Lotus Notes message boxes aint not that un-good... are they?

Dear IBM,

thank you for this beautiful example of the non-avoidance of double-negatives in brillant interface design of Lotus Notes:



P.S.: If someone could explain what that message actually meant, that would be great!

Auto Desktop Background VBS Script

I was searching for this for quite a bit to get this super easy task right, so here it is. Based on some code I found on some place on the web.

Simply download a set of nice desktop backgrounds on the web, put them all in one folder and then create a vbs file with the following content in this folder. Make sure to change strFolder=... in the top to your desired folder.

Filename: randomdesktop.vbs

Option Explicit
Dim WshShell, oFolder, intNumber, strValue, i, oFile, strFolder, intFolders, intFiles, serialIndex, sleepTime, serialFolder
strFolder = "d:\tools\bg\"
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
Set oFolder = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").GetFolder(strFolder)
serialIndex = 0
            intFiles = oFolder.Files.Count
            intFolders = oFolder.Subfolders.Count
            Randomize
            intNumber = Int((intFiles + intFolders) * Rnd) + 1
            If intNumber > intFiles Then
                sleepTime = 10
                serialIndex = 1
                i = intFiles
                For Each serialFolder In oFolder.Subfolders  
                    i = i + 1
                    If i = intNumber Then Exit For                                                        
                Next
                i = 0
                For Each oFile In serialFolder.Files  
                    i = i + 1
                    If i = serialIndex Then Exit For                                                      
                Next
            Else
                sleepTime = 10
                i = 0
                For Each oFile In oFolder.Files  
                    i = i + 1
                    If i = intNumber Then Exit For                                                      
                Next
            End If
        If oFile.Path <> strValue Then
            strValue = oFile.Path
        End If
    Set oFile = Nothing
    WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper", strValue
    WshShell.Run "%windir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE user32.dll, UpdatePerUserSystemParameters", 1, False
Set WshShell = Nothing
Set oFolder = Nothing

When executed, the script will select a random file from the folder specified and set it to the desktop background. I have placed it it my startup folder and now I have a new desktop image every day. :-)

Java ProxySelector, useSystemProxies and new Socket() = Malformed reply from SOCKS server

When you want to easily configure your java application to use the systems proxies and you do a little research on google, you will find some code snippets that look pretty much like this (from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/376101/setting-jvm-jre-to-use-windows-proxy-automatically):

System.setProperty("java.net.useSystemProxies", "true");
System.out.println("detecting proxies");

List l = null;
try {
    l = ProxySelector.getDefault().select(new URI("http://foo/bar"));
} catch (URISyntaxException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}
if (l != null) {
    for (Iterator iter = l.iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
        java.net.Proxy proxy = (java.net.Proxy) iter.next();
        System.out.println("proxy hostname : " + proxy.type());

        InetSocketAddress addr = (InetSocketAddress) proxy.address();

        if (addr == null) {
                System.out.println("No Proxy");
        } else {
                System.out.println("proxy hostname : " + addr.getHostName());
                System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", addr.getHostName());
                System.out.println("proxy port : " + addr.getPort());
                System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", Integer.toString(addr.getPort()));
        }
    }

}

This works fine, as long as you only use it to determine the System proxy for URLConnections.

However simply opening a new Socket with a command like this

Socket tunnel = new Socket("192.168.1.101", 8080);

fails with an exception if the above code has been executed before:

java.net.SocketException: Malformed reply from SOCKS server
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.readSocksReply(Unknown Source)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Unknown Source)

In my case, I was using apache axis (axis1) which I had to use because my webservice only supported the rpc/literal SOAP encoding. After looking into this issue for a while, I found the solution in the piece of code from above. It appears java.net.Socket always uses a proxy when a default ProxySelector is set.

I am unsure of why this happens, but what fixed the issue for me was to set the default proxy selector to null after I retrieved the system proxy with the above code:

ProxySelector.setDefault(null);