skim sl4m

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.
Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

The reason why you might get certificate errors in Ruby 2.0 when talking HTTPS is because there isn't a default certificate bundle that OpenSSL (which was used when building Ruby) trusts.

Update: this problem is solved in edge versions of rbenv and RVM.

$ ruby -rnet/https -e "Net::HTTP.get URI('https://github.com')"
net/http.rb:917:in `connect': SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3
  read server certificate B: certificate verify failed (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError)

You can work around the issue by installing a certificate bundle that you trust. I trust Mozilla and curl.

Description

This simple script will take a picture of a whiteboard and use parts of the ImageMagick library with sane defaults to clean it up tremendously.

The script is here:

#!/bin/bash
convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"

Results

Prolog

Google Chrome Developers says:

The new WOFF 2.0 Web Font compression format offers a 30% average gain over WOFF 1.0 (up to 50%+ in some cases). WOFF 2.0 is available since Chrome 36 and Opera 23.

Some examples of file size differences: WOFF vs. WOFF2

TTF to WOFF2 converting

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

rack/rack#337 (comment)

Question re: should this be rack's job

# config.ru
run ->(env) {
  [ 200, { 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, [Rack::Request.new(env).params.inspect] ]
}

CSS Layout Debugger

A tweet-sized debugger for visualizing your CSS layouts. Outlines every DOM element on your page a random (valid) CSS hex color.

One-line version to paste in your DevTools

Use $$ if your browser aliases it:

~ 108 byte version

Screencapture and animated gifs

I say "animated gif" but in reality I think it's irresponsible to be serving "real" GIF files to people now. You should be serving gfy's, gifv's, webm, mp4s, whatever. They're a fraction of the filesize making it easier for you to deliver high fidelity, full color animation very quickly, especially on bad mobile connections. (But I suppose if you're just doing this for small audiences (like bug reporting), then LICEcap is a good solution).

Capturing (Easy)

Launch quicktime player
do Screen recording

Upgrading to Lion or Yosemite and WebStorm 9, I noticed key repeat was
turned off for the IdeaVim plugin h j k l keys.

System-wide key repeat

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false in a terminal will enable
key repeat for every app. This can alternatively be found in the accessibility settings in OS X' preferences.

	# SSL self signed localhost for rails start to finish, no red warnings.

	# 1) Create your private key (any password will do, we remove it below)

	$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.orig.key 2048


	# 2) Remove the password

	$ openssl rsa -in server.orig.key -out server.key

	√ Zephyros (window manager) needs universal access:
	http://www.tekrevue.com/2013/06/25/how-to-enable-access-for-assistive-devices-in-os-x-mavericks/

	√ gcc can’t find stdio.h (& similar) - /usr/include got blown away
	xcode-select --install
	see https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/20427

	√ java install got blown away & replaced with a stub that says to download java
	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html