cURL Tips – HTTPS requests

Too many times have I seen this in cURL clients: curl_setopt ( $ch , CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST , false ) ; curl_setopt ( $ch , CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER , false ) ; Why is this bad? You leave yourself totally open to man-in-the-middle attacks, and makes SSL virtually pointless. Sure the data passed between the two servers would still be encrypted, but there is no way of verifying the server you’re talking to is the server you WANT to be talking to! My recommendation is that you verify the server is genuine by checking against the genuine CA certificate in PEM format.

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cURL Tips – HTTPS requests

Importance of User Agents

When you write something that connects to a web server, what user agent do you use? Far too often have I seen things like: curl_setopt ( $c , CURLOPT_USERAGENT , "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" ) ; In my opinion you should always use a nice descriptive user agent that explains to the server exactly what your client may be trying to achieve, or at least a unique identifier

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Importance of User Agents

Stop Forwarding E-Mails

I get countless e-mails, and it makes it so much worse when I get absolute rubbish sent through to me from friends and family members alike. Let me quickly explain the top reason why you forwarding an e-mail is my problem. Have a look at the e-mail you’re forwarding

Originally posted here:
Stop Forwarding E-Mails

Olark-ing About…

Olark is a very neat new service from as US company called Habla, Inc. that lets you integrate a live chat box on your website directly with one of a number of common Instant Messaging clients.

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Olark-ing About…

HTML email with images broken in Windows Live Hotmail and Firefox

If you’ve ever had to design/build HTML emails for work or fun or whatever, you might have run into a bit of an issue getting your email to display consistently in the multitude of email clients out there. I tend to just test my emails in Gmail, Outlook, Windows Live Hotmail and occasionally Mac Mail. I used to only test in Windows Live Hotmail using IE as I was resigned to the fact that it never worked properly in Firefox – until now! I finally got hassled into finding a solution for the only issue we had left – a 3 or 4 pixel gap appearing in between all the images

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HTML email with images broken in Windows Live Hotmail and Firefox

Wordpress 2.8 automatic upgrade fails

I’ve been trying to update my wordpress blogs from various versions like 2.5 and 2.7 to the newest 2.8 for a while now, but was never able to do it automatically. Every time I pressed the “upgrade automatically” button, it told me it was downloading the latest file from Wordpress, but it never got any further than that. I logged in to my site using my FTP client and found a 0KB sized file called wordpress2.8.zip in the wp_content folder, so I thought I’d found the issue – maybe the script can’t actually download the file and save it to disk because of permissions

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Wordpress 2.8 automatic upgrade fails

Ubuntu One – Taking Linux To The Clouds

I opened Google Mail on my HTC Magic this morning to find a lovely invitation to the Ubuntu One beta, woot. So I grabbed my shiny Sony Vaio laptop and fired it up, and got straight on with it

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Ubuntu One – Taking Linux To The Clouds

JavaHL Not Available: Solution

Whenever I tried to get CollabNet for Eclipse plugin working in Eclipse PDT, it always failed, yielding the error “Unable to load SVN client” upon any SVN activity. I did endless amounts of Googling to try to solve the problem, but always came to a brick wall. The big problem here is that Eclipse is just too new for Ubuntu - even Jaunty.

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JavaHL Not Available: Solution

Bloody MySQL Bugs

I’m looking to setup some replication between two servers and server B has none of the databases server A has, so obviously I have to populate B with A’s data. Easy you might think, simply start the slave and issue some like: mysql> load data from master; But actually, in my case, this fails because of the following bug when loading master data and the fact that views exist on server A As it says here http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20596 [30 Aug 2006 20:36] Trudy Pelzer Since the current implementation of LOAD DATA FROM MASTER and LOAD TABLE FROM MASTER is very limited, these statements are deprecated in versions 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 of MySQL. We will introduce a more advanced technique (online backup) in a future (> 5.1) version, that will have the added advantage of working with more storage engines.

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Bloody MySQL Bugs

MySQL 5.1.34 Upgrades on CentOS 4 – ho hum