Can’t change Apple ID email address? Try waiting 30 days

Like it or not, Apple plays a critical part in the app-based economy these days. Part of this is having an Apple Developer account in order to release apps to the App Store™️, and in order to get an Apple Developer account you need an Apple ID. In order for the Apple ID to be able to become an Apple Developer account, it needs to be considered to be “over 18”, even if it’s a company account and a Date of Birth makes no sense whatsoever. This is where I got stuck.

Let’s say you don’t realise …

in Tech · Tue 02 January 2018

Resolving an NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED error in Mozilla Firefox

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and occasionally I’ve found that certain resources (typically JavaScript or CSS files) may fail to load because of an error NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED, which is displayed in the console. For me, this is rarely seen, though I’ve experienced the issue a few times on Trello.com and another on our corporate website CMS. This has the effect of preventing whatever that resource was from loading, so in the case of CSS it won’t display and in the case of JS it won’t run. On Trello, this resulted in a fully broken …

in Tech · Tue 21 November 2017

Static sites, continuous deployment and HTTPS with Netlify

I’ve been doing a variety of things pertaining to web security in recent weeks and one thing that’s been gnawing at my brain is the fact that my blog could still only use insecure http:// because of GitHub Pages. My blog’s content was using GitHub Pages for its serving and gh-pages really hasn’t been seeing a lot of love - that I know of - since its inception a few years back, especially since the development of concepts like Let’s Encrypt with free SSL certs for the web.

I felt I probably should have taken a more …

in Tech · Sat 24 December 2016

Switching to Nginx from Cherokee: Techincal Guide

This is a follow up to a previous post on Switching to Nginx from Cherokee. Read that in case you’re here and haven’t already.

All information here on a server level is related to RHEL 6. You will need to change some instructions for Debian based systems. CentOS should be fine and needs only a minor URL change in the repo configuration.

1. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo and add this:

   [nginx]
   name=nginx repo
   baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/rhel/$releasever/$basearch/
   gpgcheck=0
   enabled=1
   

2. Run yum install nginx to install Nginx.

3. Start rebuilding your …

in Web · Fri 12 April 2013

Switching to Nginx from Cherokee: Why

After a switching away from Apache some time ago, our primary web server had been running Cherokee for quite a while - since September 2011, in fact, looking back at the configuration history. More recently, however, I’ve switched us again. This time to Nginx - with impressive improvements in performance and configurability (10x for some static files) — and reliability.

in Web · Thu 11 April 2013

Serving uWSGI Apps on a Sub-directory with Nginx

Serving up uWSGI application using Nginx is super-simple and is configured effectively like a standard reverse proxy_pass. However, the documentation isn’t entirely clear exactly how one can correctly serve an application against a sub-directory — and have the application know its correct path such that it can create correct URLs.

Coming from a background of using the Cherokee webserver, uWSGI operated slightly differently within its configuration. This behaviour, as best I know, must have modified the given uWSGI parameters to correctly handle the sub-directory path. I haven’t looked into it, but it probably just does the same thing that …

in Web · Sun 07 April 2013

Serving TileStache (or another app) using uWSGI against a web sub-directory

uWSGI is extremely promising as an application server given its huge range of options and supported platforms.  For me, however, just getting something seemingly simple up and running successfully was relatively confusing. I’d like to contribute to the documentation when I can, but thought a dedicated page about TileStache as a specific application (and associated configuration) was warranted. It does make more sense now, thankfully.

I want to serve my TileStache application at http://mydomain.com/tiles (taking careful note of the sub-directory present). I’ve chosen an INI-style configuration for my instance and here’s what the …

in Python · Fri 01 June 2012

Adding a return URL during logout with CAS

CAS (Central Authentication Service) is a single-sign-on service (say that several times quickly) and through accessing a CAS /logout URL, as an application, you’re able to log the given user out.  What wasn’t clear (by Googling) was whether there’s a possibility to redirect the user back to the original application (or a given URL).  I now know, thanks to the CAS Protocol Documentation (section 2.3), that any posts that mention adding ?service=http://my.url/ to the /logout URL are incorrect, as this isn’t a valid parameter (at least not at time of writing).

However …

in web programming · Wed 11 January 2012

Disabling caching for sensitive web pages (aka how to prevent logged out users going ‘back’)

We all see web pages like Internet banking, HR systems, email, and more that allow you to log in, do something and load pages, log out, and then prevent you from using your browser’s history to see that sensitive information.  I’m amazed that in my searches I couldn’t quickly find a definitive source of information on how to achieve this.  Pages across the web in a search for ‘stop caching’ range from blog posts, to forum posts, to other pages, and people asking the question (try it: here, or maybe here).

Maybe I got unlucky, but finding …

in Web · Thu 24 March 2011

Apache: Directories and trailing slashes

Apache does something interesting (yes, I still think it’s logical) when you’re accessing a directory that it’s serving: if you access it without a trailing slash, it’ll add one by default. This makes sense if you’re going after some static content or a folder index (or pretty much any sane usage) but it didn’t fit my use case of serving Plone using rewrite rules in a .htaccess file.

The issue that arises for myself with Plone is that my sites need to have their access customised through that .htaccess file and that’s been …

in IT · Mon 18 January 2010