...more recent posts
HTTPS-everywhere is a FireFox extension from the EFF that helps secure a limited number of popular sites which already support some form of encryption over HTTPS by rewriting links in page to always use HTTPS. In other words, some popular sites like Gmail, Wikipedia, and Facebook, allow you to use HTTPS to browse securely, but they make it a tiny bit difficult by not always defaulting to HTTPS. So some links on a secure page will point to other parts of the site using regular HTTP. The HTTPS-everywhere extension will rewrite such links to help you stay connected securely.
Bunch of front end links for my own uses (and so I can finally close some of the 50+ tabs I have open). I'm doing a lot more client side stuff lately, especially using jquery. I still hate fiddling with HTML and CSS, but not nearly as much as I used to, and javascript is sort of fun although I'm not nearly as comfortable there as in PHP on the server. In any case:
Markup.io - super clever bookmarklet that lets you draw on any webpage, and then share your results. Great for communicating while tweaking web page design.
Common security mistakes in web applications, and the ha.ckers.org cross site scripting cheat sheet. You have to understand this stuff if you are building web apps.
jQuery.pidCrypt - a jQuery plugin to impliment the pidCrypt library
SVG-edit - web-based, Javascript-driven SVG editor that works in any modern browser. Link is to a demo - pretty fun to play around with. Not going to replace illustrator, but it is pretty amazing what can be built in modern browsers.
Zoom-info - pretty simple jQuery image effect that I happen to like. Also Rocketbar, persistent headers and footers, from the same place.
jQuery BBQ - simple, yet powerful bookmarkable #hash history. There are many different implementations of this idea, but this seems to be the most complete. And, sort of humerously, jQuery starwipe, from the same place. From the page:
With jQuery Star Wipe you can enable the single best transition ever created, the star wipe, in any recent WebKit browser!....Only works in modern browsers, but indeed, probably the single best page transition ever.
Why do I need this plugin?
If you even have to ask, then you don’t need it. In fact, you’re not even allowed to look at the live example. Just go away, now.
Protocol relative URL from Paul Irish. Helps with the problem when creating pages with image links when you don't know whether the page will be on http: or https:. It's amazing to me that there is always some other cool trick that I have never heard of before.
jQuery Face Detection (like the technology behind tagging people in FaceBook.)
And finally, one server side piece of goodness: Google's mod_pagespeed for Apache:
...[A] module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Spamhaus, the venerable spam blacklisting service, is starting an invite only whitelist. (Blacklists say "we think these addresses are spammers" while whitelists say "we think these addresses are not spammers"; both can be used by email servers to reduce the amount of spam delivered to users.) The invite only part means, I would guess, that this list will be a big business type thing (I doubt I'll be able to be listed, but I'm sure Chase and Verizon will have no problem). This is the sort of issue that can be tricky in the sense that it seems to split the web into tiers based on something like corporate size, and this seems to cut against the democratic spirit of the web. On the other hand, spam is a ridiculously annoying problem, and this seems like it will only help the situation. So it's a good example of something the younger me might have been against on principle, but which I'm now in favor of for purely pragmatic reasons. The best internet isn't the one that exists somewhere in my dreams; it's the best one we can actually make in reality.
Is the Stuxnet worm targeting the Iranian nuclear infrastructure? Slashdot discussion is here. Debka (grain of salt, etc...) says that Iran has confirmed this to be the case. Pretty interesting.
I've run into an issue where I was hitting the memory limit of Safari on the iPad (loading in very large image galleries) which was causing the browser to crash. (ouch!) It turns out that there is possibly no direct way to unload images from memory in this case, but you can force something to the same effect by changing the src of images you want to unload to point to a small (1x1px) image file. This will unload the real (large) image from memory, replacing it with the small one. Details at the link.
Rsync using sudo via remote shell:
stty -echo; ssh myUser@REMOTE_SERVER/ "sudo -v"; stty echothen:
rsync -avze ssh --rsync-path='sudo rsync'/ myUser@REMOTE_SERVER:/REMOTE_PATH/ LOCAL_PATH
Way behind on a bunch of stuff to post. But I really need to remember this for my own uses since it seems to have improved the performance of Mail.app under 10.5 (which had become so slow it was very frustrating to use and taking up way too much of my time.)
1. Quit Mail.app
2. Back up Mail just in case (i.e., copy ~/Library/Mail to somewhere safe)
3. in Terminal type:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index4. Still in Terminal, at the sqlite> prompt, type:
vacuum subjects;and wait for the sqlite> prompt to return (several minutes in my case.)
5. Ctrl-d to drop out of sqlite3 back into terminal
6. Restart Mail.app
Huge speed improvement for me.
Open source (MIT license) Harmony in-browser drawing application. Wow. Demo here. That's all javascript and the <canvas> tag.
Yesterday Google announced it's new Font API and it is completely amazing. They set up a web font directory where they have open sourced a bunch of fonts. To use one of them, say Tangerine, in your web page you just include the following in the document head:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">Google also teamed up with TypeKit who open sourced their WebFont Loader which is a nice way to deal with some possible loading issue differences across browsers.
Raph Levien, creator of the great Inconsolata font, works on the project for Google. There is an interview with him about it here.
This is really exciting news for web designers. Typography has been something of a sore spot up until now. Like a lot of helpful improvements to the web, this doesn't break an amazing amount of new ground. You could already do this all yourself with @font-face. But what Google has done is to make it extremely easy to implement, while helping everyone out with the added bandwidth requirements of having to download the fonts to the users computer. Hotlinking the fonts from the same Google URI means that designers can feel very confident of the fonts already being in the users browser cache. Simple and extremely helpful. Thanks again Google. And get ready for much more interesting typography on the web.
I've done a bunch of tweaking to spamassassin which should result in many fewer spam emails getting through to email accounts on my server. I'd be curious if anyone notices any changes from this point forward.