How-To: Dynamic WWW-Authentication (.htaccess style) on Google App Engine
Sometimes classic Basic Access Authentication is the right approach to password protecting a webpage. It’s not secure from sniffing, but functional if you’re just trying to ward off the casual surfer in the wrong spot. (For example, restricting access to your cat pictures, not your missile silo codes.)
Basic authentication is often added to sites (or directories) using a .htaccess file and something like this:
…but you can also do basic authentication on-the-fly by reading/writing HTTP Headers. To ask the browser for a user/password, you can raise a 401 error, and write a “www-Authenticate” header containing something like ‘Basic realm=”Secure Area”‘. To read the user/password, look for an Authorization header, grab it’s value, Base 64 decode it, and you should have a string in the form of “user:password”.
Here’s how you might handle it with Google App Engine. (Well, really you might use a decorator.. but this example is easier to explain.)
class AuthTest(webapp.RequestHandler): def get(self): # Wrapping in a huge try/except isn't the best approach. This is just # an example for how you might do this. try: # Parse the header to extract a user/password combo. # We're expecting something like "Basic XZxgZRTpbjpvcGVuIHYlc4FkZQ==" auth_header = self.request.headers['Authorization'] # Isolate the encoded user/passwd and decode it auth_parts = auth_header.split(' ') user_pass_parts = base64.b64decode(auth_parts[1]).split(':') user_arg = user_pass_parts[0] pass_arg = user_pass_parts[1] checkAuth(user_arg, pass_arg) # have this call raise an exception if it fails self.response.out.write(template.render('templates/foo.html', {})) except Exception, e: logging.debug("AuthTest Exception: %s" % (e)) # Here's how you set the headers requesting the browser to prompt # for a user/password: self.response.set_status(401, message="Authorization Required") self.response.headers['WWW-Authenticate'] = 'Basic realm="Secure Area"' # Rendering a 401 Error page is a good way to go... self.response.out.write(template.render('templates/error/401.html', {}))That’s all there is to it.
If you want to programatically write an Authorization header (as in, sending authentication credentials to another site, like the Twitter API’s, for example) you’ll do something like this:
request = urllib2.Request(url) request.add_header('Authorization', "Basic %s" % (base64.b64encode("%s:%s" % (user, password))))Enjoy!
… how the “save draft” and “publish” buttons in Wordpress can look *eerily* similar when you’re in the groove of writing a blog post?
Emailing a group of people to find out the best time to schedule a meeting or event is probably the least efficient way to do so; inevitably you start a long thread of “This time works for me but not that time on Tuesdays and Thursdays” and “Monday is OK but I PREFER Friday” and on and on. That’s why I included 
survey via e-mail to a select group of fans, which asks a variety of questions about the current uniform scheme, including, “Which Mets game jersey is your favorite,” “Do you think the Mets should wear the pinstripes jersey more often,” and, “Why do you think the Mets should not keep the black jersey?”
blues to the all whites, from the traditional pinstripes to a new sleeveless version with a large NY on the chest.
There’s an interesting trending topic on Twitter right now: 
As you may have noticed, we've got a new reporter here at Streetsblog, 
Martin Peers of the Wall Street Journal assesses the New York Times and 
It's difficult to imagine a more epic scene, but this photo has modest origins: amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault shot it with nothing but his own telescope, a solar prism and a Canon 5D Mk II.
Meanwhile, that little silhouette is 
which I also recommend!
We don’t always cover every story that happens during each day’s news cycle, so here’s a capsule summary of what transpired today: It was discovered that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had Xanax in her system when the CIA lied to her about waterboarding. A brief Google outage left millions of Internet users unable to search for porn, resulting in a spike in demand for prostitutes on Craigslist, which was forced to reclassify their services as “retail sales,” a subsequent drop in which caused the stock market to gain half a percentage point on the previous day’s close. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed selling Miss California to Fox News in an attempt to balance his state’s budget; the offer was immediately accepted, causing spontaneous celebratory “tea parties” to break out nationwide. The New York Times remained under the control of the Sulzberger family, although David Geffen was seen climbing the side of the company’s New York headquarters. The Earth continued to revolve around the sun.
Two of the best-loved posts in Eater history involve On The House, and Mr. Frank Bruni. In 2006, William Tigertt penned an epic three-part On The House post [
No, this isn't Photoshopped - it's a real image, taken from a helicopter among the apartment buildings of mainland Hong Kong. Photographer 
This is in England, in a lot where cars and vans are stored before being shipped out to dealers. When Hawkes flew overhead, it just happened to be red SUV day.
What the hell is this? Balls? Trash? Grain? No. These are heaping piles of tomatoes dumped along a river in France.
Sadly this is not a set of mining platforms for sucking ultra-dense deuterium out of the Jovian atmosphere. These are the Maunsell Sea Forts, built in the UK's Thames and Mersey estuaries during World War II.
the roster with 
Dear Netflix, 
We won't be the first to tell you that Manhattan is experiencing a hot dog resurgence at the moment. Note: the Fatty Dog, Akhtar Nawab's 
Apple issued a 
were 0–13 when trailing after the eighth inning, plus 0–1 in extra inning games.
Bookmark this on Delicious
Apple just dropped 10.5.7 on us (a 
In fact, this past March was the second most-active month on the mailing list in almost three years; the first being the second month it was available.
Did you miss Star Trek this weekend? No matter! NASA is 
What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.
