When talking about security, the first thing that usually comes to mind is encryption. Spies secretly coding (or de-coding) some secret message that should not be revealed to the enemy. Encryption is this mysterious thing that turns all text into … Continued
Scoring a goal against google is never easy. Google analytics allows you to do some strange and wonderful things, but not without some teeth grinding. I was struggling with this for a little while, and it was a great source … Continued
I’ve come across a small nuisance that seemed to appear occasionally with unicode urls. Some websites seem to encode/escape/quote urls as soon as they see any symbol (particularly % sign). They appear to assume it needs to be encoded, and … Continued
On my previous post I talked about django memory management, the little-known maxrequests parameter in particular, and how it can help ‘pop’ some balloons, i.e. kill and restart some django processes in order to release some memory. On this post … Continued
A while ago I was working on optimizing memory use for some django instances. During that process, I managed to better understand memory management within django, and thought it would be nice to share some of those insights. This is … Continued
About a month ago I posted about tweaking timthumb to work with CDN. Timthumb is a great script, but great scripts also have bugs. A recently discovered one is a rather serious bug. It can allow attackers to inject arbitrary … Continued
Following from my previous post, I’ve come across another issue related to caching in wordpress: dynamic content. There’s a constant trade-off between caching and dynamic content. If you want your content to be truly dynamic, you can’t cache it properly. … Continued
[IMPORTANT: please check that you have the latest version of timthumb! older versions might have a serious security vulnerability. A little more about it here] I’ve been recently trying to optimize a wordpress based site. It was running fine, but … Continued
A quick-tip on the importance of timestamps and making sure your time zone is set correctly. I was recently playing around with fail2ban. It’s a really cool little tool that monitors your log files, matches certain patterns, and can act … Continued
[Also published on testuff.com] Most people I know tend to simply use the same password on ALL websites. Email, Paypal, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter. This is obviously a very bad idea. Passwords are always a problem. Difficult to remember, hard … Continued
This saturday, 8th January 2011 I’m running a small geeky arts project at Madame Lillie’s gallry in Stoke Newington. SMILE – a temporary exhibition The smile project attempts to capture snapshots within the exhibition space. The audience takes an active … Continued
I was really pleased when my good friend chris asked me to help him with his edition of 1 project. I guess it was exciting working on an arts project. I also liked his project because randomness is an interesting … Continued
One-Time-Passwords always fascinated me. Long long time ago in a land far far away I suddenly had this idea. The idea was simple and in today’s terms pretty common, perhaps trivial. One-Time-Password without the need for an extra token. After … Continued
I recently noticed my iphone clock wasn’t accurate. I’m not exactly sure why. It was only a few minutes behind, but it still annoyed me. Why couldn’t my iphone sync its time with an internet time server?? I know it … Continued
On my last post I described how I get my asterisk box to know the caller name from a csv data file. The thing is, my address book keeps changing on my iphone. People change their phone numbers, I meet … Continued
Caller ID is a wonderful feature. Don’t we love getting a call from someone we like, and perhaps more importantly, ignore those annoying callers who we really don’t want to talk to. But this is yesterday’s news. We all have … Continued
ISPs are a strange breed. They’re supposed to give a very straight-forward service – plug me in to the Internet please. That’s all. Plain and simple. It seems like some ISPs have different ideas as to their roles and responsibilities. … Continued
Perhaps yet another misleading title for this post, but bear with me. When I was a child we used to play outside a lot. I always remember the neighbours complaining if we made too much noise. Such is life. There … Continued
This is something I never thought would concern me. All those domain ownership issues, I thought, were with people who just aren’t organised enough to renew their domains, forget their passwords, or pick domains that others try to steal. I’m … Continued
I’ve had a strange thing happening a while ago. I sent a CD in a padded envelope to someone, and it was returned to me. Well, it didn’t look like it was returned, more like they actually delivered it to … Continued
Perhaps the title is a little misleading, but it’s an opportunity to combine two of my greatest loves: food and computers. I suppose even this intro is misleading. Oh. Forget it. Lets get down to business. And this time our … Continued
I don’t like being late. It runs in the family. My dad is so obsessed with being late that he’s always early. How embarrassing. Unfortunately I seemed to have inherited it from him. I do however try to compensate. I … Continued
Not a particularly interesting post, unless you happen to be running Debian 4.0 etch running on Virtuozzo host and are trying to install JDK5. I saw a post with a user reporting the same error on the parallels forum , … Continued
Just so to set the records straight, I’m the real dummy here, as you would obviously see. I absolutely have no experience with python, lighttpd, turbogears or wsgi, fcgi but I was given a task to set it up on … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] This is something I thought would be simple. Then I began scratching my head reading all the posts on the web, thinking I might actually need to get a proper book. Finally I realised it was actually … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] I’ve been struggling with getting the iCal app on Mac OS X to use a shared calendar on Apache installed on Windows and using domain authentication (SSPI). It is all supposed to be so simple, yet it … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] 2009 Aug 14 Update: Looks like rsnapshot is now packaged in cygwin! Thanks to pseudo-anonymous coward for the comment! Some of the information below may still be of interest, so it’s left unchanged. Rsnapshot is a great … Continued