that’s great…

nuthin but a hero…

This guy, Tabi Bonney, is always coming up with creative video concepts to accompany his quality music. Hailing from DC, his music always has elements of the area and his African heritage. Truly talented. This video’s based on a hero theme. “Nuthin’ but a Hero” is definitely worth a watch. Side note, I used to look like that cute kid with the cape, and then I grew up…

Caching for the DaoAuthenticationProvider - don’t do it

It’s extremely hard to remember that everything is not a nail. Whenever I’m using Hibernate Core and/or Hibernate Search, I plan on caching frequently used entities, in order to remove unnecessary load on the data-store(s). Pretty standard performance move. I tend to use Ehcache – currently on 1.7.

My latest problem arose when I decided that Spring Security’s DaoAuthenticationProvider should get as much of its information from a cache. Well, if you never change a user’s security information after they are logged in (ya know, like a password) this is fine. However, it’s actually fairly common that a user forgets their password. In some cases, a user might just want to change their password. In either case, if the DaoAuthenticationProvider is looking to a cache for its user data, it will deem the old password to be correct, at least until the cached entity expires. It took me 2 full days to figure this out. I assumed the bad data was being cached, but I could not find the source… I focused on Hibernate for the longest. I thought, maybe a forced flush? No? OK, how about making sure the cache-mode is set to Ignore. No? Hmm, what the heck?!

In the end, I just started looking for all forms of caching in the system. I finally stumbled upon my various DaoAuthenticationProvider Spring definitions, and their userCache dependencies. I went to to the Spring Security documentation and found out that because of this very issue, only stateless apps should use the non-default userCache. Ehh, live and learn…

snipping tool in window 7…

OK, so Windows 7 has this awesome screen capture tool that appears on the menu just after you do your first screen capture (Alt + PrtScn)… It’s called Snipping Tool. Considering the fact that it’s free, I was pretty surprised how well it compared to a commercial product I was going to buy called SnagIt.

Anyway, yet another subtle difference between what MS used to call an OS, and Windows 7…

Hawthorne Neighborhood Revitalization…

As usual, Habitat for Humanity (H4H) is stepping it’s game up… The Hawthorne area of Minneapolis, like the rest of the country, has been hit hard by the housing crisis. In the video below, Sue Haigh and H4H find a new reason to build and renovate homes.

United Kingdom Constitution…

OK, I saw Jon Stewart’s item above, and they were talking about the UK Constitution. I heard someone say that the UK’s constitution is “unwritten”…
I thought, Wait, what did they say? I assumed this was just a joke. As it turns out, the UK’s constitution is unwritten, as in one whole document. Britain is actually governed by a number of documents. Funny.