Carlo van Wyk thecarlo

WebSockets - An Introduction

WebSockets is a modern HTML5 standard which makes communication between client and server a lot more simpler than ever. We are all familiar with the technology of sockets. Sockets have been fundamental to network communication for a long time but usually the communication over the browser has been restricted. The general restrictions

The server used to have a permanent listener while the client (aka browser) was not designated any fixed listener for a more long term connection. Hence, every communication was restricted to the client demanding and the server responding.
This meant that unless the client requested for a particular resource, the server was unable to push such a resource to the client.
This was detrimental since the client is then forced to check with the server at regular intervals. This meant a lot of libraries focused on optimizing asynchronous calls and identifying the response of asynchronous calls. Notably t

Setting up a SSL Cert from Comodo

I use Namecheap.com as a registrar, and they resale SSL Certs from a number of other companies, including Comodo.

These are the steps I went through to set up an SSL cert.

Purchase the cert

nginx 403 Forbidden Error hosting in User Home Directory

resources

runtime environment

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

	# Ask for the user password
	# Script only works if sudo caches the password for a few minutes
	sudo true

	# Install kernel extra's to enable docker aufs support
	# sudo apt-get -y install linux-image-extra-$(uname -r)

	# Add Docker PPA and install latest version
	# sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 36A1D7869245C8950F966E92D8576A8BA88D21E9
	# sudo sh -c "echo deb https://get.docker.io/ubuntu docker main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list"

	#
	# Name: nginx-tls.conf
	# Auth: Gavin Lloyd <[email protected]>
	# Desc: Nginx SSL/TLS configuration for "A+" Qualys SSL Labs rating
	#
	# Enables HTTP/2, PFS, HSTS and OCSP stapling. Configuration options not related
	# to SSL/TLS are not included here.
	#
	# Additional tips:
	#

	/*
	This brute force algorithm was originally written (by me) back in 1998, and has been collecting dust
	since then. However, for the purpose of testing Gist on GitHub I decided to rewrite the algorithm
	from VB6 to C#, make some improvements and release this fast, compact, non-recursive, brute force
	algorithm under the MIT license: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

	Notes:
	- Do a run with testLetters = "0123456789" and testLength = 3, to see what happens
	- Remember to keep the callback testCalback as fast as possible
	- Tweet some love to @fredrikdev :)

	var request = require('request');
	var unzip = require('unzip');
	var csv2 = require('csv2');

	request.get('http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip')
	.pipe(unzip.Parse())
	.on('entry', function (entry) {
	entry.pipe(csv2()).on('data', console.log);
	})
	;

	using Amazon;
	using Amazon.SQS;
	using Amazon.SQS.Model;
	using Amazon.SQS.Util;
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Threading;

	namespace Sixeyed.Blogging.Aws

	# to generate your dhparam.pem file, run in the terminal
	openssl dhparam -out /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparam.pem 2048