A Wicket Diary

Never booking with vliegtickets.nl again

Martijn Dashorst — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:45:50 +0000

When I booked my flight for the London Wicket event I thought to book with vliegtickets.nl as it seemed like a secure website—much more secure than cheapticket.nl, since they have certificate issues in my browsers (safari, firefox). So I received a message (which they forwarded from easyjet) asking me for my passport data, and … send it through e-mail.

My god! Didn’t they learn anything about privacy and security? E-mail goes through several insecure servers in plain text. I wonder what a mobster can do with my date of birth, date issued and document number. Identity theft anyone?

Couldn’t they just bother to build a secure page where I can enter the data on their website? When my credit card information is intercepted I’m secured by my bank, but who secures me from identity theft? Ironically, payment is done through a secure webpage… This shows how much this company actually cares about their customers.

We’re living in fricking 2009 and it’s almost 2010! Is it that hard to build a secure web page that vliegtickets.nl entrust their customers identity to plain e-mail?

Best #songsincode

Martijn Dashorst — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:10:30 +0000

From the Friday twitter meme #songsincode:

@AlexJReid .corvette { width:1; height:1; color: red; }
@dashorst: let love=rule();
@codepo8: .clowns{float:left;} .jokers{float:right;} #me_you{position:fixed;margin:0 auto;width:100%}
@sweatje: $i->shoot(new Sheriff) && !$i->shoot(new Deputy)
@northerncharm stop(); time=hammer;
@codepo8 if(reaper.fear){dont()}else{cowbell.add()}
@codepo8: me={locations:['corner','spotlight'],religion:404}

A new release has arrived: Dashorst 2.0

Martijn Dashorst — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:14:48 +0000

I’ve been preoccupied lately with the support of a very special personal release. July 7th 2009 our son Liam was born. He is a tiny baby (44cm, 2310 grams at delivery), but growing healthily. As any parent will attest to, it is a lot of hard but rewarding work. Even though Liam is still no programmer—he doesn’t (yet) transform coffee into code, he is getting the basics of transforming warm liquids (milk) into other stuff (full diapers).

Liam sucking on God's gift to new parents: the pinky

My wife Diana did a wonderful job giving birth to Liam, and she’s now excelling at the toughest job of all: being a full-time mom for a 3 weeks old baby. No sleep (for mommy), no time to wash (for mommy), no time to eat (for mommy), etc.

So if I don’t answer your comments, emails or other pings, don’t feel offended: I just don’t have time to even read your messages because the next diaper needs changing.

Missing Maurice…

Martijn Dashorst — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:03:15 +0000

Today would have marked Maurice’s 30th birthday, if it weren’t for that unfortunate accident almost a year ago. It is times like these when you remember the loss of a valued friend more so than normally. No more sharing of cake, taunting the additional year and celebrating life.

My iCal notified me yesterday of Maurice’s upcoming birthday, and today again. It will keep on doing that next year, and the year after that…

Maurice you are sorely missed. My thoughts are with you and Michel and your family. Where ever you are, happy birthday!

Eclipse 3.4 with openjdk 6 on OS X 32-bit CoreDuo

Martijn Dashorst — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:55:24 +0000

With the invaluable help of David Green, I was able to run Eclipse on openjdk 6 on my first gen MacBook Pro (you know, those left behind by Apple, running on a 32 bit CoreDuo processor… good to know that Apple supports the early adapters).

With this script that I adapted from David’s blog I was able to start Eclipse 3.4 (Version: 3.4.2
Build id: M20090211-1700) with Landon Fullers openjdk 6 build:

export JAVA_HOME=/Developer/Java/openjdk6-b16-24_apr_2009-r1
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

java -server -Djava.library.path=$HOME/bin/jnilib -Dswt.library.path=$HOME/bin/jnilib -Xms128m -Xmx768m \
    -XX:MaxPermSize=192m -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts \
    -cp /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.101.R34x_v20081125.jar \
    org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main -os macosx -ws carbon -arch x86 -showsplash \
    -launcher /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse -name Eclipse \
    --launcher.library /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.101.R34x_v20080731 \
    -startup /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.101.R34x_v20081125.jar \
    -launcher /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse \
    -keyring $HOME.eclipse_keyring -consoleLog -showlocation -vm $JAVA_HOME

The script misses the shebang, since my hosting provider thinks that I’m trying to execute some serverside exploit…
You’ll have to extract a couple of shared libraries that are packaged in your Eclipse distribution:

jar xfv /Applications/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.carbon.macosx_3.4.1.v3452b.jar
jar xfv /Applications/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.core.filesystem.macosx_*.jar os/macosx/liblocalfile_1_0_0.jnilib

You’ll have to rename all those libraries to give them a *.dylib extension.

Finally I had to point /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home to the openjdk 6 directory:

sudo mv /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home.old
sudo ln -s LOCATION_OF_OPENJDK /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home