The big push, over the last few years, to move websites to use Transport Level Security (TLS) Certificates has been incredibly successful, in no small part to Let’s Encrypt. As always the arms race between attackers and defenders continues and with the increased adoption of TLS comes a number of attackers looking for less diligent Certificate Authorities who will issue a certificate for sites attackers may not actually own. Luckily for the rest of this post there’s a way to prevent this from happening, the Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS record. Read on →

I like the PledgeBank site, it’s a great idea and it’s promoting some good causes (UK Digital Rights is one of them) but it was a pain to keep going back and reading the comments… If only we had a way of subscribing to the comments… maybe using a form of XML that has a number of specs… ;) After sending in a single email asking for RSS feeds of the comments and waiting no more then seven of our earth days they’ve added them. Read on →

I’m a big del.icio.us fan, it’s saved me storing my bookmarks in three different formats and provides easy access from anywhere; all for free. I was however surprised to see “Bookmark with del.icio.us” links in the articles on both O’Reilly’s ONLamp and perl.com sites. Still anything that gets the service more exposure can’t be a bad thing.

I’m a big fan of the “big three” scripting languages, Perl, Python and Ruby, but I don’t get a lot of time to keep up with all the relevant news. Fortunately you can now download and listen to the official Ruby on Rails Podcast or the ever growing Perlcast.

There’s something up at connection.oreilly.com… will it be another jobs site or do they have an ace up their collective, animal decorated, sleeves?

I’ve made a couple of posts about the yellow fade technique but now I’ve got a script to one-up it. The people over at Axentric (Adam Michela) have put together a Fade Anything Technique that does pretty much what you expect from its name. The Fade Anything Technique demo is pretty impressive and the code is both readable and clean. For now it’s my winner in this little competition.

The very slick people over at Basecamp have a very neat UI trick that highlights any changes to the site for a couple of seconds and then fades out. This allows simple tracking of any changes on page-reload. The full (non-technical) details can be found over at 37, the technique itself is called the Yellow Fade Technique. Now as you can see by looking at this site I’m more of a functional than aesthetic person but I wanted to integrate this functionality in to a couple of sites. Read on →

I’m not very good at keeping track of my Freshmeat Projects, I’m also insanely bad at replying to comments but thanks to Stig Brautaset I no longer need to worry about it. Freshmeat has an a pair of options, tucked away under your preference page (which you obviously have to be logged in to see), with the following descriptions “Send comments to my projects by email:” and “Send replies to my comments by email:”. Read on →

I’ve seen a couple of people mentioning the Koders Source Code Search Engine recently and I decided I should have a little play. The idea is pretty simple, they spider source code from projects across the net and then allow you to search through the gathered code. While I’ve not played with it enough to know if it’s going to be of any interest to me in smaller projects a couple of things did stick out when I tried the site. Read on →

While googling for a book review google sent me to two sites (in the top five hits) that contained ALL the details about the book but missed one vital feature; the actual review After rereading the page to see if my browser had done something strange, hey it can happen on badly designed sites, I noticed a small piece of text located near the bottom of the page and below the scroll line; Status: Not reviewed. Read on →

I’ve heard the name SXIP (pronounced ‘skip’) mentioned on a couple of different privacy forums (and in the Web2.0 coverage) and decided to have a closer look at what it provides. The short version, I promise!, is that SXIP wants to be a single sign-on provider and help with filling out forms based upon your chosen persona. For the longer version of the who, what and how I’d suggest first listening to the IT Conversations SXIP show and then spending five minutes with the SXIP Demo. Read on →

The NetBSD project has recently adopted a new logo, the new NetBSD logos are decent enough if a little uninspiring and ‘safe’. I’ve always been a fan of the old NetBSD logo.

I’ve been a subscriber to the RSS feed over at Startup Skills for quite a while now, the authors insights on creating a start up and online advertising in general and Google Adwords in particular have always made interesting reading; but one day they stopped. Instead of just pontificating about what you could do he’s been busy actually creating and running a company. AdGooroo, “an advertising intelligence service that tracks competitors’ online advertising” and helps you get the most from your own Google Adwords certainly warrants a close eye if you use Google for ads and a perfect starting place to find out what it’s all about if you don’t. Read on →

I’ve never been a huge IRC person but I do like amusing quotes, if you get a bored five minutes it’s well worth having a sift through both Bash.org and QDB.us. The quality of the humour varies a lot but some of it is good wholesome geek humour. And a lot of it isn’t :)

I stumbled across this site yesterday when looking for some FireFox plugins and i have to admit i can see me getting a lot of use out of it. The basic premise is pretty simple: BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times). The FireFox BugMeNot plugin provides nice and easy right click access to the site but while I’m at work i have to use IE so i decided to write my own version, imaginatively titled BugMeNot IE Read on →