Andrew Schwabe's Blog - Open Source

iPhone 4 and Jailbreaking Nonsense

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:24:00 -0400

Is anybody else sick of all the scammers out there trying to rip people off for jailbreaking iphones ? We've obviously received some great news lately, what with the recent legal win for jailbreaking (The Library of Congress found that jailbreaking your apple device is legal). We also got the first jailbreak application for iphone 4 on August 1 thanks to the iPhone Dev Team. What has amazed me however, is all the fake people trying to capitalize on these things. There are not just one, two or even five websites trying to get people to pay them for "exclusive" jailbreak software, but more like a hundred. It goes deep, with lame websites and fake twitter accounts of people flooding the internet with all sorts of false information. Its sickening the lengths people will go to a) screw other people, and b) steal other people's software and ideas. They are just lazy looking to make a buck off somebody else's hard work. What a shame. So for those of you out there looking to jailbreak your phone, remember that the software to do it is FREE. Never pay anybody for the software to jailbreak. Now, if you are not technically savvy, get a friend to do it, or find somebody cheap on craigslist to do it while you wait, and only pay if they do it right. For those out there not well versed in the jailbreaking terminology, here is a quick guide: An iPhone is NOT ACTIVATED if it shows the "connect to itunes" screen and won't let you do anything but an emergency call. Once you ACTIVATE the phone, you can use apps, wifi, etc. An iPhone is JAILBROKEN if it has had special software installed which allows you, the user, to install software packages from non-apple sources. The most common application to look for is called "Cydia" which is a different kind of "App Store" for jailbroken software. For other phones (like Android phones), this process is called "rooting" a phone. Its pretty much the same thing as jailbreaking. Finally, most phones are LOCKED to a certain cell phone provider. For iPhone in the US, that means your iphone is locked for use with ATT only. Once your phone is UNLOCKED, then you can put in a sim card from any GSM phone provider. In the US, that means T-Mobile, and maybe some others. Many people that travel internationally do this, because you can drop in a sim card from a phone company in another country and it will work. So to summarize, any iphone must be activated before you can do anything useful with it. An iphone CAN be activated without being jailbroken or unlocked. Likewise an iphone can be jailbroken without being unlocked, and of course they can have all three.

Building Facebook apps with CFML

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:08:00 -0400

Packt Publishing put up an article I wrote about getting started with Facebook application development using CFML. This was based on a presentation I did at NCDevCon last month. Take a look, let me know if it helped ya... http://www.packtpub.com/article/facebook-application-development-with-coldfusion-railo I'm considering writing another article about using the new Facebook Social Plugins and the new Graph API since it is a bit different from the old RESTful API that most developers have been using.

Android OS on iPhone ?

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:03:00 -0400

Yes its actually true... This may be a little old (released in April 2010), but quite interesting! So many of us are wondering what turn Apple will take next, and when, if ever, they will every start playing nicely with Adobe. Seems that the underground community isn't thrilled with that lack of progress, so people have been actively working on getting linux to run on iphone hardware, and now have managed to get a build of android OS to run on iphone 2G (1st generation). Yes, this potentially means the ability to have flash apps running on your iphone hardware. Not yet, but potentially. Check it out: Source: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-been-working-on-this-quietly-in.html

Flash Builder 4 (aka Flex 4 aka "Gumbo") is released!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:27:00 -0400

Lots of aka's (i know). Flex 4 SDK (open source) has been out for a while, or at least as a public beta. Now that Flash Builder 4 (the new IDE that replaces Flex Builder 3 -- note the product naming difference), there is a lot to be excited about. A new skinning system that brings in the best of declarative graphics and fixes quirks with scale 9 and manual skinning of components. Supposedly everything is a lot more efficient and light weight. Flex 3 was pretty to look at, but a bit memory intensive. I don't have specifics on that yet, but all improvements are welcome to make it scalable for larger apps. It is also designed for backward compatibility, so hopefully all our Flex3 apps compile nicely. Looks like a great upgrade! If you are into ColdFusion/Railo as well, be sure to check out their bundle of Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder at a good price. Here are some details: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/overview/

