Ruby's net/http is setup to never verify SSL certificates by default. Most ruby libraries do the same. That means that you're not verifying the identity of the server you're communicating with and are therefore exposed to man in the middle attacks. This gem monkey-patches net/http to force certificate verification and make turning it off impossible.

Interesting approach to caching responses directly in the HTTP server, based on the value of an individual cookie.

No word yet how to force cache-invalidation.

This is a great tutorials for beginners and intermediate AngularJS developers. It covers a lot of ground, including routing and data transfer between client and server.

Enter the hostname of a server to test it for CVE-2014-0160.

Local testing allows you to test your private and internal servers using the BrowserStack cloud, which has support for firewalls, proxies and Active Directory.

This is just a quick note, mostly for my own reference, of a few ways to easily delete the dot-underscore (._foo, ._bar, etc.) files created by (badly-behaved) Mac OS X systems on non-AFP server volumes.

Interesting interview with DHH, where he talks about how they made the new Basecamp feel very fast without using a lot of Javascript (most of Basecamp still lives on the server). The two tricks they used are PJAX and Russian Doll Caching.

pjax loads HTML from your server into the current page without a full reload. It's ajax with real permalinks, page titles, and a working back button that fully degrades.

pjax enhances the browsing experience - nothing more.

This is a demo of the "Tabby" Javascript jQuery plugin to use tabs in regular textareas to make them suitable for in-browser coding of languages like HTML, CSS, Javascript, or your favorite server-side language. The idea is to be able to use a press of the TAB button or SHIFT+TAB to indent or outdent your code.

whatsmydns.net is an online service that allows you to instantly perform a DNS lookup to check a hostnames current IP Address and other DNS information against a selection of random name servers around the world. This is especially useful to check the current state of DNS propagation after making changes to your domains zones.

Selenium has been the siren song that continually calls out to us. Unfortunately, in practice we’ve been unable to get Selenium to run reliably for real applications, on both developers machines and on the continuous integration server. This failure with Selenium has caused us to search for alternative solutions

This document describes an agreement between web servers and search engine crawlers that allows for dynamically created content to be visible to crawlers. Google currently supports this agreement. The hope is that other search engines will also adopt this proposal.

Physical servers worked, EC2 did not.

Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but over the past few years an interesting variation of CSS Sprites has been getting a lot of play on large web sites that serve millions of users.

Web 2.0 sites have lots of tiny javascript/css files, which causes one extra round trip per file to the server and back! This is bad! Bundle-fu throws it all up into a big package and sends it out all at once.

I’m working on a problem for a client which involves connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database from Linux using Ruby. Here’s what I did to get it working, based off some useful instructions that are tailored for Ruby on Rails:

So, as a result, people using RESTful ideas to talk to browsers have to put the smarts back on the server. They invent new URLs which (for example) return a resource, but return it all wrapped up in the HTML needed to display it as a form for browser-based editing.

Rfm brings your FileMaker data to Ruby with elegance and speed. Now your Ruby scripts and Rails applications can talk directly to your FileMaker server with a syntax that just feels right.

sing Google’s JavaScript Library CDN comes with a 1/3 of a second tax on missing. (Note that a tax like this applies to opening connections to a any new host: JavaScript Library CDNs, advertisers, analytics and visitor tracking, etc. This is why you should try to reduce the number of different hostnames you serve content from.)

Large scale server deploys using BitTorrent and the BitTornado library.

jsPDF is an open-source library for generating PDF documents using nothing but Javascript. You can use it in a Firefox extension, in Server Side Javascript and with Data URIs in some browsers.

Next in our series on not shooting yourself in the foot: Doing a sudo shutdown -h now on the main database server right before you head home to cook dinner for six.