2023
Security
A simple to use, GUI based penetration tool that's actually useful: Zaproxy
2017
Code
An impressive walk through of what happens when you type 'google.com'` into your browser. This article covers so many things, touching upon most things you're likely to work with as a programmer - and a good few more too!. A highly recommended read.
An enjoyable walk down memory lane with the grand master Eric S. Raymond himself: Things Every Hacker Once Knew.
The famous spelling mistake in the HTTP/1.0 specification, Referer
instead of Referrer is blamed on the UNIX spell checker not having
neither of them in its dictionary at the time they wrote the
RFC. Check out this nugget from 1995.
Open Source License Business Perception Report
Linux & Unix
High quality vim screencasts are available free of charge at vimcasts.org/
Top 25 Nginx Web Server Best Security Practices not only gives you many good hints on tightening the security of nginx itself but also the machine itself on which it runs.
What is virtual memory? – Gary explains
I love when highly skilled engineers can explain something as advanced as SELinux in an easy understandable way: SELinux Concepts - but for humans
Do we really need swap on modern systems?
A tcpdump Tutorial and Primer with Examples
Man, I wish I knew about this before, it would save me pulling out network cables and dongles to get the base system up and running before installing the wireless card's firmware: Unofficial Debian CD images which includes firmware
Servers can run out of entropy (randomness needed to complete various
tasks such as JAR signing, SSL connections), one way to mitigate this
is to install haveged:
http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/downloads.html
There's a timeout command
In
GNU coreutils,
which means it's installed on virtually all Linux machines, that lets
you specify a maximum time for a command to complete, or else the
command is killed.
$ timeout --signal KILL 10s create-backup
This will send the KILL signal (same as kill -9 <pid>) to the
process running create-backup if it hasn't completed within 10
seconds.
The signal to send to the process can be any of the ones listed by
kill -l.
Containers
Docker provides a great developer experience but it leaves many things to be decided when it comes to taking it into production: https://www.federacy.com/docker_image_vulnerabilities https://www.certdepot.net/death-of-docker/
Really interesting to see what's moving in the container world. RedHat is really shaking things up in the Docker world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v-vTH71nSc
https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/
https://consolia-comic.com/comics/containers-and-docker
Interesting read on containers and challenges of sharing a kernel in spite of namespace & cgroups: https://sysdig.com/blog/container-isolation-gone-wrong/
Reverse proxies
Finally got around to upgrade from Varnish 3 to 4. The folks at Varnish Software have been so nice to provide an upgrade guide which, albeit not a complete guide, is a good starting point: https://varnish-cache.org/docs/4.0/whats-new/upgrading.html
https://www.fastly.com/blog/varnish-tip-normalize-host-header https://www.fastly.com/blog/ab-testing-edge
nginx can do TCP load balancing now, making it an alternative to HAProxy in my setup: https://serversforhackers.com/tcp-load-balancing-with-nginx-ssl-pass-thru
Fluxbox as a tiling window manager, 2017-07-07
Fluxbox can re-arrange/tile all windows on the
current desktop with the command ArrangeWindows. There are also
similar commands like ArrangeWindowsStackLeft which lets the focused
window occupy the left half of the screen, while Fluxbox stacks the
others on the right. Now, there's nothing in the tiling window
managers that appeal to me, Fluxbox has these features covered too!
I bound this command to Ctrl + Shift + s in `~/.fluxbox/keys:
Control Shift s :ArrangeWindowsStackRight
In the process of learning this,, I was reminded that nothing beats RTFM 🦐
Windows
An interesting extension to Cygwin: Babun
JS
Locally test your npm modules without publishing them to npmjs.org
People
10 Fun Activities to Engage Your Dispersed Team
Fun
This text based space game is awesomely cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPJs5t9ekI
http://patorjk.com/software/taag/
I love
this
Emoji cheat sheet,
it's the :word: style strings that produce cute emojis in clients
like Slack, Signal and Github.
2016
Linux & Unix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-speed-up-apt-get-apt-command-ubuntu-linux/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5cASgBEXWY https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-history-of-failure/
Excellent live coding video spelling out in big letters what containers really are (tarballs). They're not the same thing a s virtual macines 😉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMpldbcMHuI
Life
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html
JS
https://snyk.io/
This article made me laugh out loud, making everyone in the metro car think I was nuts 😉: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f
2016-12-09
The qemu advent calendar is a wonderfully geeky advent calendar, showing off geeky OSes for you to explore.
