If you run a website which receives or displays personal information, passwords or other secrets, you need to encrypt your connections using SSL or TLS. This is what puts the "S" into HTTPS, FTPS, IMAPS, POPS etc, and requires private keys and public certificates. Your browser (or other SSL/TLS client) trusts certain CAs (certificate authorities), and they in turn are willing to trust you by issuing you a certificate, if you throw money at them.
This is necessary for public-facing production deployments, and these days the cheapest certificates don't cost the earth - for example, Namecheap's start ...
I have been meaning to get back on the blogging horse for some time, and what better way than with a new SSL vulnerability.
POODLE was announced this morning. It's a 5/10 on the panic scale, but both users and sysadmins should take action now.
This one isn't particularly exciting compared to the recent sky-is-falling heartbleed and shellshock - instead of giving away all your secrets and/or shell access to anyone with curl, the worst-case scenario with POODLE is that someone can read your SSL traffic; still bad, but for most people running small sites it's ...
The new Christmas design for this site uses bezier curves on canvas elements to generate random snowdrifts behind the header. Drawing a bezier curve is pretty simple, so seems like a reasonable place to start my new blog. First you need a canvas and a context:
I am very proud to announce my finest work to date - the Tacky Christmas Music Interface 2.0!
The old TCMI played midi files, but most browsers seem to struggle with those these days, and even when it did work, modern soundfonts made the experience quite variable. To get around this, the new version of TCMI now uses HTML5 audio to play MP3 or OGG files (depending on browser support).
This also means that if you've got the relevant PPL/PRS license, you can now play non-tacky music to your visitors! Although I'm not quite sure what the ...
Welcome to my new tech blog, where I'll be writing about programming, sysadmin and anything else related to computers that I think may be of general interest to strangers on the internet.
I've been on the internet for about 16 years now, and I've had this site for almost 14 of them. I want to get back to sharing some of the stuff I'm working on, so this blog will be a mix of articles and tutorials covering various topics related to web development. I also want to learn things through this process too - as a ...