SSS Website Security

If you have an SSS account, you will notice that you have to change your password every now and then. For security purposes, they will require us to change the password every 90 days. Okay that's acceptable. Here are the two things that I find really stupid.

1. When you change password, they require the password to be at least 8 alphanumeric characters with at least 1 numeric character. Since I usually put special characters on my passwords for added complexity, I tried putting some and voila!

Why are you not allowing me to make my passwords harder to crack!

2. After successfully changing your passwords, you will receive an e-mail about it:

Dear Sir/Madam,

You have successfully updated your password.

You may now log-in to the SSS Website Member tab using the information below:
User ID: registered_user_id
Password: YOUR EFFING RAW PASSWORD

Should you encounter any problems accessing your account, please call the SSS Hotline at (632) 920-6446 to 55 (available 24 hours from Monday to Friday except during holidays) or email us at onlineserviceassistance@sss.gov.ph for assistance.

Thank you for using the SSS Website.

This is a system-generated e-mail. Please do not reply.

The f*ck is this SSS!?! You don't encrypt passwords you save on your database? Who the hell designed and developed this system? Ugh. No wonder our systems are so advanced.

Community Builder Password Verification

If you have used the community builder, try checking their password verification. The info message tells us that passwords should not contain spaces but it only trims the spaces preceding and ending your input.

e.g.

_ _ _ password _ _ _ will be trimmed to password

_ _ _ pass_word _ _ _ will be accepted and be trimmed to pass_word

The password field accepts spaces after all.

Joomlapolis Community Builder (CB) API

Get the CB API here for free!!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11065839/Joomlapolis-CB11-API-Guide

Google App Engine and Grails 1.2-M2

When I was trying to create my first Google Wave robot using Grails, I noticed that Grails 1.2-M2 is not compatible with the Google App Engine. Reverting to Grails 1.1.1 made the example in http://www.grails.org/plugin/app-engine work.

Note: In the site, appcfg.sh's permissions must be changed to be able to use $APPENGINE_HOME/bin/appcfg.sh update ./target/war

Customizing Grails/Groovy Drop-Down List

Grails is a powerful framework based on Groovy. Since most of the basic CRUD operations are done by Grails, we sometimes want to edit some of the fields generated in the GSP specially if it is a drop-down list.

There are two ways to edit the drop-down list:
1. By overriding the toString function of the domain

class Student {
          String firstName
          String lastName

          String toString(){
               StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder()
               sb.append(firstName)
               sb.append(" ")
               sb.append(lastName)
               return sb.toString()
          }
     }

Without touching the GSPs, the drop-down list will show the first names and last names of the students and not the default package.domain : id (e.g. Student : 1)

2. By setting the attribute optionValue in g:select tag

optionValue="firstName"

will show only the first names of the students. If you want to show the first names and last names, you may opt to use

optionValue="${{it.firstName + ' ' + it.lastName}}"

Note that character/s can be inserted for each iteration inside single quotes.