Archive for March, 2010

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Persistent XSS crawler

Photo by Scragz

The browser security model
Tarantula Crawler

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Protecting yourself from sql injection

use bind variables
restrict the rights of your web apps database user - no more rights than necessary (ie. no drop/create)
in production mode, when a sql error occurs, only show a message such as “an error occured” - not the full sql that was executed

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

should the job title ‘Sofware Architect’ exist

In this podcast ‘Joel Spolsky’ makes the point that the title ‘Software Architect’ shouldn’t really exist and that designing high level software interaction is just part of a good developers job.

…are unsure that the title “Software Architect” is a good one. We’re leaning towards it being almost.. a net negative. “It’s almost disrespectful of the […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Configuration management and Chef

This Puppet vs Chef article is a great example of a how a well seo-ed blog can affect the opinions of many. If you look at the initial article in a quick ’skim read’ to choose a technology - you would conclude that Puppet is the best option. However there are plenty of comments below […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

Small project work + living in London = free fall

I can really sympathise with this graphic designer - the media industry is full of people asking freelancers for things as cheap as possible.
Promising things like ‘do this one cheap and there will be lots of future work’ - which either doesn’t materialise or is also at the same price.
I think it may also be […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

correlated subqueries

I guess its time to refresh my sql - moving into finance means I could be running a lot of adhoc sql queries.
I am convinced I have used correlated subqueries before but had never heard of the term.
A correlated subquery is a query where the subquery uses values from the outer queries where clause.

SELECT empnum, […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie