Rob's Blog

I watched last week’s Gadget Show last night (I’m a week behind), and saw their review on the Sanyo Xacti WH1 waterproof camcorder. They listed it as “from £165″ which sounded amazing value, and considered buying it. Unfortunately it looks like they made a mistake on the price, as I couldn’t find a price anywhere near it.

I did find it at £189 however on a site I’d never heard of: Electronic Megastore electronicmegastore.com. I’m not sure what first made me wary of this site. Probably the fact it was at such a great price, and I’d never heard of the site before.

A quick Google Search came up with a page of customer reviews on Shobby. Some are great, but appear to be from similar IP addresses. The rest all talk about them being a scam run from a petrol station! This could be innocent and just a disgruntled customer/employee trying to spread rumours.

I decided to do my own investigations into the site, and have concluded that in my opinion the site is a scam, for the following reasons:

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I’m sure I’m not alone in creating administration pages for websites that under development, and relying on the fact the URL is unknown to keep them private (until the site is launched of course).

I currently have a large project under development, which has a number of administration functions that are executed by visting a certain URL (in this case refreshing product information and wiping cache tables). I got a call from the customer telling me that the cache kept disapearing without him running the function, and I knew I hadn’t.

After checking my code, and looking at the data to check if the data really was missing, I decided to check the Apache access logs.

A quick grep told me that the admin URL had been accessed, not by me or the customer, but by Alexa! This had caused the cache to be wiped (correctly as it turns out, since that was what it was meant to do).

I have a firefox plugin on my main office PC that tells me the Alexa ratiung of any sites I visit. Clearly they also spider any URLs they don’t know about!

I quickly added password protection to the admin pages, and will make sure it’s the first thing I do in future. I don’t think (I hope) that they are publicising these private URLs, but visiting them is bad enough. I will of course be removing the Alexa plugin when I get back to the office.

One for the geeks I’m afraid.

I’m developing a site with quite a complicated menu system getting details using equally complicated database queries. In various places in the menu, I needed to find out whether to display a particular sub-menu. To do this I had some SQL to check whether any products existed at that particular point.

The SQL to do this took quite a while to execute (in one case over 30 seconds), which is obviously too long to wait to load a page.

I realised that my SQL statements were selected all appropriate products, where as they in fact only had to check whether any existed.

I could have just added a LIMIT to just return the first row, but if my statement had any ordering etc this wouldn’t help. I don’t want the first row (I don’t care about the data), just to know whether there is one. I knew there must be a better way.

I discovered EXISTS, which although isn’t documented very much, seems to do exactly what I want very simply. The solution is to surround my existing SELECT statement as follows:

SELECT 1 FROM DUAL WHERE EXISTS ( [SELECT statement here] )

That’s it. I can plug any SELECT statement I like in, and it tells me (very quickly) whether any results would be returned. A very useful trick I’m sure I’ll use in future.

I was writing an email to a friend, and tried to copy and paste a URL, but all that get pasted was “Text copying disabled”.

I thought maybe the site was preventing copying, so I disabled Javascript and tried again. Same problem. I tried copying some text within a text editor. Same problem.

Eventually I realised is was a survey I was completing in another tab (I like to multi-task). I looked at the source, and saw no JS. All there was was a piece of flash embedded.

Once I closed the survey everything worked, but it’s a bit worrying that flash can take over your computer to such an extent!

Does anyone know of any security settings that could stop this? Is there anything else Flash can do to take over a computer?

Update 2008-05-20:

I’ve had a lot of people coming to this blog looking for how to fix this. If I’m right, the easiest way to fix this will be to close all web browsers.

If this doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look in to it. If it does work, feel free to comment too – I’d be interested to know how widespread the problem is.