Safari reporting MIME errors

[Steve Alex-2]

A problem has cropped up lately on the development server of my former  
employer. I do a little work for them now and then and they are being  
a little more cautious since I left and trying to test everything on  
the development server. Also they have very little Active4D experience.

First, everything is Mac OS X Tiger, 4D 2004 and Active4D 4.5r1.

Development - web server on 4D server
Production - web server on 4D Client


I first noticed the problem when I tried to implement the URLFactory  
and custom error pages on the development server. I would get an error  
page from Safari saying there were too many redirects, even with  
circuits that had no redirects. Clicking the reload button a few times  
would eventually bring up the page. I couldn't tell if it was my code  
or something else.

I then ran a standalone version of the development structure on a  
Leopard MacBook. I would not get the redirect messages, just a blank  
page.. Again, several reload would bring up the page.

This problem does not appear to happen on the production server. The  
development server also seems very slow compared to what it used to be.

I tried something else today and I happened to have Safari's Web  
Inspector open. I started to see all kinds of MIME error. Sometimes a  
blank page, sometimes a missing image icon.  A few of the errors:

Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type image/
gif. > main
Resource interpreted as image but transferred with MIME type  
application/x-javascript.  > app.js
Resource interpreted as other but transferred with MIME type  
application/x-javascript > w3c-css.gif

The only I can thing I can think of that changed since I left is both  
production and development  web roots are now git repositories and a  
git server is running on development.

Any ideas on what we have screwed up?

Again this is random, but frequent. Sometimes page will load, sometime  
one reload will work, other times you need 3 or 4. I'm just glad that  
it is not showing up on production, but the mime errors are there -  
sometimes! The empty pages also show up in FireFox.



Steve Alex
steve_alex@...


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[aparajita]

> I tried something else today and I happened to have Safari's Web  
> Inspector open. I started to see all kinds of MIME error. Sometimes  
> a blank page, sometimes a missing image icon.  A few of the errors:
>
> Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type  
> image/gif. > main
> Resource interpreted as image but transferred with MIME type  
> application/x-javascript.  > app.js
> Resource interpreted as other but transferred with MIME type  
> application/x-javascript > w3c-css.gif

Is static content being served by Active4D? If so, it looks like your  
ExtensionMap.ini file is missing or corrupt.

Regards,

   Aparajita
   www.aparajitaworld.com

   "If you dare to fail, you are bound to succeed."
   - Sri Chinmoy   |   www.srichinmoy.org

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[Steve Alex-2]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 8:08 AM, Aparajita Fishman wrote:

>> I tried something else today and I happened to have Safari's Web  
>> Inspector open. I started to see all kinds of MIME error. Sometimes  
>> a blank page, sometimes a missing image icon.  A few of the errors:
>>
>> Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type  
>> image/gif. > main
>> Resource interpreted as image but transferred with MIME type  
>> application/x-javascript.  > app.js
>> Resource interpreted as other but transferred with MIME type  
>> application/x-javascript > w3c-css.gif
>
> Is static content being served by Active4D? If so, it looks like  
> your ExtensionMap.ini file is missing or corrupt.

Static content is being served by 4D from the web_static folder. Don't  
know where 4D keeps its extension map.

I was wrong with FireFox - I think. I can't get it to fail. I've also  
observed this warning on another Active4D site with about the same  
setup - but I never get a blank page. I was also wrong that these are  
not reported as errors in web inspector, but warnings. These warning  
are also present when a page is served. I have not analyzed if there  
is a pattern between being served and blank - yet.

I watched the tcp packets with tcpdump on the development server. When  
a page was served blank, there'd only be a couple packets. After about  
15 seconds there'd be 3 or 4 more packets. Almost sounds like another  
keep alive (set to 15 seconds)  problem between Safari and 4D. We had  
a lot of problems trying to upload to Active4D with Safari - gave up  
and went to a java/php upload. If I can't find anything wrong with the  
4D setup,  I'll file a Safari bug report.



Steve Alex
steve_alex@...


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[aparajita]

> I watched the tcp packets with tcpdump on the development server.  
> When a page was served blank, there'd only be a couple packets.  
> After about 15 seconds there'd be 3 or 4 more packets. Almost sounds  
> like another keep alive (set to 15 seconds)  problem between Safari  
> and 4D.

So turn keep-alive off and see what happens.

Regards,

    Aparajita
    www.aparajitaworld.com

    "If you dare to fail, you are bound to succeed."
    - Sri Chinmoy   |   www.srichinmoy.org

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[Steve Alex-2]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 9:00 AM, Aparajita Fishman wrote:

> So turn keep-alive off and see what happens.

