Michael Fitzmaurice

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Recent posts by Michael Fitzmaurice

Hi Rich

Thanks for your response - I never thought to try that. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work; any path you put in the <form-login-page> element must start with a '/', so absolute URLs are not possible.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Thanks

Michael
19 years ago
Hi all

I have a web app deployed in Tomcat. I would like to declaratively secure the application such that all pages are inaccessible unless the user successfully authenticates. This is easy enough. I would also like to use HTTP form authentication over SSL - this is also easy enough. However, what I would like to do (declaratively) is to use SSL only on the login page. If I do something like this in web.xml:



This means the user cannot access any page without authenticating, but it also means all pages are being served over SSL, which is not necessary for my application. However, I do want to protect the communication of the user's credentials with SSL, hence I want to be able to specify SSL for the login page. Is this possible declaratively, and if so, how?

Thanks

Michael
[ March 02, 2005: Message edited by: Michael Fitzmaurice ]
19 years ago
Hi

How you would go about converting the binary back into human readable format depends on how it was converted to binary in the first place and what it represents. How did the binary you need to work with come to be in your possession? You need to know whether the binary represents and IA5 string or an octet string in the first place, then you can go about converting it from binary.

IA5 is a character set that is almost the same as ASCII - it uses 7 bytes. Octet strings use 8 bit bytes, as the name suggests.

Hope this helps

Michael
19 years ago
Presumably you are talking about connecting to Microsoft Visual Source Safe as a client? If so, what platform do you need to connect from? If it's Windows, can't you just use the MS client? Are you trying to connect programatically or manually?
19 years ago
You can read about how I studied for it in this thread.

I would also add that I found the real exam to be a little bit easier than any of the mock exams I had taken (HFEJB, EJB+, etc.) - this is probably because:

1 - there are no ambiguous questions or questions with ambiguous answers on the real exam
2 - it maybe my imagination, but it seemed to me that there were normally fewer options to choose from with the average question on the real exam
3 - you always know exactly how many options you need to choose on the real exam
4 - there are not really any 'trick' questions on the real exam - you normally understand pretty clearly what area of the spec each question is probing. Also, you never get questions on the real exam that check to see if you know about something that is technically legal (e.g. will compile and deploy okay due to some loophole in the spec) but would constitute unbelievably bad practice in the real World. The questions pretty much just test if you can make sensible use of the spec, rather than find ways to abuse it.

Big shout out to Kathy & Bert and the whole Head First massive!!!

Michael
19 years ago
Hi Dean

I passed the SCBCD today with 97%, and I can tell you that HFEJB was the cornerstone of my preparation. I also used 'Enterprise Java Beans' by Richard Monson-Haefel (which is excellent), the EJB spec, and the Enthuware 'EJBPlus' test engine.

I would estimate that my overall study time was divided thus:

- HFEJB (70% of my study time, from start of study right to the very end - a fantastic learning resource. I read it cover to cover in detail first, then booked the exam and starting cramming)
- EJBPlus (15%, all in the final 5 days before the test - good for exam cramming, but quite a lot of ambiguous questions, a few errors, and a couple of bugs, especially with the marking of drag n drop questions. Much harder than the real exam, partly due to bugs & ambiguity - I never scored more than 85% on one of their tests, and I took a fair few)
- Monson-Haefel (10%, from start of study to finish - dipped in when I needed more detail or another perspective on topics I had read in HFEJB. A very good book which I will continue to use)
- EJB 2.0 Spec (5%, mostly during the final 5 days, whenever I needed absolute authority on something, or when I wanted an alternative explanation. Get a hard copy - it's dry reading in some places, but a pretty valuable resource to have handy)

I found the references to particular pages in the spec that you see in the answers to the 'Coffee Cram' exams in HFEJB to be invaluable. Use these where you got an answer wrong - it's like a signpost to the parts of the spec that you really need to check out.

Good luck with the exam

Michael

P.S. Make sure you attempt all the exercises in HFEJB - they really do help you to understand and remember. Also, follow all the study hints at the start of the book (e.g. take regular breaks, change location, drink water, etc.)
Ritesh

I am sending a bit more info to your personal email address.

