Last week’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) brought internet surveillance into public news: one outcome of the conference was standardization of DPI technology. This infrastructure standard will make it easier for governments to implement large-scale surveillance and/or filtering. Funny thing is that governments are already having those capabilities, they only want to standardize it. The public outrage came too late. So let’s protect you from governments at home or abroad, the RIAA, MPAA, random eavesdroppers and anyone else that want to listen in on your secrets while you’re surfing the Internet. The initial steps are easy and cheap (or free), so there’s no reason let your security down. They might not be perfect but making the government’s job more expensive seems to be a good road to take. ...

Imagine your Laptop (or Desktop Computer) being stolen. How long will it take and how much will it cost you to get back on track? Hardware will be easy: the cost for a new premium desktop is around $1000, for a new Laptop around $2000. Your data “should” be always be back-uped somewhere anyways. But this neglects a hidden cost: some thief has all your data, including all your online identities, photos, source for software projects and private notes/pictures that you do not want to be published. How much would you value your online reputation, would you change all your online account passwords and connected applications on theft? How much time and effort would this cost you – and could you do it fast enough before the attacker might utilize that data against you? ...

Another small tip: to locally forward port 80 to port 3000 use the following Linux iptables command: $ sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000 You can use this command to allow customers to connect to your locally run Ruby on Rails setup (as long as you have some port forwarding set up on your local router). I am using this to develop facebook open graph apps as the application URL (that is configured within facebook’s app controll page) cannot include a custom port (like 3000). ...

Just a small tip for today: when moving an RoR-application between servers the database user often changes. While it is easy to dump and restore database dums using pg_dump and pg_restore this might lead to invalid table ownerships on the new host. I’m using the following bash snippet for fixing this problem ...

OctoPress is embraced for its simplicity: write blog posts, save them, generate HTML pages and move those upon a web server. As no code is executed server-side every page can be cached and security risks are low. So far I’m hosting my blog on a rented hetzner root-server in Germany. While there’s no server-side security problem I’m still using a full blown server which imposes maintenance overhead on me. No peace of mind. An alternative would be moving to the cloud (Amazon’s S3 storage in my case), but is it worth it? ...

After three or four years it became time to replce my Desktop Computer with newer technology. I’ve got a first generation Intel Core i7-920 Octo-core processor: it still packs more than enough power but sadly gets too hot and thus the cooling system got too loud for my taste. So time for a new Desktop! I decided to go the miniITX route. The main idea was to pack as much power-efficient technology in an as-small-as-possible case. This post describes my hardware experiences.. ...

Recently I’ve switched my working day to a more enjoyable pace – and noticed that my productivity rose too. Too many friends claimed that I’m just plain lazily so this post tries to clarify my mode of operation. The basic idea is to reduce procrastination and improve my attention span through voluntary self-censorship. Some caveat beforehands: I am working as self-employed independent software contractor, thus my work has some unique properties: ...

Ruby on Rails is perfect for creating web applications but sometimes you just need to create some documents which can be stored or send through email. While printing is no problem with CSS not all users are able to “save/print page as pdf”. The ubiquitous Adobe PDF file format seems to be a perfect solution for this problem. The common solution for this is Prawn (also see the RailsCast about it). Alas prawn uses a custom DSL for defining and styling the document and I would rather prefer to reuse existing view partials. princeXML seems to solve this: it transforms existing HTML/CSS into pdf. This allows to reuse existing views and partials but comes with a hefty price-tag of $3500+. ...