             jvm="${tomcat.java.home}/bin/java">
          <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.home=${tomcat.dir}"/>
          <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.base=${tomcat.dir}"/>
          <jvmarg value="-Djava.io.tmpdir=${tomcat.dir}/temp"/>
          <jvmarg value="-Djava.endorsed.dirs=${tomcat.dir}/common/endorsed"/>
          <jvmarg value="-Xdebug"/>
          <jvmarg value="-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n"/>
          <classpath>
           <pathelement location="${tomcat.java.home}/lib/tools.jar"/>
           <pathelement location="${tomcat.dir}/bin/bootstrap.jar"/>
          </classpath>

          <arg line="start" />
         </java>

         <waitfor maxwait="10" maxwaitunit="second" checkevery="5000">
          <http url="http://localhost"/>
         </waitfor>
         <echo message="Tomcat started"/>
       </then>
       <else>
        <echo message="Tomcat already started..." />
       </else>
     </if>
    </try>
    <catch>
     <echo message="Unable to start tomcat"/>
    </catch>
  </trycatch>
 </sequential>
</macrodef>

This macro is really easy. First it starts of by checking if tomcat is not already running (well actually it just checks to see if there is something running on port 80). If nothing is running then tomcat is started using the java defined by the ant property tomcat.java.home. This macro also depends on some other properties that are set by a different macro, which will be a bit further on in the post. Tomcat is started by using the Bootloader class provided by the server, to make sure it loads correctly the classpath is set.

The last step in the macro is to wait for tomcat to start, this has to be done since we start tomcat in a seperate java instance (the spawn option).

Stopping Tomat

Off course you also want to be able to stop tomcat to load some new data, or an entire web-app. I use the following macro to stop Tomcat:

<macrodef name="tomcat-stop">
 <sequential>
  <trycatch>
   <try>
    <java classname="org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap"
         fork="yes"
         dir="${tomcat.dir}"
         spawn="true"
         jvm="${java.home}/bin/java">
     <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.home=${tomcat.dir}"/>
     <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.base=${tomcat.dir}"/>
     <jvmarg value="-Djava.io.tmpdir=${tomcat.dir}/temp"/>
     <classpath>
      <pathelement location="${tomcat.java.home}/lib/tools.jar"/>
      <pathelement location="${tomcat.dir}/bin/bootstrap.jar"/>
     </classpath>

     <arg line="stop" />
    </java>

    <kill-java name="Bootstrap" />
    <echo message="Tomcat stopped" />
   </try>
   <catch>
    <echo message="Unable to stop tomcat forcing shutdown....."/>
    <kill-java name="Bootstrap" />
   </catch>
  </trycatch>
 </sequential>
</macrodef>

Just like with the starting of Tomcat I use the provided Bootloader class to instruct tomcat to stop. Again I use the java that is set in tomcat.java.home as well as some other properties loaded by another macro. Since Tomcat sometimes fails to stop gracefully (due to poorly designed webapps) you also have to kill the Java process of Tomcat. This is done with the call to kill-java.

Killing any java process

As you saw in the tomcat-stop macro I used a macro called kill-java to make sure that Tomcat is really killed and no longer running in the background. The macro is as follows:

<macrodef name="kill-java"
          description="Forcefully stop tomcat....">
 <attribute name="name"/>
 <sequential>
  <!-- Execute the jps and check for any Java process with the provided @{name} attribute -->
  <exec executable="${tomcat.java.home}/bin/jps" output="pid.out.file" />
  <!-- Load in the name / pid file and strip all information except the PID -->
  <loadfile srcfile="pid.out.file" property="pid.out">
   <filterchain>
     <linecontains>
      <contains value="@{name}"/>
     </linecontains>
    <tokenfilter>
    <deletecharacters chars="@{name}"/>
    <trim/>
    <ignoreblank/>
    </tokenfilter>
    <striplinebreaks/>
   </filterchain>
  </loadfile>
  <echo message="Killing java process with pid ${pid.out}"/>
  <!-- Kill the process, warning this only Works on Windows -->
  <exec spawn="true" executable="taskkill">
   <arg line="/PID ${pid.out}" />
   <arg line="/F" />
  </exec>
  <delete file="pid.out.file" />
 </sequential>
</macrodef>

This macro is really simple and relies on the jps application provided by Java. This application returns a list of all running processes with name and process id (PID). All we need to do is get the line containing the process name provided and strip everything except the PID.

