I’ve been out of the loop on straight Java programming for a while, so this is probably obvious to a lot of people, and has been for a long time. But on the off chance that I’m not the only other idiot out there, I’ll post this.

The old way of instantiating a List in Java was like this:

List strings = Arrays.asList(new String[]{"foo","bar"});

In Java 5, templates were introduced, so I had to change to doing this:

List<String> strings = Arrays.asList(new String[]{"foo","bar"});

It just occurred to me that with variable-length methods, I can simply call asList like this:

List<String> strings = Arrays.asList("foo","bar");

This is among many brilliant hacks from this page.

b = (b * 0x0202020202ULL & 0x010884422010ULL) % 1023;

The multiply operation creates five separate copies of the 8-bit byte pattern to fan-out into a 64-bit value. The AND operation selects the bits that are in the correct (reversed) positions, relative to each 10-bit groups of bits. The multiply and the AND operations copy the bits from the original byte so they each appear in only one of the 10-bit sets. The reversed positions of the bits from the original byte coincide with their relative positions within any 10-bit set. The last step, which involves modulus division by 2^10 - 1, has the effect of merging together each set of 10 bits (from positions 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, …) in the 64-bit value. They do not overlap, so the addition steps underlying the modulus division behave like or operations.

The genius here, I think, is the modulus division to compress eight specific bits from a 64-bit number down into an 8-bit byte.

On philihp.com, I redirect the root address philihp.com to philihp.com/blog. I do this with mod_rewrite, since it’s much faster to do an HTTP Location header based redirect than to use an HTML meta tag redirect. I encountered a problem with this, though.

I want to be able to authenticate with the identifier “philihp.com”. Not “openid.philihp.com”, not “philihp.com/openid”, just simply “philihp.com”, and I have it all setup using phpMyID to host locally, which is good. But rather than put all the server machinery for authenticating at my root level, I like to have it at “philihp.com/openid” (or elsewhere), and out of the way. OpenID has facility for doing this, since it’s almost always done; when a browser visits philihp.com, in the HEAD tags of the HTML, there’s the following:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://philihp.com/openid/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://philihp.com/" />

Where the openid.server specifies where the machinery is for taking care of the authentication, and the openid.delegate specifies what the claimed identifier is. What happens when you go to somewhere like twitterfeed.com, when you try to authenticate there the server itself goes to the URL you give it, looks at the HEAD tags of the HTML it sees there, and forwards the end user to the openid.server specified. The problem I had is that when the server goes to philihp.com, it’s being redirected from mod_rewrite to blog/ because of this thing. This is bad, because it causes my claimed identifier to be “philihp.com/blog/” instead of just “philihp.com”.

I wasn’t the first person to have this problem, though. Haris bin Ali and Will Norris found a solution with PHP that checks the HTTP headers and redirects based on them. Below these have been adapted to RewriteCond rules, which would get evaluated before PHP or any other platform your site runs on (so long as it’s still Apache).

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !openid [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xrds+xml [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /blog/ [R,L]

These say “Redirect empty requests (requests for root) to /blog/, unless the User-Agent header has “openid” in it, or is blank, or the Accept header contains “application/xrds+xml”"; which are all going to be characteristic of a request coming from an OpenID consumer, and not from a normal browser.