Archives

Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password. In our …

Image via Wikipedia Someone asked me a question today “Why would anyone choose SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) instead of REST (Representational State Transfer)?” My response: “The general rule of thumb I’ve always heard is ‘Unless you have a definitive reason to use SOAP use REST’”. He asked “what’s one reason?” I thought about it …

I wanted to polish up my javascript coding so I decided that the best way to do that was with a project that I’ve been wanted to do for a while anyway, my own identity site, or my online business card, or my online vcard. The idea was inspired by Tim Van Damme’s website.

Some of this may seem like a broken record, yet every single time you hear about a bank losing millions of customer data, or a company having a security breach they consistently have failed to implement and enforce the most basic security practices. Here are 7 simple security practices that you cannot afford to not follow.

  Drupal is a very powerful Content Management Solution. Many other organizations both large and small have found it to be a perfect platform for managing their website including some Fortune 100 companies. I decided to compile a list of some of the more notable organizations running drupal. This list is not exhaustive, but intended to demonstrate …

SSH is great and secure… Unless you need to automate it. Then it sucks because your only options are to create a passwordless key, or login add your key to ssh-agent, stay logged in forever. Here’s a quick guide to having the best of both worlds. A Secure SSH Connection that can be used in automated scripts. ( …

Image via Wikipedia Why use it It’s super easy to use It has tons of snippets It’s pretty well compatible with TextMate snippets for easy portability Dynamic variables, for all the times you use the same string multiple times It’s really easy to define your own snippets It’s better than anything else out there, trust …

Git is a fantastic tool and is very useful for deployment. If you can’t install git system wide or don’t want to mess with installing it on the entire system here is an easy way to install it for a single user. This also works well on Mac OS X where installing git is more …

Image via Wikipedia The NERD Commenter is an indispensable tool when programming in VIM. It understands like a zillion different file types and properly comments each. It can handle single line, multi line, partial line commenting as well as nesting. If you’re programming in VIM you really should be using it.

Image via Wikipedia If you use *nix, no doubt you’ve spent some time on the command line. Here are a few of the most helpful tricks you can use in the bash shell to really optimize your time, impress your friends, and make everyone else feel inferior… not to mention become more productive. People familar with …