Archive for August, 2007

Method Aliasing and Aspect-Oriented Programming

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

One of the things that I have recently played with in Ruby is a sort of aspect-oriented programming. I say “sort of” because Ruby is not really an aspect-oriented language out of the box, but with some inconvenient constructs one can approach problems in this manner, using this mindset. I touched this because I am […]

Security Risk Assessments

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Risk assessments are one of the main tasks I am faced with day-to-day with my security work. Most of the time it comes in as a request to “approve” some architecture. In my head, this is basically a security risk assessment where I also getting to decide for the business that the benefit of allowing […]

From Vim to TextMate

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

Yesterday I switched from using Vim for all my code editing to TextMate. It is Mac only and costs €39 when I decide to register, but I really like how much easier it is to switch between more than two files and how it auto-terminates parentheses, logical statements, and HTML tags. This latter behavior should […]

Debugging Connectivity Problems

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

The Application is down! No, wait! Our Unix administrators just checked the server and it is running. They swear by it, and say it is the network team’s equipment dropping packets. The network team checks their systems and swear they are passing the traffic, and it must be an application configuration issue. The application folks, […]

Secure FTP in All its Forms

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

It is the File Transfer Protocol. FTP has been an important part of the Internet for more than 20 years. Businesses depend on it to transfer data from system to system and from business to business. In today’s world of SOX, HIPPA, PCI, and other standards and regulations companies are not only required to get […]