A group of friends and I have a contest going on FiveThirtyEight’s NFL Forecasting Game Leaderboard and they don’t allow group functionality, so at the end of each week I Ctrl + F on the page to find each of our name’s and update a spreadsheet. Instead of spending 3 minutes once a week I decided to spend 15 minutes and write something that will do it for me.

Just replace the names array with a list of the names in your group

const table = document.getElementById('leaderboard-table-wrap').getElementsByTagName('tr');
Array.from(table).forEach(function(item) {
  const names = ['Matt Busche', 'Random Dude'];
  if (names.indexOf(item.getElementsByClassName('name')[0].textContent) === -1) {
    item.closest('tr').remove();
  }
});

As always you can use a Bookmarklet Creator to add this as a “bookmark” on your address bar to make filtering super easy.

Note: If you can’t find a person, each person needs to acknowledge that they want to publically post their score by visiting the leaderboard page and clicking a link.

read more

Fun tip I learned today. If you need to find the md5 hash of a file you can simply user the following command.

certutil -hashfile {path+filename} md5 

certutil is included in windows by default, so you aren’t required to have anything additional installed.

read more

If you ever need to load two different files in production vs test, you can add some code to your main.ts file in your Angular project. The existing code includes the if statement and enableProdMode(), but you can easily add in the else to conditionally load a different file. In my case I don’t want google analytics posting to my production account.

import { environment } from './environments/environment';

//create a new element
const script = document.createElement('script');
if (environment.production) {
    enableProdMode();
    script.src = 'analytics.js';
} else {
    script.src = 'test-analytics.js';
}
//append that element into the dom
document.head.appendChild(script);

read more

If you avoid using xml for you configuration files like I do, but don’t want to pass the jsessionid around through the URL you can create a @Bean and use a lambda to set the tracking mode as follows

public class AuthProvidersSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Bean
    public ServletContextInitializer servletContextInitializer() {
      return servletContext -> {
        servletContext.setSessionTrackingModes(EnumSet.of(SessionTrackingMode.COOKIE));
      };
    }
}

read more

If you need to override the domain on a session cookie you can add the following method to your AuthProvidersSecurityConfig class to do so. It’s not common you’d need to do this, but our domain wasn’t setting correctly in our cookie and this cleared the issue up.

public class AuthProvidersSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

  @Bean
  public ServletContextInitializer servletContextInitializer() {
    return servletContext -> {
      servletContext.getSessionCookieConfig().setDomain("mrbusche.com");
    };
  }
}

read more

I’m proud to announce I’ll be speaking at Iowa Technology Summit on October 2nd! The conference will be held at the Community Choice Credit Union Convention Center in down Des Moines.

I’ll be speaking on Secure by Design and how you can ensure security throughout development of your application. I’ll cover some of the OWASP top 10, best practices, and things I’ve implemented at work. I gave a similar talk at DevOpsDays Des Moines, but I have a lot of takeaways from that talk and my team at work has made a lot of progress that I’m excited to be able to share.

Registration is open now, so don’t delay in getting your tickets!

read more

I was helping a team at work recently and we needed to add a few users to Jenkins. We added the users and then asked them to login and make sure they could run jobs. 2 out of 3 people were able to run jobs, but the 3rd person was not. We had added them the same as everyone else, but it wasn’t working. I had them logout and back in and that’s when I realized the issue - Jenkins is case sensitive If you add a user as mrbusche but they login as MRBUSCHE they’re not recognized in Jenkins.

Long story short

Jenkins is case sensitive

read more

Spring JPA is awesome, but I ran into some issues adding a default timestamp to the column. The database should be set to have a default value, but that wasn’t an option here. I found the annotation pretty quickly, but instead of checking the database to see if it worked I was debugging in IntelliJ and that’s where the hiccup occurred. The value isn’t set on the object at object creation it’s only set once the entity has been saved. The following is what I ended up using

@Column(name = "creationDate")
@CreationTimestamp //this adds the default timestamp on save
private Timestamp createDate;

read more

By default Spring boot does a lot for you in datasource configuration, but if you’re using two separate database types – DB2, MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, etc. It doesn’t know how to infer which database type each is, so if you are configuring multiple different database types in Spring you need to specify the jpa.database type. In a yaml configuration your datasources should be defines like so.

spring:
  datasource:
    url: jdbc:sqlserver://${server}:${port};databaseName=${databaseName}
    username: ${username}
    password: ${password}
  jpa:
    database: sql_server
db2:
  datasource:
    jdbcurl: jdbc:db2://${server}:${port}/${databaseName}
    username: ${username}
    password: ${password}
  jpa:
    database: db2

read more

On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins is a truly fascinating book. It delves deep into how the brain works and why it is so hard to train a bot to do normal human things. Our brain is able to make low-level sensory predictions about what it expects to see, hear, and feel at given moment and it does all of these task in parallel. Here are other things I found interesting.

• Deep blue beat Garry Kasparov at his own game, chess, but the successes were hollow. Deep blue didn’t win by being smarter than a human it won by being millions of times faster than a human, deep blue had no intuition.
• These successful AI programs are good at one thing and one thing only just like a calculator is great at math but can’t do anything else.
• A computer just mindlessly executes instructions. It doesn’t know any more context than we have given it.
• Our intuition is often the biggest obstacle to uncovering the truth. Intuitive but incorrect assumptions keep us from seeing the correct answer.
• The strengthening and formation of synapses is what causes memories to be stored.
• The best ideas in science are almost always simple, elegant, and unexpected.
• We teach children we have five senses – touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. We really have more vision is like three senses motion, color, and luminous. Touch has temperature, pressure, pain, and vibration.
• The neo-cortex is infinitely smarter than any computer.
• An artificial intelligence strategy to open every door is impossible. Every attribute a door can have has to be in a database, weight, hinges, handle location, etc. There would need to be similar lists for every object in the world. Your brain makes low-level sensory predictions about what it expects to see, hear, and feel at any given moment and it does it all in parallel.
• Correct predictions result in understanding. “the door is normal” incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention. “the door is too light” the door knob is moved, etc
• When you miss a step you know immediately. If your foot misses its intended target by even a fraction of an inch you know something is wrong.
• If you get stuck on a problem go away for a while and then start again rephrasing the problem as something new.
• Brain uses memory and current context to predict what is written, words and letters that are unrecognizable on their own are easily recognized in context. Pattern matching with computers is not sufficient to the task.

read more