2016-11-28
Great site for browsing emojis, complete with Unicode references. Good fun.
Nice CSS reference.
2016-11-25
Web based diagram sketching tool: https://sketchboard.me
2016-10-25
If I asked by a colleague for good BASH resources. There's so much out there, but most of it are one liners, not really guidance on programming in the BASH language.
Here, I'll list some of the BASH resources I would recommend that goes beyond the one liner style:
- Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Looove Debugging)
- Unix shell programming notes by Chris F. A. Johnson
2016-10-11
Status of HA stack in Jessie: ral-arturo.org/2016/10/06/debian-jessie-ha.html
Pearls of wisdom: DB failures: bytebot/lessons-from-database-failures
percona.com/blog/2008/04/28/mysql-replication-vs-drbd-battles/
Expand/collapse in Emacs/markdown files
Why am I surprised, this is logical! To expand and collaps Markdown sections/headings in Emacs, just push the Tab key. I've been wanting this for so long, why didn't I just try to see if Tab worked? Duh!
2016-10-10
developers.googleblog.com/2016/10/an-open-source-font-system-for-everyone.html
2016-10-09
hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f
2016-10-06
github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II
speakerdeck.com/stevvooe/heart-of-the-swarmkit-object-model
rkt, a better way to run containers (than Docker's runC): coreos.com/rkt/docs/latest/rkt-vs-other-projects
2016-09-03
https://dzone.com/articles/9-things-in-jdk-9-that-arent-jigsaw
2015
Linux & Unix
https://www.rileybrandt.com/2015/10/15/foss-photo-flow-2015/
Network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8orjQLacTo
Database
https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4
Games
http://grumpygamer.com/monkey25
Various
https://backchannel.com/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-apple-google-and-microsoft-78af12071bd http://www.gq.com/story/president-obama-bill-simmons-interview-gq-men-of-the-year
Language
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/139-norse-words
2015-12-14
Open files faster in Emacs (and prettier)
As all Emacs users know, the shortcut Ctrl + x Ctrl + f opens a file. It's pretty neat with lots of shortcuts and Tab completion.
Today, I found a great improvement up find-file, namely
ido-find-file. Lots of people rave about helm-find-file, but it
doesn't allow me to Tab complete may way down the directory
tree and that just drives me nuts! ido-find-file on the other hand,
works pretty much as the traditional find-file, but enhances it by
fuzzy matching, vertical menu (thanks to ido-vertical-mode) and
different colour coding of files directories and:
Navigate to a function in your Python, C, Java, Elisp file
There are lots of great special purpose extensions for your favourite
language in Emacs (e.g. I use emacs-eclim for Java), but there's a
small gem called imenu which gives you a lot of this for free
without any setup of any can.
It scans the source code in your buffer and provides these in a
menu. Combining this with a completion like helm-imenu, you have a
really neat simple code navigation for any source file you open. No
setup required.
For the time being, I prefer using vanilla imenu together with
ido-ubiquitous and ido-vertical-mode over helm-imenu as ido
gives a faster experience and it doesn't alter my UI too much. Try it
out!
An turbo charged buffer list
I'm experimenting using helm-mini instead of the standard
list-buffers command for listing the buffers open in Emacs. The
advantage of helm-mini over the default option is apart from pretty
colours, fuzzy regexp matching of buffers. For instead, here I filter
the open buffers to only show anything related to shell scripts:
2015-10-29
Firefox
Navigate to the previous tab
Just like Alt + Tab on your desktop, just use Ctrl+ Tab to navigate to the previous tab you were at.
Except that it doesn't work the way you expect it to. It only cycles between the tabs.
Enter the "Firefox registry" by writing about:config in the address
bar. Then navigate to this key and set it to true:
browser.ctrlTab.previews
Quckly find any tab
Ctrl + Shift + e
And type something matching that tab's title.
2015-10-13
Adobe has a really nice font called Source Code Pro, to start Emacs with this found, you can do:
emacs -fn 'Source Code Pro:pixelsize=14' &
2015-10-08
Meteor a JS framework with persistent storage and automatic syncing of all clients' and server's storage. From never having heard about it, to having a working multi user chat system up and running, it took 30 minutes.
Package repository of Meteor modules: AtmosphereJS
2015-10-06
A hidden gem in the Fluxbox window
manager is the client menu which gives you a list of all the open
windows on all workspaces. I've bound it to Ctrl + Shift + y like
this in my ~/.fluxbox/keys:
Control Shift y :ClientMenu
Finding it was indeed a great discovery and I've happily used it for a couple of years now. This week, I discovered something equally useful: You can navigate the client menu (window list) by simply typing the first letters of its title.
