Alfresco CIFS shared drive authentication problem
I'm a newbie in Alfresco and honestly cannot find my way in there. If you are trying to develop a WebScript or some other type of service for Alfresco, you can either upload files one by one using the web interface or you can map the CIFS shared drive (\\workstationA\Alfresco\) and use it as a file-system. It seems it worked just fine in Windows XP and friends but I have Windows 7 and I simply could not make it work. It requests a user name and a password but then returns a "Failed to authenticate. Invalid user or password" message The hack I found seems really dumb and I'm sure there is a better solution out there but this works for me.
What you have to do is go to your hosts file (Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) and add a new line in there mapping the workstaionA (Where workstationA is your computer name + the letter a) to some unused IP address.
13.13.13.13 workstationA
That's it, now it works and you can map it as a network drive and do your development in peace.
net use X: \\workstationA\Alfresco /user:admin admin /persistent:yes
Note: admin/admin are the Alfresco default username and password, you should change that and use yours.
Happy codding !
How to run python code in Windows batch (bat) files
Here’s the bit of tricky batch file magic that does it:
1 2 3 | @setlocal enabledelayedexpansion && python -x "%~f0" %* & exit /b !ERRORLEVEL! #start python code here print "hello world" |
The way it works is that the first line of the file does two different things.
1. starts python interpreter passing the name of the file in, and the -x option will tell it to skip the first line (containing .bat file code)
2. When python finishes the script exits.
This nifty trick makes it much nicer for writing admin scripts with python on Windows.
FlashBuilder network issue
Like most of my articles here, I try to post solutions for unusual problems I encounter now and then that may help someone someday. And this one almost made me scream.
So here's the story. My DEV environment (http://dev/) is a Virtual Host mapped in the Windows host file to point to a sandboxed directory somewhere on my hard drive. The Flex project I'm building uses a RemoteObject and tries to communicate with a AMFPHP gateway to do it's stuff. All good till here.
The weird part is that when I try to run the app, even though my flash is coming from the DEV host and the path to the gateway points to the same DEV host, the AMF calls either failed with a security exception or if they worked, they were extremely slow. The delay between a service call and a response/error was somewhere between 6 and 10 seconds.
Why oh why !? The AMFPHP Browser app that comes with the package works just fine so my app was at fault somehow. Tried some investigations and thanks to Firebug I found the vital clue.
It seems that my app was trying to make the connection to the gateway through http://localhost:37813/. WTF ?? I didn't had any reference to 'localhost' in my code, yet the app was trying to connect using that address for some reason. And quite often, the crossdomain.xml failed to load resulting in a security error.
So what in the world is the problem then ? Well, Flash Builder seems to be the problem (and me for not RTFM).
It seems that if you compile your swf with Network Monitor active, which you may not realize, especially if the window is not even opened, you have just told your swf to redirect all traffic to localhost:37813. It will compile the redirect info into your flash. Traffic may work if you have Flash Builder debugger running but try to deploy that somewhere. Heh.
All you have to do is turn network monitor off. Recompile your swf. Redeploy.
Ta da !
Zen Coding
If you write HTML for a living, and you don't know Zen Coding yet, you are missing out big time.
Zen Coding is build as a plugin for commonly used editors (including Notepad++, yey!) that allows you to write HTML, CSS and XML code 20 time faster. So writing:
1 | html:xt>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a |
with a keystroke converts to:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 | < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> <title></title> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <div id="logo"></div> <ul id="nav"> <li class="item-1"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-2"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-3"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-4"><a href=""></a></li> <li class="item-5"><a href=""></a></li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> |
Don't get this wrong, like the man said, "The purpose of ZC is not to write a full HTML page with a single line, but to help you write smaller code chunks.". Here is a video introducing the system in further detail.