It appeared to get worse!

It also appears that anytime I get a blank page I'll get a warning:

Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type image/
gif. > edit

I will alway be transfered with MIME type image/gif and it will point  
to the fuseaction.


Steve Alex
steve_alex@...



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[Steve Alex-2]

On Jul 23, 2009, at 10:06 AM, Steve Alex wrote:

>> So turn keep-alive off and see what happens.
>
> It appeared to get worse!
>
> It also appears that anytime I get a blank page I'll get a warning:
>
> Resource interpreted as document but transferred with MIME type  
> image/gif. > edit
>
> I will alway be transfered with MIME type image/gif and it will  
> point to the fuseaction.

I hate it when I don't know what is going on, so I keep looking.

I downloaded the latest version of the Active4D demo to see if I'd get  
the same type of warning - and I did. What was worse is that it  
appeared that the CSS  was not working - no background gradient -  
floats didn't work, etc. I was about to send of a private message  
asking for verification when I noticed that the main.css file  
displayed in Web Inspector was not the same as main.css in the demo,  
it was the version from another site whose source was the same - /css/
main.css.

I emptied Safari's cache, 4D's cache, turned off 4D cache and kept  
reloading. Safari would still show the wrong version of main.css. I  
finally restarted Safari and the Demo worked normally.

I've noticed the css problem before if I'd bring up the demo to  
investigate a problem - Safari would use the cached version. Usually a  
reload would fix the problem, but that does not appear to be the case  
with Safari 4.0.2. I guess in their effort to gain speed, cache is  
king. There are some threads out there that "top sites" make keep some  
stuff in cache, even after empty cache. Have to turn it off and see if  
that helps.

I'm running about 4 different databases, all somewhat based on the  
demo recipe - main.css, etc. This could explain why I'm having  
problems with blank pages - could Safari be so broke that it thinks  
that circuit1.list is the same as circuit2.list?

I'll do some more investigation but this appears to be a Safari 4  
problem. I did get a report that FireFox will infrequently return  
blank pages so there may still be a problem, just don't know where.

Steve




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[Mike Erickson-2]

Hey Gang

i am curious, has anybody done any image validation on their forms?    
If so, what method have you used.   I need to stop some severe spam  
submissions on a client server and I figured this would work well

Any and all recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Mike Erickson, President
Automated Solutions Group
mike.erickson@...



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[Michael Check]

captcha

http://www.captcha.net/

Michael Check



On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Mike Erickson<mike-nug@...> wrote:

> Hey Gang
>
> i am curious, has anybody done any image validation on their forms?    If
> so, what method have you used.   I need to stop some severe spam submissions
> on a client server and I figured this would work well
>
> Any and all recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Erickson, President
> Automated Solutions Group
> mike.erickson@...
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Active4D-dev mailing list
> Active4D-dev@...
> http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/mailman/listinfo/active4d-dev
> Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
>

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[B. Perkins]

Mike E,

If you think the spam is being submitted by a bot you can also use a
technique where you use CSS  (not <input type="hidden" />) to hide an
extra field on the form. Assuming the user has CSS on they'll never see
the field. Bots won't know the difference. If data is submitted for the
field ignore the submission. I've used this technique successfully.

Here is an example for partial form markup from a web site comments form.

    <p class="input">Please enter your e-mail address: <input size=44 name="f_email_address" value="" class="ta"></input>
    <span class="errMsg"></span></p>
     

    <p class="input confirm">Please confirm your e-mail address: <input size=44 name="f_conf_email_address" value="" class="ta"></input>

    <span class="errMsg">Please Contact us if you see this warning</span></p>


Notice how the f_conf_email_address field has an extra class "confirm".
That class' CCS hides the field and the error message. Bots have no idea
they aren't supposed to insert data in that field.

hth,

Brad Perkins

Michael Check wrote:

> captcha
>
> http://www.captcha.net/
>
> Michael Check
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Mike Erickson<mike-nug@...> wrote:
>  
>> Hey Gang
>>
>> i am curious, has anybody done any image validation on their forms?    If
>> so, what method have you used.   I need to stop some severe spam submissions
>> on a client server and I figured this would work well
>>
>> Any and all recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Mike Erickson, President
>> Automated Solutions Group
>> mike.erickson@...
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Active4D-dev mailing list
>> Active4D-dev@...
>> http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/mailman/listinfo/active4d-dev
>> Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
>>
>>    
> _______________________________________________
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> Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
>
>  

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[Steve Alex-2]

On Jul 22, 2009, at 9:21 AM, Steve Alex wrote:

> ...Any ideas on what we have screwed up?
>
> Again this is random, but frequent. Sometimes a page will load,  
> sometime one reload will work, other times you need 3 or 4. I'm just  
> glad that it is not showing up on production, but the mime errors  
> are there - sometimes! The empty pages also show up in FireFox.