My new articles on packt publishing

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:44:00 -0400

Packt Publishing asked me to write a bit about Railo. It took me forever due to being busy (as always), but here they are! Enjoy and share the love. Introduction to Railo Open-Source CFML Engine:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/introduction-to-railo-open-source Tutorial: Rendering web pages as PDF using Railo
http://www.packtpub.com/article/rendering-web-pages-pdf-using-railo-open-source

JavaScript Hack Enables Flash on iPhone

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:41:00 -0400

Ok, well it isn't exactly what we want, but it shows that the development community is thinking beyond Apple's stranglehold on iphone OS. According to Wired, Tobias Schneider has written a javascript runtime engine for processing .swf files that is compatible with iphone. [More]

Multi-web configuration for Railo 3.1 and BlazeDS

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:54:00 -0400

Seems like lots of people are having a problem with Railo configured for multiple websites on a single host, but also need to support AMF via BlazeDS. The common symptom is when you restart railo services, sometimes you will get a big error instead of your web page that says something like:


MessageBroker failed to start: flex.messaging.config.ConfigurationException: MessageBroker already defined from MessageBrokerServlet with init parameter messageBrokerId = '__default__'

Here is what I found to work for me: 1. Read this post by Roland Ringgenberg at the railo google group and follow the directions to install the java jar and edit the flex/services-config.xml file:


    
        
        
                
		
        	
            	yourcustomBroker

2. For me, railo runs on port 8600 internally, and I have IIS configured to serve up content. BlazeDS however doesn't get mapped through IIS, so you need to talk on the native port (again, for MY configuration, YMMV). So to access it, i needed to open TCP port 8600 through the firewall. 3. Once i could talk to the server over port 8600, I changed my flex app that uses remoting to point to http://myserver:8600/flashservices/gateway/ and eveyrthing worked great! One other interesting observation... When using Flash remoting with CF7/8/9, you can talk to your CFCs and invoke methods that are set to "public." With BlazeDS, your methods need to be marked as "remote" to be accessible. Minor syntax difference, but a huge impact on security. make sure you secure your CFCs!

Railo 3.1 Install on Linux -- Caucho security note

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:56:00 -0400

Now that Railo 3.1 is out, I think we will see a jump in commercial usage. I have done a few installs on production machines now, and wanted to point out a security note. By default when you install Railo 3.1 (with caucho) on Linux (prob the same for OSX), it adds the following to your apache httpd.conf file:


LoadModule caucho_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_caucho.so

ResinConfigServer localhost 6800
CauchoConfigCacheDirectory /tmp
CauchoStatus yes

The bottom one is the problem -- it enables CauchoStatus by default. That means that you can open up a web browser to http://your.host.com/caucho-status and see status info, but there is a lot of detailed info there, including the names of each of the hosts you configured in resin, so people can snoop and see all the railo-enabled sites on that machine. This might also give a would-be-attacker the info they need to plan a DOS attack, SQL injection attack, etc.. especially since they can see how the server is responding to their attacks. Pessimistic, I know, but who can you trust on the Internet anymore ? Kid hackers are emerging just following directions posted online, and some don't even really know what they are doing, but they are causing trouble for you and I. Better to be safe. So the simple fix is to update your httpd.conf file and set the status option to no:


CauchoStatus no

For those so inclined, check out Nessus, an open source vulnerability scanner, which picked this up on one of our servers.

Upgrading CentOS 4 or RHEL 4 to use PHP5

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:40:00 -0400

This seemingly simple task was more work than I expected. Here are some of my notes in the hopes that this helps somebody. If it does, and you want to donate to my cause, or just encourage me to keep blogging about stuff like this, email me :) Ok, there are a bunch of sites out there, that helped me get 75% of the way. Download the RPMs, try to install, and error, dependancies i've never seen before. This tutorial got me 75% of the way: http://www.lampdeveloper.co.uk/linux/installing-php-525-suhosin-php-eaccelerator-on-centos-4-with-yum.html (By the way centos 4 and RHEL4 are pretty much the same, but this is focusing on the specifics for RHEL4) All said and done, here are the RPMs I ended up needing (to get to 90% success)

php-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-cli-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-common-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-gd-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-ldap-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-mysql-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-pdo-5.1.6-3.el4s1.10.i386.rpm
php-pear-1.4.11-1.el4s1.1.noarch.rpm

