My Side Projects

As developers we often need to take minified JSON and XML and pretty print it so it is human readable. A multitude of websites provide a free service where you can enter minified JSON or XML and it will format it the data so it is human readable. The problem is this can lead to leaking data causing security incidents. The solution is to write a couple of bash scripts to pretty print. A big thanks to Campovski 's answer on stackoverflow for the JSON and Ben Noland 's answer on stackoverflow and Anton I. Sipos ' comment for the XML I took these answers a little further and created a bash script that accepts arguments so you can pretty print A file The result returned form an API A string Data piped in Both scripts have the same usage Format a file with the -f flag JSON ./pretty_json.sh -f <name_of_file> XML ./pretty_xml.sh -f <name_of_file> Format the return value of an API with the -u flag JSON ./pretty_json.sh -u www.api.com XML ./pretty_xml.sh -u

I recently needed to create a number of files to test uploading. Copying and pasting multiple times seemed like to much work, so I wrote the following script to do the hard work for me. create a file called create_files.sh and make is executable $ touch create_files.sh $ chmod 774 create_files.sh Then open create_files.sh and paste the following script for i in $(eval echo { $1 .. $2 }) do echo "Test file $i " &gt; file $i .txt done The script takes two arguments, the number to start at, and the number to finish. This is useful for cases when you create files then discover you want more. Example $ ./create_files.sh 5 9 $ ls -la drwxrwxr-x  ./ drwxrwxr-x ../ -rwxrwxr-- create_files.sh* -rw-rw-r-- file5.txt -rw-rw-r-- file6.txt -rw-rw-r-- file7.txt -rw-rw-r-- file8.txt -rw-rw-r-- file9.txt I also created a script to copy files, as I also wanted to test uploading images and other file types create a file called copy_files.sh and make is exe

I've been doing a lot of NodeJS lately and one thing I always forget is how to run Mocha recursively. To run all test recursively update your package.json to include the following { "scripts" : { "test" : "mocha --recursive './{,!(web|node_modules)/**/}*.spec.js'" }, } to run the tests, run the following command from where package.json is stored npm test or yarn test The test entry in the package.json file will run MochaJS recursively on all directories except web and node_modules directories, and run the tests in any file that ends with the extension .spec.js Excluding the node_modules directory is a good idea because you don't need to run the tests of your installed packages and when you have a lot of packages installed it can slow down your test suite. If you're using windows you might need to use double quotes instead of single quotes. For example "test" : "mocha --recursive \" ./{,!(web

Another developer I work with just showed me a much nicer git log command experience. It gives pretty colours, the commit id, the author and much more. The idea comes from Filipe Kiss' blog  however the solution I use was submitted in the comments of the blog post by LordMonkey The following command creates an alias lg for the git log command. git config  -- global   alias . lg  "log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative" git lg will then result in something similar to I have blurred text to protect privacy

Poodle is a security vulnerability that has been found in SSLv3. Since SSL is over ten years old, and the only browsers that support it as the strongest version of encryption are IE6 and older, in my humble opinion it is safe to turn it off.  Let's start with the easy one, Linux, in particular CentOS. NB you will most likely need to be root or be part of the sudo group to make the following changes 1)     Open the ssl.config file with your favourite text editor. In Red Hat based distributions like CentOS you should find it in /etc/httpd/mods-available/ssl.conf 2)     Find the line starting with  SSLProtocol 3)     Change it to  SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 This will allow all ciphers expect SSLv2 and SSLv3 4)     Save ssl.conf and exit your text editor 5)     Restart Apache by running the command service httpd restart 6)     Use a tool like sslscan to check all SSLv2 and SSLv3 ciphers are rejected or fail. An example of this would be ssl

The project I'm currently working on is Linux based, and I just can’t get my head around vi no matter how hard I try. Fortunately I have root privileges, so Emacs to the rescue :) We are using CentOS so installing is as easy as sudo yum install emacs   One of the many reasons I really like Emacs is you can run a shell inside Emacs. Press Alt – x Type shell Press enter NB the Alt key in Emacs is often called the Meta key and the key combination above would be shortened to M – x This allows me to split the Emacs window and have the shell in the bottom half and what I working on in the top half, see the image below. To switch between the shell and what I’m working on I press M – O (that’s Alt and the letter O and not the number zero, Alt zero will unsplit the screen) If like me you’re running Emacs inside Putty the first thing you might notice is the shell prompt is in dark blue on a black background. Not only is this very difficult to read but it c