The folks over at Packt Publishing are kind enough to send me out an advance copy of the upcoming Modsecurity book by Magnus Mischel. I have written about mod security before, but really haven’t had a chance to look into it recently. I am anxious to see where its advanced to in version 2.5.
If you don’t know anything about mod_security, I encourage you to read up on it in the interim.
Stay tuned for the review.
Ran into an annoying gotchya with Perl’s IO::File. Apparently opening the file in append mode with read access if the file already exists puts the file position pointer at the end of the file. If it doesn’t exist, it creates the file. Note the +>>, that opens the file r/w/append. You can also use the more common (and more easily recognizable) form of a+.
I noticed that when I tried to read the file (if it already existed), then nothing would be read. I neglected to realize that you must seek to position 0 in the file if you want to read it. Therefore the following code will work:
Although it might seem obvious that you need to be at the beginning of the file to read it forward (and it is), I didn’t realize the file pointer opened a file in append mode to the last position in the file (in hind sight, it does appear to be a bit more obvious).
During a conversation I was having with Nirvdrum about blog posts, we got to discussing the validity and credibility of blog posting along with how and why people do it. I have a few thoughts on this topic.
The first and foremost reason that I write blog posts is that engineers who spend a lot of time figuring things out on the fly could use a helping hand. A lot of that figuring is done piecing together parts of other people’s solutions to problems from various blogs and papers. Every time I run into an issue or fix a problem, I try to write a blog post about it. I don’t do this because I feel that I have more to offer than anyone else, I just feel like my work should be able to benefit others (there is no use in reinventing the wheel). And to top it off, if I do something and someone has a better way, I like hearing about it in the comments or from an email.
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Now that I have basically fallen for Git, I decided to finally move my Subversion repository over to Git (this way I can finally have a remote backup of it that I am comfortable with on Codaset).
The method for this was a lot more straightforward than I expected it to be. For the conversion tool, I used Nirvdrums fork of svn2git. It a feature complete version of the svn2git portion though the rest of it is still is development. Since it is a Ruby gem, getting it installed was a breeze. Just make sure that you have Ruby and rubygems installed.
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