Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Why I left my new MacBook for a $250 Chromebook

“Why I left my new MacBook for a $250 Chromebook” is a nice write up of a new Chromebook user.  Even though I don’t own a MacBook (or any Mac products for that matter), I have been considering a Chromebook for a while now too.

My biggest concern is obviously programming and system administration tools – editors, terminals, remote access, etc.  But it’s getting there.

Apart from the experiences and wishlists, I found these two links useful:

Git from the inside out

git

Git from the inside out – must be the best thing I’ve ever seen on how git works.  Everybody knows that git is awesome.  Most know that git is implemented with graphs.  But not many know how exactly git stores the project history and how it is affected by different git commands.

And if you are feeling adventurous, there is this:

After reading, if you wish to go even deeper into Git, you can look at the heavily annotated source code of my implementation of Git in JavaScript.

Which, among other things, includes  “Git in six hundred words“.

Packer – a tool for creating VM and container images

With the recent explosion in the virtualization and container technologies, one is often left disoriented.  Questions like “should I use virtual machines or containers?”, “which technology should I use”, and “can I migrate from one to another later?” are just some of those that will need answering.

Here is an open source tool that helps to avoid a few of those questions – Packer (by HashiCorp):

Packer is a tool for creating machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.

Have a look at the supported platforms:

  • Amazon EC2 (AMI). Both EBS-backed and instance-store AMIs within EC2, optionally distributed to multiple regions.
  • DigitalOcean. Snapshots for DigitalOcean that can be used to start a pre-configured DigitalOcean instance of any size.
  • Docker. Snapshots for Docker that can be used to start a pre-configured Docker instance.
  • Google Compute Engine. Snapshots for Google Compute Engine that can be used to start a pre-configured Google Compute Engine instance.
  • OpenStack. Images for OpenStack that can be used to start pre-configured OpenStack servers.
  • Parallels (PVM). Exported virtual machines for Parallels, including virtual machine metadata such as RAM, CPUs, etc. These virtual machines are portable and can be started on any platform Parallels runs on.
  • QEMU. Images for KVM or Xen that can be used to start pre-configured KVM or Xen instances.
  • VirtualBox (OVF). Exported virtual machines for VirtualBox, including virtual machine metadata such as RAM, CPUs, etc. These virtual machines are portable and can be started on any platform VirtualBox runs on.
  • VMware (VMX). Exported virtual machines for VMware that can be run within any desktop products such as Fusion, Player, or Workstation, as well as server products such as vSphere.

The only question remaining now, it seems, is “why wouldn’t you use it?”. :)

WordPress Plugins : Demo Data Creator

Here is a useful plugin for all of you, WordPress developers – Demo Data Creator.   It generates a whole lot of test / demo data and populates your WordPress site with it.  No more lengthy copy-pastes of Lorem Ipsum into posts and pages, single user (hi admin) installations, and senseless “foobar” and “foobar2” categories.  Now you can populate your test or development environment with lots of data to help with previews, and all those issues around search, pagination, and things like that.

demo-data-creator

If you’d rather avoid the plugin and automate this kind of work yourself, make sure to have a look at WP-CLI – command line interface for WordPress, which, among others, has the “wp post generate” command.

httpoxy – a CGI application vulnerability for PHP, Go, Python and others

httpoxy

httpoxy is a set of vulnerabilities that affect application code running in CGI, or CGI-like environments.

It comes down to a simple namespace conflict:

  • RFC 3875 (CGI) puts the HTTP Proxy header from a request into the environment variables as HTTP_PROXY
  • HTTP_PROXY is a popular environment variable used to configure an outgoing proxy

This leads to a remotely exploitable vulnerability. If you’re running PHP or CGI, you should block the Proxy header now.