Anybody know these kind of child friendly organisations?

Today I recieved a phone call. A woman called me asking if I would like to support their organisation, this was a one time only offer. They were helping young children who had a special disease and who couldn’t afford the medicine. She had prepared a whole text that she was rambling like an idiot. In the end she asked me if I would like to sponsor them. I replied “No” … Why you may ask, well this exact same lady called me a couple of months ago with exactly the same text, exactly the same offer but only for another organisation. At that time I asked here to send me all the data by mail and I would read it and she could call me back. It struck me when I saw the mail, the sender was something callcentre antwerp.

I started thinking, well if you have a callcentre and are in financial troubles. You could always start an organisation for helping children (who doesn’t want to give some money to children in need?!) You then start calling people (bussines people who can deduct the costs) and ask them to support your ideas. With all the money you raised you deduct your costs and some profit and the rest you give to a real organisation who helps the children. Sounds like a way you could easily start a bussines and even make a big profit.

The first time I gave them money. That time it was for children who had cancer and they wanted to grant them one wish. As my father died from cancer 4 years ago, this touched me and I gave them some money. But when she called me today I was rather angry. If these organisations really work like I suspect them to work, how can you do bussines like this. I explained here the story and told here that she talked to me for another organisation and instead of handing here the money, I would rather give it to an organisation I know. Or sponsor somebody I really know and care about and who has an expensive illness. Almost everybody knows somebody in need so …

Does anybody out there know these kinds of organisations? Can you inform me if they really work like this or if this is just my imagination going wild?

new home, back to linux :)

With the birth of our baby girl, my girlfriend and I decided to move back home until we found a real house. We didn’t want to raise our children in an appartment. After a couple of months we finally found something we liked. In the mean time we already bought it and are living in it. There is still plenty of things to be done, but we can live in it, be it somewhat messy but still beats living at home 🙂

The requirement was that I also had my own room to put my computer stuff. Luckily for me this point is checked 🙂 I managed to setup my linux computers again. Finally I can get back to working on a Linux desktop. You might tell me, use it at work or on your laptop. Well actually at work we are obliged to use their windows systems. It is managed by there sysadmins and they do a good job so I won’t bother them. I can do my daily tasks (be it somewhat slower then on a linux machine). So I figured I buy a new system where I could install a fresh ubuntu on. The only requirement there was that it was kick ass laptop (high res,7200 rpm disk,17″ screen + keypad). So I bought a Dell XPS. I got it delivered with windows XP on it. I tried booting into the ubuntu live cd, no go, tried installing fedora, no go … Still have to try Suse but I haven’t got my hopes up. I should have known that this was too exotic hardware to work out of the box. For now I’ll use my macbook at work and use the Dell with win XP as is. As soon as the next releases come out, I’ll give them a try until they finally boot.

Hmm, I’m drifting a bit 🙂 I just wanted to let you know I’m back using Linux on my machines and boy have I missed it. All the applications you need freely available and if needed customizable at your very own needs! hmmm

Tomcat non SSL behind Apache SSL

First let me explain our setup. In front we have a Apache 2.2 with SSL. Our users can access the site using http. A certain URL is mapped to a Tomcat running in the background. This mapping was done using mod_proxy. In the beginning I had to enable the preserverhost option. Otherwise the request.getRequestURL() is the request Apache made to the Tomcat.

Today I had to install a SSL certificate (signed by Verizon). The configuration was actually straightforward and after a restart I checked the main page and everything was working. Then I tried loging in and suddenly I was back to plain http. Hmmm strange, so I checked my code. After login I did a redirect (using Spring MVC “redirect:/”). After some googling I found a setting that would help RequestHeader set Front-End-Https “On”

(Don’t forget to include the headers module!) After a restart it still didn’t work, after fiddling around with my settings I found the solution. It seems if you combine the RequestHeader setting with the ProxyPreserveHost this doesn’t work. If you disable the ProxyPreserveHost setting but leave the RequestHeader enabled everything is working fine. The problem now is that your request.getRequestURL() is not the URL your customer is using. Luckily I could solve this by doing request.getHeader(“referer”) note that this probably won’t work in every situation (but in our case it does). Hopes this helps some people who are searching for the same solution.