Here, I've types "emacs" to navigate to the Emacs window.
2015-09-11
Discovered that the more I read about character sets and character encodings, the more I know that I don't know. Nevertheless, I've learned a LOT while preparing for my JavaZone talk:
2015-08-25
MySQL's utf8 encoding type on columns and tables isn't proper UTF-8,
it only supports up to 3 byte characters, not 4 bytes as UTF-8 can grow
to.
To be able to insert the whole spectre of Unicode that UTF-8 supports,
you must set up your MySQL database to use the encoding type called
utf8mb4.
A good article on the topic can be found here
2015-06-24
Shutter is an excellent tool for creating screenshots on the Linux desktop. For years, I've used my own made command based on imagemagick, but I've lately started to use Shutter more and more as it simply has more features.
2015-03-15
Running occur in Emacs gives you
nice listing of all lines in the current file with an occurances of
your search query. Here, I search for all lines containing
db.get:
The hits are both clickable and iteratable with the standard
next-error mechansim (by default bound to C-`).
2015-03-05
This excellent article at W3C explains how to center things on a web
page (including images) using the standards,
i.e. by not using <center/>.
2015-02-02
You cannot create files directories on Windows starting with a dot and no suffix. Try this: create a directory in Windows Explorer called ".ssh".
Windows will not only fail to do this, but ask you to enter a file name as if you hadn't written anything at all.
Apparantly this is something inherited from the days of old, i.e. Windows' DOS heritage.
2015-01-20
Ugly looking capitalised music, pictures, documents directories begone! I prefer to have all my directories and files lower case. It's easier on my eyes and it reads faster. Thus, I've hated how GNOME and others enforced a pile of directories with names like "Documents" and "Music" on me. Deleting them was no good as some kept coming back and my actual music and document directories didn't get the icon decoration that their capitalised counterparts got.
As you can understand, I was thrilled when I discovered today that sanity was a mere text edit away (I thought so!):
$ vim ~/.config/user-dirs.dir
And then set these to my preferred directories:
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/tmp"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/tmp"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/tmp"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/doc"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/videos"
Logging out and in again in GNOME gave immediate success. The file manager even had my "pictures" and "music" and "tmp" directories nicely decorated with meta icons.
2015-01-12
puppet-lint will not only spot errors and deviations from Puppet Lab's best practices, it will also fix many of these issues for you:
$ puppet-lint --fix init.pp
2014
2014-12-23
When using GNU sed, you can use
much more powerful regular expressions by passing the
--regexp-extended switch to sed.
Passing --regexp-extended, or just -r, also makes some of
the syntax easier as you don't have to escape group parenthesis and I
find sed overall becomes more predictable using this switch.
2014-12-22
It's easy writing presentation slides using Markdown and generate these into beautiful HTML5 slides with CSS3 transitions from reval.js by using pandoc
Previously, I've been using an exporter to Emacs org, but pandoc
is so much more stable and flexible.
2014-12-18
PlantUML is a great command for generating diagrams from plain text files. It also sports a Confluence plugin - among other things.
2014-12-12
This presenter at Computerphile, he's absolutely brilliant. It's rare to find someone so technical in computer science being so good at presenting.
2014-11-26
Flask: Impressed with what I've read and tried out so far. In less than 20 lines of code, I've a standalone micro service Python application which routes different HTTP URLs to internal methods, reads user input and outputs JSON objects.
From the (first hour) look at it, it seems that Flask strikes just the right balance between simplicity and bare bones Python on the one hand and support for real world world features like security, complex objects, templating, database integration, application types, error handling, logging and easy deployment on the other.
2014-11-22
I've read about these free HTML grids before, but I didn't check them out to see how simple and beautiful they were before now.
2014-11-12
Excellent geeky comic strips: commitstrip
2014-11-10
Idle highlight mode gives you IDEA/Eclipse-like highlighting of other uses of the variable/method under your cursor. It only triggers after a slight delay, which is excellent.
Politics
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21608752-any-ceasefire-will-be-temporary-unless-israel-starts-negotiating-seriously
2013
Scaling communication: email vs shared documents by Vivek Haldar.
2010
Code
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
2008
Coding
Steve Yegge is as always dead on. This post explains why every coder worth his or her salt should learn to type: Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