Thanks

Michael
19 years ago
Hi

The organisation I work for (a large red-brick UK university) need to independently assess the Java skills of one of our employees. Our requirement is that nobody internal to the University is involved in this assessment (other than the candidate, of course!); hence I cannot conduct the test myself, or directly influence the questions and methodology.

Is there anyone who would be interested in carrying out this assessment for us on a contract basis? We would ideally want somebody to come on site and perform the assessment in person. If you are interested, or know another suitable person who would be, drop me a line and we'll take it from there.

Thanks

Michael
[ June 08, 2004: Message edited by: Michael Fitzmaurice ]
19 years ago
Slough is quite ugly. Maidenhead is quite nice though. Expensive though. I worked down there for while when the whole M4 corridor was known as the 'Golden Corridor', or the UK 'Silicon Valley' (I was there in 2000/2001). Hmmm, look at it now...
19 years ago
I think they speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish (although I'm sure a Portuguese speaker would understand the gist of your post).
Peter
Have a look at my post on this thread. This will enable you to read in each character of the input number one by one. You can then store them in whatever data structure you think appropriate. You could even compare them against the 'mastermind' number as they are read in from System.in, if you like.
One way to store the mastermind sequence (and the user's input) would be a String - you could store words as well as numbers. Check out the String.charAt() method to figure out how to perform the comparisons of individual characters within the Strings.
If you use arrays, you are almost reinventing the wheel - the String class can be thought of as an array of chars and a set of operations you can perform against it.
Hope this helps
Michael
20 years ago
Hi Peter
Do you want to read in just one number, or a series of numbers? Why do you need to put the individual digits of these numbers into an array? I assume you want to use this array to perform some manipulation of the individual digits - is this acurate? What is your overall goal?
Michael
20 years ago
Gregg
I would also vote for web app, assuming you do not need a really rich user interface. Another reason I tend to prefer these, all other things being equal, is that it allows me to pool database connections in one place and have a bit more control over where and when the db gets accessed from.
Where I work we have some VB & Java fat client apps on desktops holding open lots of database connections unnecessarily. We have also found, as other people have already mentioned, that rolling out new releases and patches is a bit of a pain for the fat clients. Releasing to 160 desktops as opposed to one web server is definitely slower, more difficult, and more error prone, even if it only happens a couple of times a year.
Michael
20 years ago
Jim
I stand corrected, but feel obliged to point out how highly dependent on particular circumstances this caveat is, and even then I don't know if I would go so far as to say it is encouraged. Accepted, yes. And I would say the caveats you provided are actually more valuable than those Sun offer (i.e. 'if you would have used a struct, its okay').
However, I am really talking about what the default practice should be for public classes, which is what I guessed was under discussion in this thread. I feel strongly enough about that to re-iterate my objection to the practice of matter-of-factly declaring member variables public as a habit. I regard this as a completely filthy practice, and would be amazed to find that anyone had written a coding standard that encouraged this as the norm. And if I was ever asked to conform to such a standard, I would really have to ask myself if I wanted to work on a project like that.
I know we are all in agreement that JD's preference is superior, hence this further post is possibly a bit redundant, but sometimes a fella just has to get something off his chest...
20 years ago
Hi JD
In short, your colleague is undertaking a very bad practice - exposing the implementation of his classes as opposed to the interface. He seems to dismiss encapsulation as a non-issue - amazing. This leads to a high level of coupling between classes, which is always to be avoided. Using your colleague's idea, let's say I decide to rename one of my class members - I have potentially just broken every single piece of code that uses my class, and they are broken because they have an unacceptably high dependence on the internal implementation details of my class.
How my class does what it does is nobody else's business, and that 'how' includes the number of, type of, and name of any member variables.If your colleague does not think this is important, why use OO languages at all? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I feel he really is fighting a losing battle on this one. Encapsulation is one of the most fundamental tenets of OO programming.
BTW, I have never yet read a Java coding standard that allows your friend's style of programming, let alone encourages it.
Michael
[ October 30, 2003: Message edited by: Michael Fitzmaurice ]
[ October 30, 2003: Message edited by: Michael Fitzmaurice ]
20 years ago