The Lighter Side of Code

I am a fan of Google Chrome, but recently I installed an update and it totally jacked up my install.  Now when I launch Chrome I get the about:blank page and can’t go to any sites.  Has anyone else experienced this problem?  I originally thought that the problem was with my firewall or anti-virus, but after going through all of their options and logs, I have ruled that out.  If anyone out there know what the deal is, please help!

Lu Sancea General General

ClipX – This gem of a program is along the same lines as CoodClip, but not as buggy.  ClipX will save text and images to the clipboard and keep it all saved for later.  This program is sick, especially when you are testing accounts for large systems.

AutoHotKey – AutoHotKey is a new arrival to my list of programs.  I found this app when I saw my manager log into a system with a hotkey.  I was sold, since I am constantly logging in and out of accounts during testing.  You can also use this program to do automatic mouse clicks and even drag and drop.

Fiddler – For those who can not use Firefox in the office, I found this app.  It works much like Firebug does, and can be very helpful when debugging AJAX.

Check em out, hope it helps.  Cheers.

Lu Sancea Tools Tools

I was looking around the net for ways to dump queries into excel and I ran across this post on Todd Sharp’s blog <cfsilence>.  I thought it was pretty cool, so I looked up the specifications on Microsoft’s site.  Anyway, thanks to Todd for the inspiration.  I had to take one or more queries and dump them to excel, so I decided to make CFC and share it with everyone.  I hope this saves someone some time in doing something like this.  Cheers.

ObjectToExcel

You can also download it on the great RIAForge!

Lu Sancea Coldfusion Coldfusion

I was working with jQuery today and I had an unusual issue.  Some users were getting incorrect data when using the app and others had no problem at all.  After checking the code and the queries I started looking at the app using Firebug, the best plugin ever.  After a few minutes of trial and error, I was still stumped.  I could not understand why only a few people were getting wild results.  Well, the final straw was when we changed the caching rules in the browser to automatically reload data and never load new versions of the page.  That was when I finally was able to reproduce the problem.

It turns out that ajax calls will cache your requests unless you append a different value at the end of each request.  You can also stop the cahcing if you use the jQuery post method instead of the get method.  I had no idea that ajax did that, but thanks to Ken Foubert’s blog post for clearing that up.

Lu Sancea AJAX

I am pretty excited about this software and I bet that some of you folks will be as well.  Thanks to a wonderful podcast called Security Now, I have been shown the way!  The program that I am talking about is Sandboxie.  This is a very complicated program with a simple purpose, to keep your programs from doing anything stupid.  I have to say bravo, this application is awesome and very good at what it does.

So, what does Sandboxie do?  Well, in a nutshell, Sandboxie takes your programs and runs them in a space that prevents them from making any permanent changes to your data or your system.  You read it correctly, you run your programs in a sandbox which makes your programs think that they are running on the system, but they aren’t.  Once you decide to delete the sandbox all changes the program made goes away.  Sweet huh?

Think of it this way, let’s say you are using Internet Explorer and you decide that you want to go to a shady website.  Let’s say the site has evil code on the page that tries any number of javascript hacks to break into your machine.  Well, if you did you would probably have a bunch of viruses and trojans on your machine.  You probably wouldn’t know it happened either.  Does that sound like fun?

With Sandboxie you can open your programs in a Sandbox.  By doing that you will be able to do the same things you did before, but with added security.  If you took the same scenario from above and did that in Sandboxie, you would still get the virus and trojans and all that crap.  However, this time you could delete the sandbox and, poof, there goes all the crap!  I know you are excited and I was too.

There are many applications for this software, for instance you could install a program, install it, and if you don’t like it simply delete the sandbox and it’s gone.  Or how about running your email in a sandbox and if you click a bad link and corrupt your machine, just close it and there goes the problem.

I know, too good to be true or what about the files you want to save.  Well, Sandboxie is designed to give you the ability to assign programs the rights to save files when you want them to.  That means only files you want saved will be able to be saved.  I can’t suggest this software any more than this, it’s awesome.  But there is one more thing that makes this software awesome.  Once you buy it, for $30 bucks, you get a lifetime registration and you can install it on any computer you own.  Go get it now…that is all.

Lu Sancea Security Security