I've missed you, you don't write anymore!

It’s been sometime since my last blog post, you might have thought this blog was dead, but it isn’t. Since my last post I have moved to London. I decided it was time to live in the northern hemisphere for a while and explore this part of the world. As you can imagine moving to the other side of the world does take a little bit of time. It also explains why my side project hasn’t progressed any further. I’m now a happy job hunter in merry old England. I am also trying to find a good C# community group, but sadly I’m having trouble finding even one that meets on a regular basis. So if you know of one let me know about it. Once things settle down a little bit I will start to post more and work on the project will commence.

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Change the Colour of Emacs Shell Prompt and Font Highlighting

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...

Turning Off SSLv3 in Apache and IIS8, AKA Putting Down the Poodle That Bites

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) ...

How to Pretty Print JSON and XML from the Command Line

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 ...

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