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How to protect your site against a DDOS attack

A Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack is an attempt by a malicious party to prevent legitimate users of using your services. With a DDOS attack this is typically accomplished through flooding, a process whereby multiple clients generate traffic to your site that takes up all capacity of your site so it stops responding to [...]

How to connect to Amazon EC2 from Mac OS X with SSH

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

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.

A Simple Front End Controller in PHP

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 [...]

Serving media files from a different url with Django and NGINX

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 [...]

Logging out of a Basic Authentication session (with PHP example)

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 [...]

Changes to this site

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 [...]

A Query Engine for PHP

Looking at the code in the previous entry wasn’t exactly a pleasant aesthetic experience (sorry for that, bit of a botched job) so for my new project, an implementation of the NIST RBAC model in PHP, I decided to code a nice generic PHP query engine. The Query Engine takes a number of arguments like [...]

Transactions, prepared statements and PHP mysqli

How to do prepared statements and transactions in the mysqli PHP extension

Templates, template engines and PHP

Why not to use separate template engines for PHP

Lies, damned lies and caching

How to create a caching policy for IIS 5 using VBScript

How to use PHP XPath queries with XHTML

My work for the Lilliput CMS has lead to some interesting new findings about PHP 5′s new DOM functions, particularly the XPath part of it. Whilst working on the templating structure for Lilliput I couldn’t get the DOM XPath queries to work on the file at hand, a normal XHTML 1.0 Strict document. With an [...]

Building the previous blog

This blog uses used a novel approach (I think) in that it is was entirely Atom 1.0 based. There is was no underlying (X)HTML, everything is was Atom (with a hint of XSL). I came to this approach after I figured out that it is silly to serve the same content in multiple formats when [...]