After about 10 days of having these errors/warnings gnawing at me,  
I've found the problem on at least one site - it is Safari - but  
caused by me. Could you believe a missing gif could cause all these  
problems?

Short version:
>> I thought I had cleaned up all serving from the layouts folder, but  
>> I guess I missed the css files.  I fixed the css and after a force  
>> reload or two - no more mime warnings!
>
> Safari 4's caching is seriously broken. A force reload does not  
> always clear the cache. Either hold down the shift key and select  
> View->Reload, or select Safari->Empty Cache, then refresh.

I had a couple image URLs in my css file that pointed to a non-
existent folder (the old layouts directory). Safari seems to have a  
serious bug that ties a resource not found response to a different  
resource, e,g, index.a4d would occasionally display a blank page  
because Safari thinks it's displaying a missing gif! It's not enough  
to just validate CSS and HTML, you also have to look at FireBug or Web  
Inspector!

----------------

A little longer version for those interested. (I wish I could write -  
but I can't. I actually own that url <http://iwishicouldwrite.com>  
but gave up on trying to put up a Blog and it points a RoR site I  
wrote for my golf group. I guess I'm not into the social stuff, but  
you can actually find out a little about me at that site or its master  
site golfgaggle.com - another unfinished project! I can write some  
crappy code - but it is still better than my English. My excuse is  
that I'm from Pittsburgh PA!)

For those of you that think css is awesome <http://www.zazzle.com/css_is_awesome_mug-168716435071981928 
 >, I applaud your skills. Every time I think I understand css I'm  
beaten down by trying to add some neat effect that I copied and pasted  
into my css that does not work or looks the same. I understand  
styling, but cascading/inheritance is my downfall. I decided to try to  
cleanup my css and get rid of 9 of the 10 different approaches I tried  
to get some effect (e.g., horizontal nav bar). Since I've retired and  
have nothing to do except work on my money-pit retirement house, I  
decided to see if I could rewrite one of the sites from scratch at the  
same time!

I started with something called Compass and Sass <http://compass-style.org/ 
 > to fix the style sheets - a really neat programing concept. One of  
the things that Sass points out is that css was designed to make  
browsers more efficient, not designers. Sass is an attempt to make  
designers more efficient (but generates slightly inefficient css).

Skipping forward - I started with the basic parts of my css (the 1 out  
of 10 approaches I liked) and converted it to sass. Everything worked  
great with only some minor tweaking - but I still saw the mime  
warnings. I then tried to rewrite a couple of the circuits from  
scratch using a circuit generation tool I wrote in Active4D - kind of  
a RoR script/generate approach. I've been playing with that tool for  
the last couple of years and will share it if I ever decide that it is  
actually useful. Again, that worked great and I had consistent pages -  
but I still saw the mime warnings. Trying to tweak my generation tool  
to handle nested fuses better, I put some debugging code in an Ajax  
handler to dump something from $fusebox. Of course the Ajax handler  
did not have $fusebox available and I got a syntax error. I moved the  
dump, but then started getting random syntax error messages pointing  
to code that was no longer there. It was time to go to the mountain  
and ask the Guru for guidance - Aparajita. How could Safari be caching  
an error page on code that was no longer there?

As usual, after a couple brief exchanges, he pointed me in the right  
direction and made me see the light! A couple years ago I finally got  
around to moving static content from the layouts directory to the  
web_static folder. The problem was that I left the css, image and js  
directories in the layouts folder - just in case I missed one. The  
rewrite version of the site did not have a layouts directory and no  
static content should have been served by Active4D. When asked to  
double check that static content was indeed being served by 4D, I took  
a closer look at Web Inspectors resource page and saw the missing  
reference to /layouts/images/li-arrow.gif. I had used that gif in a  
couple different places in the css - one pointing to /images in  
web_static and one pointing to the missing layouts directory. That  
little error, a missing image,  caused Safari to puke.

I have not looked at the development server to see if it has the same  
problem, but I now know where to look. Hopefully if you see this  
problem crop up, I'll save you some time in looking for the solution.

End long version

Steve Alex
salex@...
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