Live from Kurihama

I took me far to long to find this perl script to create release notes from a cvs log file again. It’s worth running this after every build and posting it somewhere as the information it gives is far more readable than anything that CVS produces by itself.

Having your build run at least daily is considered a good idea if not essential:

Daily Build

I always forget to put CVS.exe in my path and to set:

CVSIGNORE=*.bak *.~* *.java~* *.*~ *.*~* *.java.bak
HOME=C:\Documents and Settings\swoodward.STUART

While researching the reason for the “No results were returned by the query” error I found this interesting and kind of scary article:

“From a number of experiments, it appears that the only way I can re-use a connection after it has asserted an SQLException is to issue a rollback() call on the connection.”

Winmerge my favourite Win32 diffing and merging tool has just realease a new version. This is a great piece of software for your toolbox though I am a bit uncertain as to what the new features are in this realease. I think have added support for Visual Sourcesafe and some other versioning systems but don’t quote me on that.

Chandler Notes. Ever since I joined Lotus and played with Lotus Agenda I have been interested in what Mitch Kapor is up to. It’s really painful to see Chandler being developed out in the open as I want to use it today! I’m really hoping that it will be as powerful if not more powerful than Agenda on it’s first release. Then anticipation is killing me!

I’m doing some work now with a set top box but before I can use it I need to prepare a machine which has a TV “video in” port to view it on. Luckily I have a machine at hand. I reinstalled XP from scratch on it as I prefer the English version over the Japanese. If you use the English version you can add Japanese reading and writing capabilities to it easily but if you install the Japanese version unless you are multinational company with clout you can’t even purchase the English language pack to add English menus to it. sigh.

After installing I thought I would install the latest Service Packs and upgrades before I use it for anything critical. There are critical 34 upgrades that I need which makes me wonder why Microsoft dosen’t just install over the network once they have established that you are connected to the net. I feel like I have reinstalled the everything several times now after applying all these patches.

Yesterday we had a question from a customer regarding the behaviour of one our Servlets. In the end it seemed that it was loosing the session information when they went back in the browser. I can understand why, as they actually cross domains doing in going back. (Don’t ask why their store is spread over two domains). When customers cross to the second domain they are not sending a cookie, the servlet puts new session information in the urls and the session is getting restarted.

From the support point of view it also seems that the problem is only related to IE 6. (In fact it is only related to non cookie users). In the end it turns out that by default IE 6 rejects cookies from sites that don’t have XML P3P privacy information on their server. When I installed IE 6 I turned this feature off straight away so I never saw the problem. Turning IE6 back to it’s default settings makes the session problem manifest itself.

Fair enough. There are few ways around this. One is to ask everyone to set the non default cookie setting. Since most of the users use the default settings we can’t do this as some people are not going to get it and this will cause problems for the store’s support people. Secondly we can submit and install the privacy information on the server. This is a good thing but a pain as the store has to decide it’s privacy policy which is going to take some time. Do we just say, “Sorry you need to install P3P policies on your server” or do we do this work under our maintenance agreement. After all, since the problem occurs with our software it must be our fault. Also remember that this store is in Japan and the electronic privacy concerns may not be the same as the US. People are aware of privacy issues but the solution may be different.

Microsoft, it was a nice idea to trying get everyone to install privacy information on their servers but to force people to do it by breaking their applications is not on. Anyway, it’s a pain. Thanks again Microsoft.

Hmm read this Unix Administration Course lecture notes to know all those things that your System Administrator is doing without telling…