How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Python
I’ve used a few different programming languages over the past few years, ranging all the way from just a tiny bit of assembly, up to the ridiculously abstracted Java EE. Recently I’ve started using Python a lot – both at work and for side projects. Given that, for a number of years, I’ve scoffed at Python, I thought I’d talk about why I’ve come to accept Python – and what issues I still have with it. #The Good Some things really standout about Python as being consistently good about Python – and are largely why I’ve been using it. ##It’s...
How to Purge Comment Spam from Drupal
I recently wrote about a spam comment problem I had that was so bad it effectively took down my website. Fortunately by rooting around in the database for my installation for a few minutes, I was able to remove all of the spam in bulk, rather than manually deleting the comments in batches of 50 or so (which is about all the Drupal interface will let you do in a single action). Comment Table Structure I want to talk briefly about how the comment table is structured in the Drupal’s database – don’t worry if this seems a bit to...
How to Get 1 Million Blog Comments in a Month - A.K.A. Cleaning My Spam Infestation
I’d like to tell a brief, cautionary tale about what can happen when you don’t monitor your website’s comments for spam for a little while. Please note – the events within didn’t happen over the course of years, but in around a month. Lately I’ve been a bit lax on keeping up with my website. I’ve made sure to keep up-to-date with the latest security updates on Drupal, and posted a n article now and then, but generally speaking I’ve not been keeping a close eye on it. One thing I do know, is that the last time I posted...
IPFire on the Dreamplug - Major Version Upgrade
IPFire (http://www.ipfire.org/) is a Linux distribution targeted towards providing a security focused router/firewall that can provide a number of services beyond basic router capabilities. It has been ported to run on ARM, including GlobalScale’s Dreamplug, allowing home users to setup a router with a similar level of capabilities to a corporate router with a power and space footprint roughly equivalent to typical consumer routers. If you are doing a fresh install or wiping and doing a clean upgrade, the official IPFire directions should be sufficient - available at http://wiki.ipfire.org/de/arm/start/kirkwood/installation. If you have problems getting the bootloader configured correctly, be sure...
Making a Linux Foundation-Like Foundation for Cryptography Libraries
One of the things that the recent Heartbleed bug really should alert us to is the fact that our crypto libraries need work. On the one hand, we know that trusting a crypto library developed by a single company is probably a bad idea - such a library gets fewer eyes on it performing code reviews, and also may not be motivated to immediately fix vulnerabilities they are aware. Of the other side of the coin, we have open source libraries, most notably at the moment being OpenSSL, which lack the resources available for a large company to drive development....