Category: Technology

Apache HTTPD: SSL Virtual Hosts

For quite some time, you couldn’t bind multiple SSL web sites to a single IP:Port combination — this had to do with the mechanics of negotiating an SSL session — the client and server negotiated encryption based on a specific certificate before the server really knew what the client was trying to retrieve. The quick/easy solution was to just add a virtual IP to the box and bind each individual web site to a unique IP address. While this was quite effective in a corporate environment or purely internal network, it was a terrible solution for a set of home-hosted personal web servers — I don’t want to buy four public IP addresses to host four differently named websites. My workaround was to off-port sites no one else would be using (the MQTT WebSockets reverse proxy) and use a reverse proxy to map paths within the family website to the remaining web servers. This page, for instance, is rushworth.us/lisa … which the reverse proxy re-maps to https://lisa.rushworth.us behind the scenes.

With Apache HTTPD 2.2.12 or later built against OpenSSL v0.9.8g or later, you can use Server Name Indication (SNI) to serve multiple SSL websites from a single IP:Port just like you have been able to do with non-SSL sites. Using SNI, the client includes “what they’re looking for” in first message of the SSN negotiation process so the server knows which cert to serve.

In your httpd.conf, indicate that you want to use SNI on an IP:Port combo

# Listen for virtual host requests on all IP addresses
NameVirtualHost *:443

And, optionally, configure one of the named virtual hosts as the default for non-SNI browsers:

SSLStrictSNIVHostCheck off

Now the configuration for your SSL sites can include a ServerName directive. Restart Apache HTTPD, and you’ll be able to access the proper SSL-enabled website without adding virtual IP addresses.

HTML – Multiple Values on Select Option

I needed to pass multiple values with a select option. It’s easily accomplished by setting the value to a JSON string

while ($row = oci_fetch_array($stmt, OCI_ASSOC+OCI_RETURN_NULLS)) {
	echo "<option value= " . json_encode($row) . ">" . $row['STRTYPENAME'] . "</option>\n";
}

And using JSON.parse to pull out the key of the value you need:

jQuery("#selectDivSetType").change(function () {     
    var strTemplateObject = $('#selectDivSetType').val();
    var jsonTemplateObject = JSON.parse( strTemplateObject );
    var strTemplateURI = './templates/' + jsonTemplateObject.STRTEMPLATENAME;
    $('#templateURI').attr("href", strTemplateURI); 
});

jQuery – Changing href When Drop-down Selection Changes

I needed to provide a different template depending on the type of activity selected in a drop-down menu. The following jQuery code gets the template name from the drop-down value and updates the href target. 

jQuery("#selectDivSetType").change(function () {     
    var strTemplateName = $('#selectDivSetType').val();
    var strTemplateURI = './templates/' + strTemplateName;
    $('#templateURI').attr("href", strTemplateURI); 
});

Exporting Microsoft Stream Transcript — Prettier Output and Error Handling

Updated script available at https://www.rushworth.us/lisa/?p=6854 — and, since copy/paste doesn’t seem to work for everyone, the script is also available as a text file.

I had posted a one-liner to grab the text content of the Microsoft Stream transcript — there’s a good bit of cleanup required to make something professional looking, but I’ve been lazy about it & leave formatting up to the recipient. The one-liner approach fails when it doesn’t encounter a text element where it expects to find one. A more robust export approach creates a Node List containing all of the transcript-line classed elements, then iterates through that list and when the node has a textContent attribute appends that content to a running string value. Printing the running string value produces output that needs minimal reformatting.

Code:

var objTranscriptLines = window.document.querySelectorAll('.transcript-line');
var strRunningText = null;
for(var i = 0; i < objTranscriptLines.length; i++){
    if( objTranscriptLines[i].textContent ){
        var strLineText = objTranscriptLines[i].textContent;
        strRunningText = strRunningText + "\n" + strLineText.replace("Discard   Save","");
    }
}
console.log(strRunningText);

Results:

You *could* strip off the timestamps as well — instead of strLineText.replace(“Discard Save”,””) use (strLineText.replace(“Discard    Save”,””)).substr(8)

Scratch: Changing Variable In Operator

When I needed to change a variable within an operator block, I’d been removing the variable block and adding the right one. Unlike the “change <variable> …” and “set <variable>…” blocks, the little variable name bubbles do not have a drop-down selector. Today, Anya and I were working on our Chicken Keepers games and she right-clicked the little bubble to select a different variable. Totally didn’t realize you could do that.

Scratch – Touching Clones

While you can detect when a clone is touching a main sprite, there’s no way to detect if something is touching a clone. The workaround is to use broadcast messages to trigger events.

1. In the clone, create an “if touching” block to detect when it is being touched by the sprite

2. Within the if-touching block, send a broadcast message (under the “Events” blocks)

3. On the other sprite, create a block triggered by the “I receive” event for the code you want to run when this sprite touches the clone of another sprite.

4. Now a sprite executes the desired code when it is touching the clone of another sprite.

 

Git — Show Dates For Branches

We wanted to see all of the branches in a repository with the dates of the latest commit:

git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate:rfc-local) %(refname:short)'

This outputs the full date/time (you can use any of the git log date formats [relative|local|default|iso|rfc|short|raw] after committerdate; short for the date without time)

 

Decompiling Jython Class Files

Looks like Jython that is compiled into a class file can be decompiled just like a Java class (I use jd-cmd which is both simple and open source). But … you don’t get back Python. In a disaster recovery scenario, you get back something and could reconstruct your Python code from the Java-looking stuff you get back.

I don’t normally type the entire command — a quick function in your .bashrc gives you a command alias that can be used instead.