DNS is obviously a very important component of the Internet. Many people understand DNS works much like a phone book, where finding a phone number for a person requires looking for their name in an alphabetical list and then using the number adjacent.
Deploy websites using Git - the easy way
After hours of playing around with ssh, sudo, user permissions etc. trying to deploy a PHP website from a Github repository, the best solution I could find was to not use Github at all. I am a big fan of Git and Github, but automatically deploying a website from a Github repository was very fiddly and in the end more trouble than it was worth.
12 useful firefox plugins for web developers
Every day I use plugins to help me work, here are a dozen firefox plugins that I have found to be most useful.
5 XSS Exploits You Should Know About
Following on from my HTTP Splitting post, this post rounds up 5 common cross site scripting (xss) attacks and how to prevent them.
HTTP Cache Poisoning
I have started working through the WebGoat tutorials from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). The first tute covering HTTP splitting and cache poisoning was difficult enough for me to start with, and in fact I could write a whole post on installing WebGoat and WebScarab which was an achievement in itself.
Non capturing groups in Perl regular expressions
Non capturing groups are very handy, recently I was working on grabbing a portion of xml out of a document. After trying the PHP 5 xmlReader() class I opted for the quick and dirty Perl regular expressions for this script.
Blackberry 8800 html checkbox issues
This was such a mission to fix, it deserves a post. Starting with a very basic login page using standard html form elements, a couple of text inputs for username and password, a checkbox to accept terms and conditions and a submit button. The login system would work fine on very early blackberries version 3.7.0 - those really old text only browser versions. It also worked on the latest 9530 blackberries version 4.7.0.
Blackberry Emulator on Windows
Spent a while downloading and installing the blackberry emulator on Windows. Since installing Ubuntu well over a year ago I hardly ever boot into Vista, perhaps a handful of times in total.
Use iconv to help migrate databases
Iconv is a useful tool to convert the encoding of given files from one encoding to another - which comes in very handy if you want to migrate that old MySQL 4 database to a hot new MySQL 5.
Reinstalling the InstallShield Engine.
From time to time I have noticed that InstallShield will fail and corrupt itself. This will manifest itself in weird installation errors such as the following:
Reinstalling the InstallShield Engine.
From time to time I have noticed that InstallShield will fail and corrupt itself. This will manifest itself in weird installation errors such as the following:
Network Password Error Outlook 2003
I recently came across this problem for a network we provide support for at work, there were not that many solutions for it out there on the world wide web as far as I could see so I thought I would write up what I found:
Password prompt keeps popping up even though the password is saved on the system. Real pig of a problem, Outlook 2002 had same issue but Microsoft fixed, however, when 2003 came out the same issue arose again (possibly only in xp I don't know). A few solutions online including this one and this one recommend messing around with registry keys but personally I am loathe to messing around with registry keys especially on remote desktops for clients when I am connecting on a slow vnc connection.