Connecting to my Amazon EC2 image (from which this site is running) from Mac Os X took ages to find out and turned out to be relatively simple with the correct information (isn’t that always the case). At first I didn’t think the builtin Mac OS X ssh could cut it so I started looking into various Mac OS X ssh clients (Fugu, RBrowser, CyberDuck etc ..) but none of those could handle the Amazon public/private key encryption. Then I started looking into using Putty on Mac OS X even though thats not available for Mac OS X (but with a little help from MacPorts). That bombed on problems with GTK1. Dang, what to do?
NIST RBAC PHP API package 0.65 released
Posted: June 2, 2010 at 10:22 pm
I’m happy to release my first public version of the NIST RBAC PHP API library. I’ve blogged a number of posts on this subject and I hope that the software is of use to you. The package can be downloaded from code.google.com.
The package contains the library, the data model in the form of MySQL DDL instructions, installation documentation and PHPDoc API documentation. It comes with three applications: a management application, a demo application and a test framework. The demo application shows you how to integrate the library with your own application.
Language based redirects using mod_rewrite
Posted: February 22, 2010 at 5:17 pm
For the website of my wife’s company, www.exportmanagement.nu, I needed a simple approach to direct traffic to the proper pages based on the language preference setting of the visiting browser. It’s a very simple approach, any browser with Dutch as its language setting will be directed to the main site and any other language will be directed to a smaller, English language based, website. Luckily the swiss army chainsaw named mod_rewrite came to the rescue and the following little code fragment will do just that (placed in an .htaccess file).
A simple approach to Localization in PHP
Posted: February 22, 2010 at 10:31 am
There’s quite a number of ways to approach localization (L10N) in PHP. Typing in “simple localization php” in Google yields an impressive amount of results. I won’t go into a heavy theoretical approach in what the best way is or that you need to use gettext or any such approach. I just want to present the function(s) I’m using and leave it up to you to decide whether you like the approach.
A Simple Front End Controller in PHP
Posted: January 18, 2010 at 10:21 am
A Front End Controller is part of an MVC pattern.
The controller receives input and initiates a response by making calls on model objects. An MVC application may be a collection of model/view/controller triplets, each responsible for a different UI element. MVC is often seen in web applications where the view is the HTML or XHTML generated by the app. The controller receives GET or POST input and decides what to do with it, handing over to domain objects (i.e. the model) that contain the business rules and know how to carry out specific tasks such as processing a new subscription.
NIST RBAC Data Model
Posted: January 9, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Serving media files from a different url with Django and NGINX
Posted: November 21, 2009 at 8:04 am
Media files in Django are served through the web server and they can be served with a different url than the Django content itself. By spreading requests across multiple urls you can speed up your site because the browser will execute requests in parallel. The rule of thumb seems to be a maximum of 2-3 hostnames otherwise the added DNS requests negate the speed up effect.
Logging out of a Basic Authentication session (with PHP example)
Posted: October 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
A good friend of mine asked if it was possible to log out of a Basic Authentication session. My first knee-jerk response was that Basic Authentication has no log out function and you should close the browser to safely log out of the session. After some days silence he came back with a script he’d found on the php.net site. The script used sessions to break the Basic Authentication behavior of the browser. It wasn’t a very successful script because it only worked in a limited set of browsers but it got me thinking about a better solution.
Switching to WordPress
Posted: October 3, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I finally succumbed to ease of use and switched from my bespoke PivotLog installation to WordPress. I thoroughly enjoyed Pivot but when switching from Textdrive to Amazon EC2 I had to change and migrate so many things that I settled for the easier solution; WordPress.
Changes to this site
Posted: October 2, 2009 at 9:41 pm
As explained in one of the first posts on this blog this site is basically just one big Atom feed that gets transformed into this blog by using a bit of Apache content negotiation and client side XSLT. Besides some issues with browsers ignoring client side XSLT in a feed and forcing their own rendition of my feed which was fixed by inserting 512 bytes of crud to throw of the feed sniffing this approach has worked fine for the last four years.