FYI Don't be daft and ask me for download links, if you need to know where to download these, google for it, took me all of 3 minutes. Some of them came from all over. Now when you try to install these, you get the dreaded dependancy error: Needs libmysqlclient.so.15 So i went searching, and ended up finding this gem: MySQL-shared-compat-6.0.10-0.rhel4.i386.rpm which installs multiple mysql version libraries. That did the trick, and a simple "rpm -U *.rpm" >> success cheers

CF United 09 Presentation Files - Google App Engine and Flex

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:42:00 -0400

Ok folks, here are my preso files for my CF United 2009 talk on Google App Engine and Flex. Is this the final version? Sure. Until I change it. I shall resist doing that... Here is the powerpoint presentation download: 294_Andrew_Schwabe_Google_App_Engine_Flex.ppt Here is the full download (warning, this is big!) Contains all 4 google app engine java projects, all 4 flex projects and the powerpoint file. The download is big because of all the jar files. I will try to have a USB key with me so if you want a super fun time instant copy instead of downloading it, I should be able to do that. Full download (94MB, zipped): CFun09_GAE_Files.zip For those of you web surfers interested -- demo 4 project includes a fix for allowing Flex app using AMF to retrieve Google Account information (using ajax and a custom auto servlet) so your Flex apps can determine if you are logged in, and get your user identifier if you are logged in.

CF United Update: Google App Engine + Flex

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:02:00 -0400

My talk at CFUnited has changed a bit... Since the topic was chosen a while back, Google has released a Java developer environment and eclipse plugin for Google App Engine (GAE). Since Java is a whole lot closer to CFML than python is, I've updated all my code and presentation to focus on the Java application architecture, and how to connect it to Flex. I've even got some tidbits on how to get CFML running on Google App Engine ! Be sure to come on out and learn about the exciting new "super scalable" web application system running on Google's free hosting infrastructure.

Setting up a BETTER SFTP Server on Windows

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:13:00 -0400

I added a blog post a while back about setting up an SFTP server on Windows. It turns out that it IS easy to setup an SFTP server, but to setup a GOOD (read: "secure") takes a bit more work. The solution I am going to describe, I call "Better" (not "Good"), because it solves some problems, but not all of them. [More]

I will be speaking at CF United 2009

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:19:00 -0400

I have been invited to speak at CFUnited 2009 in Leesburg, VA, August 12-15 2009. If you haven't attended CF United before, be sure to sign up, as it is a fantastic program, and a great place to network with some of the most skilled developers in the world. This will be the 5th CFUnited event that I have spoken at, and the second time I will be presenting on a Flex topic. This year I will be going through the architecture of building a Google App Engine (GAE) app, powered by Flex. This allows you to create an application hosted by Google's application architecture, and using a Flex application as the user interface. It's a mashup of multiple technologies, and should be a lot of fun. Be sure to stop by!

pfSense 1.2.2 Success

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:12:00 -0400

I have been looking at open source firewall/router solutions for a while, and my list of requirements has been pretty steep. In particular, any solution I give a recommendation to would need to support WAN load balancing and SIP (for VOIP phones). I also recently added dynamic DNS to that list. Today I am pleased to say that I have a working solution using pfSense 1.2.2 (http://www.pfsense.com/). I had done a comparison between pfsense and vyatta a while back, and found issues with both that prevented it from being a solution I can recommend. [More]

Manually adding bindings between objects in Flex/AS3

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:53:00 -0400

I recently needed to manually create bindings in AS3 code between objects, and since MXML ultimately all is just AS3, I figured there had to be a way to do it. Binding in MXML Lets look at the following code...

Here you bind the text property of the TextInput to the label's text property so wh you type in the textInput, it reflects in the label. Binding in AS The key to this is a class called BindingUtils in the mx.binding.utils package. You can use this class as below: [More]