This is a re-post of my mail to the suphp mailing list. Although the behaviour described here is a serious design issue, I've never got any feedback.

The attached patch is some kind of "proof of concept" to solve a security related problem I have with suPHP.

Problem: Run script with file/directory owner threatens the user's files.

Since there is no mechanism defined to log the user out of a HTTP authenticated session you have to use a workaround. Most browsers forget their login data once they received a 403 response. The problem is, that the user have to return to the normal starting page manually.

Update 2017-02-22: It seems that this technique doesn't work anymore in recent Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Apache's include directive does not accept wildcards, so something like this won't be allowed:

Include /srv/www/vhosts/*/conf/vhost.conf

You can use mod_perl to realize this. Additionally, the following example does a simple permission check to ensure that the included file has not been modified by an ordinary user:

Some tutorials suggest to use the system properties http.proxyUser and http.proxyPassword to get proxy authentication, but that won't work since - in contrast to http.proxyHost and http.proxyPort - these properties will not be processed by Java's HttpURLConnection.

Other suggest to use a custom default Authenticator. But that's dangerous because this would send your password to anybody who asks.

JasperReports is a library which can be used to fill reports from Java applications or just create simple PDFs. It allows you to not only use static output strings but also Groovy expressions. Sadly, this is restricted to simple expressions that result in a value and don't generate multiple class files at compile time.

For example, you could use the following expression to print different values depending if your document has more or less than 10 pages:

JTextPane and his ancestors JEditorPane and JTextComponent won't respect the color defined with setBackground(Color) since they display a "styled document" and expect the background color to be defined in the content. You'll always see a white background.

To change the background color (without modifying the content) you have to define attributes for the document:

When doing MVC programming in Java, there is a problem that most people don't know about. I've ignored it myself much too long. The problem is that when you bind a model class to an UI component you will get a giant memory leak.

What happens?

Well, imagine a model class supporting listening for property changes. A simple example might look like this (I extend from PropertyChangeSupport here so that I don't have to delegate all the methods, normally you wouldn't do so, of course):

I'm doing some end-user support for Linux desktops (family and friends). From a chat with my mother and observation of our trainee I've noticed that what's normal users making the most head pains are the different packaging formats. For example, when you want to download Google Chrome Linux users are confronted with four different options:

2014-02-26:
I've updated this HowTo for current versions of udev and kvm.

libvirt/kvm allows you to expose any usb device attached to your physical maschine to the guests. Just edit the domain's XML definition and add the following <hostdev> to the <devices> area:

Today I wrote a patch to Flexbackup 1.2.1 which allows you to define exclude expressions on a per-directory-base (like svn:ignore, cvs_ignore or tar's --exclude-from). Apply this patch and add the following line to your flexbackup.conf:

$exclude_expr_filename = '.flexbackup_exclude';