posheika.net

Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 more restrictive

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:37:23 +0000

Dealing with handling sessions on 3rd party content (I mean content pulled in using iFrames or Ajax from a different domain than the main page), I recently encountered an issue particularly with Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, but not on Windows XP or Windows Vista – our (3rd party) cookies handling sessions were suddenly being blocked. Soon after I found out that the same issue exists for Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. I tried to find any issues or topics online in particular what had changed in IE8 on Windows 7, but – nothing. The solution, however, I had to seek for more than a day as I found it using trial&error as it was not described anywhere, but it proved to be pretty simple.
Firstly, after finding out that IE6 had the same symptoms as IE8 on Windows 7, I must conclude that IE7 and IE8 on Windows XP and Windows Vista are for some reason more “lenient” as the root of this problem with IE6 on Windows XP and IE8 on Windows 7 was lack of appropriate privacy preference and policy specification, known as P3P, even though the same policy settings and requirements are for IE7 and IE8 on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

A similar issue and appropriate solutions is discussed at StackOverflow in a great detail, however, the solution described there didn’t work for me completely – besides creating an appropriate P3P policy file (which can be pretty easily done using this P3P file editor and validated here), I had to add the following P3P line to the Apache server configuration to add to header of every file sent out from the 3rd party server, even images and Javascript – files that are not setting or using session or cookies:

Header set P3P “policyref=\”/w3c/p3p.xml\”, CP=\”ALL DSP COR CURa OUR IND COM NAV CNT\”"

This solved it. Hopefully this will avoid or at least minimize headaches for someone having the same problem.

Importing/exporting data with MySQL

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:39:08 +0000

This is more of a note-to-myself entry to dig it up later easily, but the syntax to import dump file to MySQL is:

mysql -p -h database_server -u mysql_user mysql_dbname < file_dbname.sql

The same way mysql dump can be created:

mysqldump -p -h database_server -u mysql_user mysql_dbname > dump_file.sql

Good resource with more on this is here.

Get query string variables of Javascript files

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:37:01 +0000

Looking at different scripts linking to Javascript and AJAX frameworks such as Scriptaculous, I noticed that it allows loading of particular parts of it by adding them in the following query string such as this:

 type="text/javascript" src="scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder">

Looking at scriptaculous.js itself, it relied on some built-in functionality for that. I was unsuccessful in finding online a ready function to do exactly that, so inspired by this piece of code and borrowing the regex part of it, I wrote a function which grabs the additional parameters and allows using them in the Javascript:

function getJSvars(script_name, var_name, if_empty){
var script_elements = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’);
if(if_empty == null) {

var if_empty = ”;

}
for (a = 0; a < script_elements.length; a++) {

   var source_string = script_elements[a].src;

       if(source_string.indexOf(script_name)>=0) {
       var_name = var_name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");

       var regex_string = new RegExp("[\\?&]"+var_name+"=([^&#]*)");

       var parsed_vars = regex_string.exec(source_string);

       if(parsed_vars == null) { return if_empty; }

       else { return parsed_vars[1]; }
      }

   }

}

Usage of it is simple: if you have a Javascript which should parse some dynamic variables (such as user or account ID), you can include it right after the included Javascript like this:

 type="text/javascript" src="script.js?var1=value1&var2=value2">

instead of creating a server-side generated dynamic Javascript using PHP or other language. The values of variables like var1 can be retrieved like this:

var var1 = getJSvars(‘script.js’, ‘var1′);

You can also add a value as third parameter to output in case var1 is empty, but it is optional.

Now this is scary

admin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:33:53 +0000

Could you possibly imagine it is this easy to capture what is typed on your keyboard? Wirelessly.. even through a wall!

Videos below from the Engadget article mentioned above:

Video 1:

Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Keyboards Experiment 1/2 from Martin Vuagnoux on Vimeo.

Video 2:

Compromising Electromagnetic Emanations of Keyboards Experiment 2/2 from Martin Vuagnoux on Vimeo.

Welcome!

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:39:05 +0000

In this web site you will find different useful on-line tools, code snippets, maybe even different ideas and thoughts on different topics. The purpose of this web site is to serve more like a personal notepad, but it is aimed also to be useful for others.