It is easier than it looks actually, and looking a bit over the syntax will make total sense. Printing the cheat sheet also helps 
Also worth noticing that in Notepad++ (the only one I tried) the plugin added few more functions that help with the coding that I'm sure you'll enjoy (Jumping to the edit points is a God given). This project inspired another neat tool for PHP developers to output HTML using this syntax from code. You can find more here
I have only touched briefly on what it can do but I will certainly not author another single HTML document without the benefit of Zen Coding.
Check if user visited certain websites
Today I found a website called http://www.stayinvisible.com/ that uses a really clever technique to peak in your browser history. They can't see everything of course but they can see whatever they are interested in and that is a list of web-proxy websites.
So how are they doing it ?
First, they have a list of websites they are interested in, like i said, a list of web-proxies.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | var sites = { "hidemyass.com": ["http://www.hidemyass.com", "http://forum.hidemyass.com"], "freeproxy.ca": ["http://www.freeproxy.ca"], "proxy4free.com": ["http://www.proxy4free.com"], .... .... } |
Second, they create a temporary IFRAME where they write a simple 2 lines CSS that does the magic
1 2 | a { color: #000; display: none} a: visited { color: #F00; display: inline } |
... and in the body they append all the links from the
The browser renders the links, and all the sites that appear in your history will use the "a:visited" CSS class. The others use the normal "a" class that has a display:none property and will be hidden.
What's left to do is iterate all the links from the frame and check if they are visible or not to know which of them are in your history and which of them aren't. Pretty simple eh ?
So here's the class:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 | var bHistory = function(){ var sites = { "hidemyass.com": ["http://www.hidemyass.com", "http://forum.hidemyass.com"], "freeproxy.ca": ["http://www.freeproxy.ca"], "proxy.org": ["http://www.proxy.org", "http://www.proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml", "http://www.proxy.org/forum/index.html"] }; var visited = {}; function getStyle(el, scopeDoc,styleProp) { if (el.currentStyle) var y = el.currentStyle[styleProp]; else if (window.getComputedStyle) var y = scopeDoc.defaultView.getComputedStyle(el,null).getPropertyValue(styleProp); return y; } function remove( el ) { el.parentNode.removeChild( el ); } function createIframe() { var iframe = document.createElement("iframe"); iframe.style.position = "absolute"; iframe.style.visibility = "hidden"; document.body.appendChild(iframe); if(iframe.contentDocument) iframe.doc = iframe.contentDocument; else if(iframe.contentWindow) iframe.doc = iframe.contentWindow.document; iframe.doc.open(); iframe.doc.write('<style>'); iframe.doc.write("a{color: #000000; display:none;}"); iframe.doc.write("a:visited {color: #FF0000; display:inline;}"); iframe.doc.write('</style>'); iframe.doc.close(); return iframe; } var iframe = createIframe(); function embedLinkInIframe( href, text ) { var a = iframe.doc.createElement("a"); a.href = href; a.innerHTML = site; iframe.doc.body.appendChild( a ); } for( var site in sites ) { var urls = sites[site]; for( var i=0; i<urls .length; i++ ) { embedLinkInIframe( urls[i], site ); if( urls[i].match(/www\./) ){ var sansWWW = urls[i].replace(/www\./, ""); embedLinkInIframe( sansWWW, site ); } else { var httpLen = urls[i].indexOf("//") + 2; var withWWW = urls[i].substring(0, httpLen ) + "www." + urls[i].substring( httpLen ); embedLinkInIframe( withWWW, site ); } } } var links = iframe.doc.body.childNodes; for( var i=0; i<links.length; i++) { var displayValue = getStyle(links[i], iframe.doc, "display"); var didVisit = displayValue != "none"; if( didVisit ){ visited[ links[i].innerHTML ] = true; } } remove( iframe ); var usedSites = []; for( var site in visited ){ usedSites.push( site ); } return usedSites; } |
To use it:
1 2 | var visited = new bHistory(); alert(visited); // an array with visited websites from the defined list |
All credits go to the smart man who did this. Cheers!