Spring (Acegi) Security Account Lockout

Due to my previous articles in Spring Security, some has asked me how to implement the Account Lockout on too many failed login attempts. The best way to do this is to listen for Spring events and update your User object on a failed login.  Let us start with your User object. It must be implementing the UserDetails interface and you might have already noticed that it has a method isAccountNonLocked(). You might be currently returning true in the implementation. Now we have to change the logic here to implement locked status.
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Back in US!

After a month long journey and two kids with dysentery, I am happy to be back home in California. I am still recovering from my jet-lag. These days I am sleeping very early, probably by 8:30 PM because of the jet-lag. Hopefully I will over with that by the end of this week.

On my way back from India we stayed 4 days in Dubai, UAE. It is amazing how they have constructed that huge city in the middle of a desert. The Burj Dubai, Burj Al Arab and the Palm Jumeriah are impressive. Dubai seemed to be an extension of Kerala since we could go into any store and start talking in Malayalam. Probably half of Dubai residents are people from Kerala, India. The food there is cheap and good. The third day, we went on a desert safari which we all enjoyed. My kids had a blast riding ATV on desert.

However I am amazed by the lack of the concept of a family (at least in the public), especially among local population. It is hard to find a family go together to a mall or a restaurant. You can see groups of men and groups of ladies roaming separately which is hard to see in US or any other western country.

Look what I was working on!

We recently created a SPOT Live Widget that can be embedded in your blog or your web page. Here is my SPOT Live widget and it tells me where I am:

If you are a SPOT User, you can easily get the SPOT Widget running on your site.

1. First create a share page by logging into your SPOT Account and then clicking the “Share” tab.
2. Now note the glId of the share link created (share links are of the format http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/gogl.jsp?glId=xxxxx – here xxxxx is your glId or guest link Id).
3. Sign up for a Google Maps API key. You need to provide the URL of your site.
4. Return to this page and click on the “Share this” button on the bottom of this widget and copy the code from that and paste it to your blog or webpage. Make sure you are pasting the code in HTML mode (not visual mode).
5. Replace the feeds: [ "0o0VYWuQkoUvs9dj04qhOxFOgavQXdAEP" ] in the copied code with feeds: [ "xxxxx" ] where xxxx is the glId obtained from step 2.
6. Replace your-gmap-key in the copied code with the key obtained in Step 3.

Sure, it sounds complicated since I explained it too much . For people with some knowlege of HTML it is quick and easy.

My Kindle 2 Finally Arrived!

From late December, I was planning to order Kindle but I put it off just because of the rumors of Kindle 2 being out. I also noticed the huge waiting period for Kindle last month (almost 13 weeks). From that I was pretty sure Kindle 2 is on the way. Finally the day they announced, I ordered my Kindle 2. I have seen Kindle 1 and I liked it too but I heard that the major flaws with Kindle 1 is resolved in this version.

Kindle 2 came in a very nice packing. After opening, I was surprised by the iPhone like thin look and its tiny bright keys. The keys actually fits nicely compared to the Kindle 1.It came powered on and the screen had instruction on how to start using Kindle! I initially thought that it was plastic paper stuck on the screen of Kindle!

The shorter paging button is much better and it does not accidentally turn a page. The kindle 2 feels like it is marginally faster… the page rendering seems to be faster and the accidental page flip is not as annoying since we can flip back fairly quickly.

I understand that with today’s thin devices the possibility of replacing batteries is even more difficult. However I am not happy that the Kindle 2 does not have a replaceable battery. The other biggest drawback and is a downgrade from the version 1 is the missing expansion slots. The Kindle 1 had a SD slot. I hoped that Kindle 2 had at least the micro-SD slot. But without the expansion slot your Kindle is stuck with 1.5 GB capacity. Right now with around 30 books and manuals stored in Kindle, I have not even used 20 MB. But someday you have to swap some stuff out to make room for other books. I am also unhappy that I cannot organize books in folders – I am too used to folders. Even if I create folders in the Kindle internal disk everything shows up flat in the Home screen.

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Spring, Quartz and Auto-wiring of Quartz jobs

Facing Null Pointer Exceptions in Quartz jobs? This is an example on how to do Spring Quartz Integration with Auto-wiring.

Quartz Enterprise scheduler is a neat application that lets you setup periodic jobs within a J2EE or J2SE environment. Quartz is not as powerful as other commercial enterprise job schedulers like Autosys but its ability to run simple cron-like jobs within an Application server environment is commendable.  Above all Quartz and Spring integrates very nicely with a little effort.

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