How to build (and how not to build) a secure “remember me” feature
This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Secure Account Management Fundamentals" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/secure-account-management-fundamentals] Here’s the scenario – a user logs in to your website, comes back tomorrow and… has to log in again. The idea of the “remember me” feature – and
WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
The news has just come out that Opera is switching all of their browsers (both mobile and desktop) to use WebKit (specifically, Chromium). I’ve seen a lot of gnashing of teeth on Twitter and I feel like I can respond because I use to feel the same way back in 2008-2009. However this is 2013 and the Chrome/Chromium…
CMS Trap
Avoid architectural premature optimization
I sent a balloon up to capture 360x180 degree imagery/video from 100K feet
It turns out that launching, losing, finding, and recovering a balloon is way easier than getting the imagery ready. Let's find out why! (If you see an image in this post, click it. If you regret i...
How I Automated “Finding Almost Anyone’s Email Address”
EDIT: The original article author, Rob Ousbey, has popped up on various social media sites to remind everyone to use this tool/knowledge responsibly. I agree. Please be responsible.
Edward C++Hands
I’ve been looking for a good analogy of what programming in C++ feels like and I remembered this 1990 Tim Burton movie, Edward Scissorhands. It’s a darker version of Pinocchio, shot in …
How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
Google Apps drop support for IE9
Thank a lot for this post that was very interesting. Keep posting like those amazing posts, this is really awesome :) Internet Explorer Help Number Australia
New Werkzeug and Flask Releases
Update on the Flask 0.10 and Werkzeug 0.9 releases.
When Haskell Is Not faster than C
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
Questions about Cameron’s ‘new’ porn-blocking
There’s been a bit of a media onslaught from David Cameron about his ‘war on porn’ over the weekend. Some of the messages given out have been very welcome – but some are con…
Take pride or fuck it
The blank, unblemished untitled.txt shimmering in your code editor can mean only one thing. It’s new feature time.
Brilliant or insane code?
I came upon a very interesting and cryptic snippet of code somewhere nameless , and I can’t decide if it is brilliant or completely insane. It is a very obscure way of accomplishing the required task, but it’s around four times faster than the alternatives I’ve tried, so I have to admit that it’s not completely…
The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
I Sold The Magazine, Too
The Magazine ’s development workload was much more front-loaded than I expected. These days, 99% of the work is done by the authors, illustrators, and especially the Executive Editor, Glenn Fleishman .
How to stop Time Warner Cable sucking at Youtube
Experience: Capita Technology · Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Location: Australia · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Mitch Ribar’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.
Kal – a clean JavaScript alternative without callbacks
Kal is a highly readable, easy-to-use language that compiles to JavaScript. It's designed to be asynchronous and can run both on node.js and in the browser. Kal makes asynchronous programming easy and clean by allowing functions to pause and wait for I/O, replacing an awkward callback syntax with a clean, simple…
Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
Clojure from the ground up
This guide aims to introduce newcomers and experienced programmers alike to the beauty of functional programming, starting with the simplest building blocks of software. You’ll need a computer, basic proficiency in the command line, a text editor, and an internet connection. By the end of this series, you’ll have a…
Idiomatic Clojure with LightTable
LightTable, the famous innovative IDE (slash reactive work surface, as described by the author) recently got some pretty amazing additions: user defined plugins and user defined custom expressions.…
Design Books Every Hacker Should Read
Maybe you're an engineer, or maybe you work with a designer. Maybe you think that design is what you do in Photoshop. Or maybe you just care about design. If any of these are true, then there's a lot you can learn by reading and understanding these books. They'll help you understand how to