Author Archives: Stijn de Witt

Fiat money does have backing!

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

It’s just not gold.

Fiat money is a form of money where the currency is not backed by any commodity. It is to be accepted as payment by fiat (order) of the government. We call this ‘legal tender‘. The US Dollar is fiat money, as is the Euro, the Yen and, in fact, most modern currencies.

money

 

In the past, most money was backed by commodities. Usually, silver and gold. But this has not been the case for a long time. The last time western money was backed by gold and silver was between 1944 and 1971. After the second world war, the United States and the allied nations agreed on what is called the Bretton Woods system. In this system, the national banks of the participating countries tied their currencies to gold and kept physical gold in reserve. Commercial banks (but not consumers) were able to exchange bank notes for gold. However, this system came to an end in 1971 when the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold.

Today, our money is not backed by anything. It’s just worthless paper. Right?

money-toilet-paper

 

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Undertow CORS filter

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

Adding CORS headers to your Java-based REST server responses is more tricky than it needs to be. There seems to be an oversight in Java EE’s filter handling, because when the container is configured with container managed authorization and a user that is not (yet) authenticated attempts to access a protected resource, the container intercepts that request and sends a 401 response. That response does not have CORS headers, but for some reason cannot be filtered. Neither with a Jax-Rs ContainerResponseFilter, not with a plain servlet filter. A container-specific solution seems to be the only way to get the job done.

I created an Undertow filter to get this job done easily for JBoss Undertow based EE servers. These include JBoss AS/EAP, Wildfly and Wildfly Swarm. The Github project, which includes installation instructions, can be found here:

https://github.com/download/undertow-cors-filter

I am currently in the process of publishing this project to Maven Central. Update will follow soon!

Listing copyright info in each file

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

…is just silly.

I found a way to list it for each line!

public class HelloWorld {                  // © 2015-2016, Stijn de Witt
  public static void main(String... args){ // © 2015-2016, Stijn de Witt
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");   // © 2015-2017, Stijn de Witt
  }                                        // © 2015-2016, Stijn de Witt
}                                          // © 2015-2016, Stijn de Witt

(I changed the program twice, but due to using the clearly inferior method of tracking copyright per file, I’m not sure which lines changed in 2016)

Chrome doesn’t take no for an answer

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

And the series continues…

This time it’s Chrome. Chrome is an excellent browser, but some dialogs are weird… And some are not taking no for an answer.

The dialog below asks us whether we want to recover tabs that were opened before the browser crashed. Curiously there is only one button for us to answer…

chrome-doesnt-take-no-for-an-answer

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11 transparent GIFs every webmaster should know

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

Transparent gifs. I hear you sigh as your mind wanders back in time, to days long gone, when there where only 2 browsers and both of them had layout quirks that demanded the use of transparent 1×1 pixels gifs. every. where.

11-transparent-gifs-every-webmaster-should-know

The return of the GIF

GIF was huge in the early days of the web. It was the one format that could be used to send images over slow connections and still have an acceptable page load time. It could do animations! And most of all, as web developers, we used them to artificially inflate our table cells so IE and Netscape would leave them as we intended them.

Then, some company claimed ownership of the format and people called for the banning of GIFs from the internet. Browsers grew up and the 1×1 transparent GIF faded away…

Or not?

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WhatsApp doesn’t take no for an answer

Posted on by Stijn de Witt

I’m stretching the meaning of ‘doesn’t take no for an answer’ a bit here in order to make this post fit into the broader series of posts I’ve been making on this subject recently, but apart from the fact that this time the dialog does offer me the choice of ‘Never’, the dialog *forces* me to make this choice on it’s terms instead of mine.

Whatsapp-doesnt-take-no-for-an-answer

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