This is a slight departure from my normal choice of topics, I’ll admit. Last year I decided that I wasn’t happy about my weight. I’d been slowly gaining weight for the last few years, as a fairly predictable consequence of a sedentary lifestyle and liking for food. I topped out at 240 pounds, which left …
Author Archives: kemayo
Vulnerable
One of my sites got hacked. How? My spouse tried out a number of WordPress themes while setting up their blog a year or two ago. One of them contained something called timthumb.php, which just this August was found to have a great big security vulnerability. Someone exploited this vulnerability, probably by scanning for every …
Google Reader… Plus?
Google released their Google Reader revamp. Certainly prettier, though I’m not entirely convinced right now by the increased vertical space used by the list view. Puzzling oversight is not importing my existing Reader friends into a Google Plus circle. Seems like a really obvious thing to do, and yet they’re giving everyone a chance to …
Raking Jekyll
I’ve never really touched rake before, but since switching to Jekyll I’m finding that it’s becoming an essential part of my workflow. In the limited area of blogging, at least. rake is a version of make in which you define all your targets in Ruby. Because practically anything would be an improvement over Makefile syntax, …
XSS is fun!
Pretending innocence, I ask why all these high profile websites have their homepages covered in spinning images? CNN (screenshot) The New York Times (screenshot) Mashable (screenshot) Fox News (screenshot) Okay, obviously enough, I’m messing with them. But how can I do that? The answer is cross site scripting (“XSS”). XSS is surprisingly common, and nigh-universally …
Jekyll
I’ve just redone my website using Jekyll. It is now completely static. No PHP, no database, nothing like that. Why did I do this? It’s quite soothing knowing that all my content is version controlled. I am now nigh-immune to traffic spikes. I was using caching with WordPress before, so it had never been an …
To replace PHP you need
(Expanding slightly on my response to this HN thread.) First: to be on all shared hosting everywhere. I.e. you need to be really easy to install, and preferably not involve long-running processes that shared hosts might choke on. Second: to be beginner friendly. No requirement of understanding MVC, or running commands in a shell (hi …
Inane, random, and opinionated
I need to bear in mind that the threshold for the Hacker News front page is a bit lower late at night on Friday, and perhaps only submit my less inane, random, and opinionated stuff in that timeframe. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s great for getting views.
Why not just use an IDE if you want IDE features?
After I posted about my Sublime Text 2 git plugin I got one response which I thought was worth responding to. That looks helpful, but I often wonder why not just use an IDE if you want IDE features. Obviously I have a bias here, but I’ll try to be fair to IDEs… An IDE …
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Sublime Text 2 git plugin
I wrote a git plugin for Sublime Text 2. I’d decided to try Sublime out for work to see how it compared to TextMate… and thus some degree of git integration was required. Given that it’s been out since January, I was surprised that there wasn’t already a solid git plugin. I did find this …