"Winter in Blogville" by Jennifer ("14221") Wutz-Lopes (Buffalo Spree, Nov 2007, p26)

Someone ( everyone!) over at Estrip.org has their panties in a bunch about something to do with the fact that they are not taken seriously as bloggers. Take a number and get in line, I say.

But estrip is by far the most colorful screenshot in the bunch.

- Z

Because I know everyone's been holding their breath for this, here's the HTTP auth Javascript server-side script and database layout

Notes:
- does not require any hooks in your HTML code; just make sure your form has fields named 'username' and 'password' and import the Javascript
- can be attached to any form with an access-restricted target; script will pre-authenticate and, if successful, send the rest of the form as usual.
- You're not going to be able to use the server script as-is because it's kind of dependent on other parts of the project. You're not going to be able to read the server script as-is because it's Python. [Also in the full version you can change your authentication realm, and users in the special '_administrator' realm can log in to anyone's site.]
- no backwards Internet Explorer compatibility code in the Javascript
- on successful authentication, 'validate' returns 204 No Content. on unsuccessful authentication, server returns 400 Bad Request.

- Z

You know, I just can't fucking leave well enough alone. This morning (e:paul) mailed me a short Surebert script to do logins, which works, yet I'm still hacking this HTTP auth problem. Stay The Course, right?

But I got it solved. 1: Never send 401 Unauthorized without a WWW-Authenticate header. It's not allowed, and you'll get what you deserve. RFC 2617 briefly mentions using 400 Bad Request to report miscellaneous failures to the browser, and sure enough, that resets Safari. 2: If the script detects a failure, send another request to the same URL using a bogus username. This will of course fail, resetting Firefox in the process [thanks (e:kookcity2000)]. I think that's a gruesome hack, but if it works it works.

Why do I care about HTTP authentication? Most importantly, I want to support authenticated, noninteractive web services [specifically an authenticated RSS feed]. Since this code will have to live in my server somewhere, I might as well get some mileage out of it. HTTP Digest is often overlooked but it's a nice middle ground between static hashes [which are plaintext-equivalent] and full-blown encryption [CPU load].

Source code available upon request.

- Z

Don't bother reading unless you give at least a quarter of a shit about XMLHttpRequest and HTTP authentication.

Here's a stupid geek trick. The correct login information for this is user="user", password="password". Give it the wrong password [it will say something like 401 Unauthorized, user="user", password="bogus"]. Then give it the right password and try again - it will keep sending the wrong password. This happens in both Firefox and IE; Safari has a slightly different bug.

Here's the sitch: I have an XMLHttpRequest going out to a password-protected resource. The credentials are supplied by the user and thus they are likely to be wrong some of the time. The script is designed to gracefully handle authentication failure - specifically, I want to avoid the crappy infinite HTTP authentication dialog box loop. I'd think that this issue would come up from time to time, but I guess it doesn't because this is really hairy:

XMLHttpRequest states "If authentication fails, user agents SHOULD prompt the users for credentials."

To work around this, Paul James suggests returning 401 Unauthorized without the mandatory WWW-Authenticate header. In theory, this tells the browser to stop trying and forget the password. The browser does, in fact, stop trying, but it also goes into a weird undefined state where it continues to issue the old [incorrect] password despite instruction to the contrary. [Safari instead puts up the dialog on the next request, even if credentials are provided.]

HTTP/1.1 states "If the 401 response contains the same challenge as the prior response, and the user agent has already attempted authentication at least once, then the user SHOULD be presented the entity that was given in the response, since that entity might include relevant diagnostic information." - ie, reissue the same challenge to indicate to the browser that it should give up. As near as I can tell, not a single browser has ever done that.

HTTP/1.1 also gives us 403 Forbidden: "Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated." This response has the same bizarre effects as 401 without WWW-Authenticate.

I'm actually kind of an AJAX newb, so ... does anyone have any recommendations?

- Z

OK I admit it, I'm too cool for school. I don't like getting dressed up for Halloween. I think costume parties are lame. One year we sat at home with all the lights out so nobody would try to trickortreat us. And secretly I always thought that people who professed to like Halloween better than Christmas were just trying to fit in with the kids who don't fit in.

But this year it seems like there's a lot of fun stuff happening. Consider this, first off, a bump for "Nosferatu," below.

At the other end of the film spectrum, Regal Transit is going to be screening The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D this year. [I was initially surprised that they'd taken the expense of shooting in 3-D if they weren't going to distribute as 3-D ... but alas, this is yet another film digitally altered by ILM. Thank you George Lucas!]

::Download Flash Video::

[Woah, rerecompression. I hear Flash 9 is going to have native support for H.264?]

Is everyone familiar with fundamentalist Christian haunted houses? Alleyway Theatre bought a copy of the 'official' script and is presenting "Hell House Buffalo" upstairs of the costume store/bike shop at 745 Main. Todd Warfield (Reefer Madness), director: "I've changed very, very little of it. The challenge for us is to perform it sincerely." I've always been sort of morbidly curious of the spectacle, and now that I know the money is going to a good cause and I won't get evangelized at too much, I think we're going to go check it out. With local celebrities as Guest Satans, how can you go wrong?



- Z