http://danielbray.com/blog Daniel Bray's professional website Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:10:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My wife is currently incubating a daughter for the new year, which means that my old office at home has to go. In fact, it's going downstairs; down into a tiny alcove between the toilet and where we keep our fruit and veg. I can live with most of this, ... http://danielbray.com/blog/home-network/media-centre/ A while back I did a bit on how to generate good preshared keys for WPA. Well, in a moment of boredom I hacked together a web-facing PHP version of the same idea. You can find it here http://www.danielbray.com/php/keygen Enjoy. http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/update-wifi-encryption-how-to-make-a-good-psk-for-wpa/ UPDATE: I’ve had some trouble getting people to use this because, well, it was hard to use; so I changed it about a little: now it uses MySQL rather than XML to store the locations, and there’s a new, web-based, method for creating new locations. I’ve been playing with PHP (fun) ... http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/bringing-out-baby/ Sometimes, when you're debugging your application in eclipse, you see where you've made a mistake in your code, and that if you had assigned some variable differently, or had invoked some operation a bit earlier, your code would work. Trouble is, you're not completely sure, and you don't want to ... http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/eclipse-bugfixing/ This is part of my Ruby on Rails project. Once I figured out what I wanted to do, I guess I had to figure out how I was going to do it. InstantRails: kind of like xampp, but for rails. It's a simple-to-use installation of rails that comes with a deployment of ... http://danielbray.com/blog/ruby-on-rails/toolkit/ This is part of my Ruby on Rails project. I guess the first thing you need to do before you do something is decide what it is you want to do. That sounded a bit like humpty-dumpty, didn't it. Anyway, I wanted to do something realistic, so I would have to learn ... http://danielbray.com/blog/ruby-on-rails/what-it-is/ Right, so I wanted to learn that whole Ruby on Rails thing, and I figured the best thing to do would be to throw myself in at the deep(ish) end and do something big(ish). So, the plan is to do some kind of automatically cross-referenced bloggy/wiki kind of thing; where people ... http://danielbray.com/blog/ruby-on-rails/ruby-on-rails-project/ Updated: I've rejigged all of this into a public, automatic key generator, that you can see here: http://www.danielbray.com/php/keygen/. I got a broadband a while back, and it came with a wireless router, which was just enough to tip my natural anxiety over into full-blown paranoia. So, I spent a bit of time ... http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/good-key-generation-for-wireless-encryption/ A lot of what I do is web-applications, and the framework for serving up these web-applications that I’ve chosen to work with has been tomcat and struts: tomcat serves up the pages; struts organizes and controls the flow of the web-app. This essay is about struts, and how to avoid ... http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/struts-avoiding-some-common-problems/ Object-oriented languages are well known, and are part of every college CS syllabus: object-oriented programming is, however, as rare as the penny black. This is a short(-ish) essay on the subtleties of the paradigm that tend to be overlooked in the speedy twelve-week OO programming course that gets thrown at ... http://danielbray.com/blog/coding/object-oriented-programming-rarer-than-you-think/