I recently got in touch with On Your Bike, a cycle shop with stores in Birmingham and London, to alert them to a number of security issues in their website. I’d raised the matter with a very friendly chap at the shop, and he advised me to send an email to the manager. This I […]

Introduction Last year I tried running Fedora on a MacBook Pro (Intel i5 processor) to see how much pain was involved in switching to Linux completely. I was also interested to see whether using virtual machines for day-to-day tasks was feasible, via Oracle’s VirtualBox. In the end I didn’t make the switch: an idle guest […]

There is a rule of street fundraising that surely has parallels in the physical sciences. You find a charity mugger, pop them in an excessively luminous T-shirt to match their personality, and stand them in a sea of shoppers on a Saturday high-street. Powered by some alien intuition lurking in the moving throng, the “chugger” […]

One of the things I’m cautious about is logging onto my own blog, and other self-hosted sites that require authentication, over public wifi. Unless I use server certificates, my WordPress and other passwords are in danger of being captured via a promiscuously-configured wifi adapter on the same subnet. Whilst I really ought to get a […]

I’ve been reading up on build processes for PHP recently, and comparing them with the good and bad deployment approaches I’ve been asked to use in the past. To do it properly, there are two approaches designed for a speedy changeover: Build the app in a new location and then change the docroot symlink to […]

This would make a nice weekend hack project! A website to report (PHP) tutorials that recommend insecure techniques, especially involving SQL injection (I just found another one, and have reported it via the comments). For novelty, render all the sites as labelled divs in a Masonry wall, and bonus points for a cheeky xkcd-style alt-text […]

I’ve been working since Christmas last year on an online PHP tutorial for beginners, which is now pretty much ready to try out. The working title during development has been “I ♥ PHP” and I still rather like that, so I’ll stick with that at least for the alpha period. The course is split over […]

Using HTTPS in the browser is a good security measure against data and session theft, especially on publicly available networks, such as internet cafes. A number of browser plugins now offer the ability to auto-switch to an encrypted connection, such as NoScript and SSL Everywhere. I thought a good counterpart to these would be a […]

Having fully switched from OS X to a proper Free operating system, I’m finding there’s a few things that the new environment doesn’t quite do as I’d like. One of them is the ability to name terminals per tab in gnome-terminal, but there’s no immediate provision for it. So, I’ve written a simple PHP script […]