Since I originally published my article on active authentication in the Java Developer’s Journal a couple of years back, I’ve been receiving a trickle of requests for the source code. It looks like the article is still available online although the accompanying source code seemed to have disappeared. I rummaged through my archives and dug up the WAR file containing the source code in case you’re interested. I can’t vouch for its absolute correctness. I seem to recall recreating the source code for a guy in Switzerland a couple of years back to run on Tomcat 5. I’m not sure if this is the version I’ve posted.
Video on the Web
I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with Web-based video for GeoGlue as of late. I knew very little about the medium out of the gate but with a bunch of reading and prototyping over the past couple of weeks, I’ve learned quite a bit. The first revelation to me was that the majority of professional-grade video sites such as YouTube and Google video encode their video as Flash. A bit of further research found claims of 98% pervasiveness of the Flash plugin, as opposed to much lower rates for Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. Scott Persinger’s post on the video format wars proved to be quite interesting reading in this respect.
Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion
I got through the entire book Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion over the weekend. You can read my Amazon.com review on the book’s page. Overall, the book follows in the footsteps of the other guides in the Pragmatic Programmers series in that it is written to be easily understandable and provides to be a relatively light read
Although the first several chapters are relatively elementary, the material gets a bit better as the book progresses. Towards the back of the book, there is coverage on organizing Subversion projects and directory structures, handling common libraries, and dealing with vendor libraries and source code. To me, it was this material that justified the cost of the book. If you’re interested, I’d personally recommend getting the book directly from the Pragmatic Programmers website (no offence, Amazon). These guys are very good about providing updated versions of their books as they become available. They are usually free of charge or at reduced rates. A great bargain as long as you don’t mind reading PDFs.
DasBlog Installation
After a while searching for blogging hosts or blogging software for .NET, I finally settled on Scott Hanselman’s DasBlog. The installation of DasBlog proved to be extremely easy; involving the simple extraction of a Web project into a folder (virtual or otherwise) under which one intends to host. Furthermore, storage is all file-based so that no database interaction is required whatsoever. All of the expected amenities such as rich HTML editing (see below), a variety of skins, and a plethora of configuration options are offered through Das Blog as well.