Mark Sanborn . net

Well for the short answer all you have to do is ask your self this simple question. Would you give your mail, credit cards and other personal information to a complete stranger? Probably not. By connecting to someone else’s internet connection you are giving them complete control over the data that you send from your computer. This may include mail, credit card information, and personal information.

Although crucial information like bank passwords are transmitted through SSL (encrypted) almost all traffic is sent in plain text. For example this blog and all blogs running Wordpress don’t use SSL to encrypt the credential exchange. Thus if you were connected to a untrusted internet service like your neighbor’s wireless they could easily see your blog’s password. This is just one out of thousands of examples where personal information could be hijacked on the account of YOU hijacking their service. Read more »

Flash doesn’t come with Ubuntu by default so we need to install if for all of our browsers if we want to view any sites that have flash. Adobe provides an easy deb installation file to install it for browsers like Firefox but not Opera. Although the package from Adobe doesn’t automatically install flash for Opera, adding it manually is as simple as copying over a file.

Download the .deb file from Adobe and install it like you normally do. Read more »

When learning regular expressions it is helpful to be able to quickly test regular expression patterns. It doesn’t really matter which proramming language you use to build it but I will give you two examples, one in Perl and one in PHP.

If you are new to regular expressions first check out, Learning Regular Expressions For Beginners: The Basics. It will run your through your first example. Once you have the hang of it you can come back here and build a test program to practice your own regular expressions. Read more »

SVN is one of those things that you love once you know what and how it works. SVN is a version control system used by almost all major open source projects and is an absolute dream to work with. If you have ever worked with a team of developers you probably have had the experience of having your code accidentally written over or deleted.

With SVN you have version control where you can revert changes, kinda like Wikipedia. It also keeps track of which files were actually modified and gives you an option to describe to other developers what changes were made. No more unfortunate mishaps.

What is great about SVN is that the code can be checked out to any server at any time with the latest code. I use SVN to make a “sandbox” server. A server that I can play around in without worrying about deleting code or messing something up. When I am happy with my changes I can type one command and the two servers are synced with the newest changes. If for some reason it doesn’t work out I can revert back to the old way in one easy command. Read more »

Well I just recently hooked up a DSL connection via a DSL modem that was also a router. For regular home users this DSL modem/router is probably good enough but for more complex setups it is useless. In this particular setup we had a custom built firewall. This firewall had a built in dynamic DNS service for ISP’s that rotate IP addresses. The problem however, is that the firewall was behind the DSL modem’s NAT. So it was reporting a private 192.168 number to Dyndns.

We couldn’t turn off NAT on the DSL modem unless we purchased a block of static IPs. The DSL modem, being home orientated, didn’t allow for dynamic DNS.

Fortunately dyndns offers a service to detect your public IP address. They also have an API to change your IP for dynamic DNS. Knowing this I quickly did a search on my favorite perl code repository, CPAN. Sure enough someone made a module that sends updated IP info to dyndns. Read more »

If you consider yourself a programmer and you have not learned regular expressions yet now is the time! At some point in your development you will need to manipulate strings in more complicated ways that simple string functions can’t provide. Regular expressions are used in almost all programming languages and are considered the de facto standard for string manipulation. Regular expressions can also be used in searches and many other utilities.

The problem with regular expressions is that nobody wants to learn them because they look very intimidating. Don’t worry though, we will try to make it as painless as possible.

When I first looked at regular expressions I have to admit they looked absolutely foriegn. You can’t really look at a example snippets and learn a whole lot as you can with some languages.

For example a regular expression might look like this:

((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,15})

If you are new to regular expressions this will look like absolute gibberish or some encrypted code. With regular expressions you have to start with absolutely nothing and build up. Examples snippets simply wont do. Read more »

Out of popularity I have decided to take UPS modules written in PHP found in my article, Calculating UPS Shipping Rate with PHP, over to the next level. I am rewriting all the code in object oriented PHP and publishing the code on Google Code under GNU General Public License v3 to ease implementation.

I am also going to be writing official documentation in the Google Code wiki pages.

This doesn’t mean that I am going to stop writing articles about UPS here on this blog. I will still add more detailed articles about the code and provide tutorials for implementation. The project at Google code is just so the project can grow and provide support, bug tracking, svn access, and official documentation. Read more »

Well if you have decided to take the plunge into Perl I commend you. So far my experience with Perl has been really great. I have already made very useful programs for both Windows and Linux. Coming from a web development background I like to think of Perl as the “PHP for operating systems”. If PHP is great for creating dynamic websites, Perl is great for manipulating anything to do with your operating system and applications. The best part is Perl has similar syntax.

Before you can create all this useful stuff you need to actually go out and get the Perl interpreter since it is a scripting language. Read more »