PeeaycHPee

Hi all,

Quick note to say that the Komodo Extensibility Challenge (as previously mentioned) is now complete, and it's time for voting.

I made the short list for both categories. Please take a moment and vote for my projects.

For XPI Extension, please go here and vote for Clipboard Helper by scoates.

For Toolbox Extension, please go here and vote for Komodo Modeline by scoates.

I personally think Komode is the best candidate (-: (I really do use it all the time).

If you'd like some background info, see komode and clipboard helper.

Thanks! I appreciate your votes.

S

Yesterday, if you tried to call me (either at work, or at home, or even my mobile), you were probably unable to reach me.

The telephone (VOIP) wholesaler I use, Unlimitel, was down for around 9 hours. Normally, 9h of downtime would really bother me, but I can honestly say I've never been happier with their service.

Read on for some background info on why.

Quite a while ago, O'Reilly sent me a copy of my friend and colleague, Chris Shiflett's book, Essential PHP Security.

When I received it, I read through it quickly, and knew it was a good book, but didn't have much else to say about it (lest I join the ranks of the me too!ers (everyone was saying it's a good book)).

Today, I was wondering about session ID regeneration. I know it's important, but I was looking for a "best practice," or opinion on an appropriate level of session ID regeneration.

After a few quick Web searches, I remembered that I have a copy of the aforementioned book. I respect Chris' opinion on such matters, so I pulled it out of my pile.

A glance at the index shows:

 session identifier
    obtaining, 43
    regenerating at session,  46
    regenerating for change in privilege, 46
    regenerating on every page, 47

Turns out page 47 contains exactly what I was looking for. It's too long to quote here, but the gist is Regenerate only on privilege escalation, not on every page. Every page works for the most part, but causes problems with the back/forward buttons, and needlessly annoys users.

Thanks, Chris!

S

If, today, you couldn't get to some of your servers today, or email was overwhelmingly slow, or more probably: servers worked from one location, and not another, here's why:



Those red outlines indicate that the network availability dropped below 90% at cogent.

I didn't notice until late into the outage (well, I did notice, but I didn't know why the net was sucking so much), this grab was of a 4-hour period, at ~18:00 EDT, and some of those points are reading 82%. That means that over the course of the past 4 hours, the cogent network was only available 82% of the time.

This makes approx. 43 minutes of downtime in the past 4 hours.

So much for five nines.
At least it seems to be working now.

S