OpenIDThursday, 20th February 2003
DNS mess
As the recent lack of updates demonstrates, I’ve been getting stuck in to a pretty time consuming new project. It should have launched several days ago but I made a right royal hash of the DNS settings—hopefully everything will be working fine in about 24 hours time. [... 119 words]
Calendars and crawlers
Douglas Bowman has been having some amusing problems with robots and his calendar. The calendar, visible on every page of the site, automatically adds a “next month” and “previous month” link to allow surfers to browser through the archive in both directions. Unfortunately, Doug ommitted the logic to stop showing a “previous month” link when there were no earlier entries. An enterprising crawler started following the links, and didn’t stop until it had reached 1542! [... 113 words]
Get a better browser!
Via Scott, this oh-so-true quote from a Microsoft “next-generation technology” consultant: [... 377 words]
Watch out for Javascript in referrals
Here’s a good reminder why you should always encode < and > as HTML entities when displaying content from an untrusted (i.e external) source: Kasia in a nutshell was hit by a false referrer containing javascript deliberately aimed at hijacking the page the referrer was displayed on: [... 76 words]
More Python advocacy
Intelligent Enterprise: For all of you unfamiliar with Python, get ready for the “next big thing.”
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Python for Java programmers
Python and Jelly: Scripting Power for Java and XML incorporates an excellent introduction to Python and Jython for Java programmers, with a whole bunch of comparative code samples and comprehensive coverage of differences between the two languages. [... 38 words]
SSH public key authentication
I’ve been having fun with SSH lately. Did you know you can set up SSH so you can log in to servers without having to provide a password? It’s called “public key authentication” and is apparently more secure than using a normal password. You generate a public/private key using a program called ssh-keygen, and store a copy of the public key on the server(s) you wish to authenticate with. When you attempt to log in, the server sends you a message encrypted with your public key—your machine decrypts it and sends back the original message, proving your identity.
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