Please note: the task killing the proces is designed for Windows, you could change this with kill in Linux.

Rounding it up

Though you now have all you need to manipulate tomcat there is one last macro that we are tegenkant upon. That is the initializer of the various Tomcat properties. I use the following macro:

<macrodef name="tomcat-init">
 <attribute name="from"/>
 <sequential>
  <property name="tomcat.dir" value="${tomcat.@{from}.dir}"/>
  <property name="tomcat.server" value="${tomcat.@{from}.server}"/>
  <property name="tomcat.port" value="${tomcat.@{from}.port}" />
  <property name="j2ee.server.type" value="${tomcat.server}" />
  <taskdef name="webapp-stop"
          classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.StopTask"
          classpath="${tomcat.dir}/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar"/>
  <taskdef name="webapp-start"
           classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.StartTask"
           classpath="${tomcat.dir}/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar"/>
 </sequential>
</macrodef>

This little macro will initialize tomcat for a specific environment (for exemple DEV). Of course none of this works without the loading of some preset properties in a property file tomcat.properties. Which contains the following data:

tomcat.java.home=C:/jdk1.5.0_22_32b

tomcat.DEV.dir=d:/jakarta/tomcat5.0
tomcat.DEV.server=tomcat55-DEV
tomcat.DEV.port=8000

tomcat.MAIN.dir=d:/jakarta/tomcat5.0-MAIN
tomcat.MAIN.server=tomcat55-MAIN
tomcat.MAIN.port=8000

To load the property file just include the following instruction in the build script:

<property file="./tomcat.properties" />

Last week I did a lot of debugging on the Debian server to try and find out what was the issue. And initially it was Dovecots memory usage. After disabling this tool for a couple of days the server was still running fine. However the day after I posted the article on Dovecot the server crashed again. So I had to restart my investigation.

First off I had to had to get a better memory management tool, so I installed Htop on the server (apt-get htop). This shows the current memory usage of each running application. After installing this I enabled all services and applications again and started running stress tests. And though Dovecot was causing some peeks in memory usage it did not keep the high memory usage after the requests where done.

As it turns out for some reason Apache 2.2 was using a lot of memory during peak loads. But even more frustrating it didn’t seem to release any memory any more. Which was causing issues for services that only spawn when they are being accessed like Dovecot and Postfix, which explained why both of these services crashed when the server halted.

After tweaking the maximum amount of servers Apache is allowed to start and the maximum amount of client threads to handle the memory usage dropped dramatically. And I am very happy to report that the server has been running again for more then a week, without any glitches.

Still it doesn’t explain why all of this only happened after updating my server with the latest versions and patches. But I’m glad it’s solved for now.

Why I believe that dovecot is slowely over time eating up memory, well after I disabled it the VPS continued running without any issues. I already knew Apache 2, subversion and MySQL weren’t causing it. So I only had postfix and dovecot left to test.

What is truly amazing is that the website for Dovecot indicates it is low in memory consumption, hence it has no settings to limit the amount of memory allocated for Dovecot. So I still need to figure that part out, or alternatively change to a different IMAP server.

Doing this in the MySql setup created before should be relatively easy. First of modify the ‘/etc/aliasses‘ file and add ‘devnull: /dev/null‘. This will add a virtual debian user called devnull to the system. Keep in mind this alias is not yet active. To activate it run: newaliases. This will compile the file and load it into the memory.

Now open either PostfixAdmin or MySql and add an alias from ‘@domain.com’ to ‘devnull’. Which will catch all e-mail sent to domain.com and store it into the file belonging to user devnull, which in our case is the blackhole .

Please be carefull, as all mail sent to the domain will be dropped unless either an alias or a mailbox is defined for the domain.