Stackswitch – Linux Compiz Plugin

Okay, okay. So you may have seen the video up on Digg.

I’m sorry, but exposé at an angle doesn’t thrill me.

When it comes to window switching, I hardly ever use exposé. On OS X I use Alt-Tab with Witch, which allows me to alt-tab through every window, not just every application.

On linux, once everything’s installed and put right (2 – 3 days), I spend a week tops trying to use it, and ending up not being thrilled by any of it. And abandoning it in favour of washing my hair, doing my laundry…

Linux needs:

1. Propriety application and driver support. Wine does not cut it. Ndiswrapper does not cut it.
2. Stability. No, it isn’t stable on the desktop.
3. Polish, and viable release schedules. Nothing pisses me off more, than updating over three hundred ‘applications’ every time I boot. It’s not on.
4. Convergance. SUSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Blahblahnix. Which do you think Grammy’s going to pick? Windows XP.

I love Linux, I love the premise, I love the ideals. Problem is that things founded on good intentions usually end up being evil. (Communism, Nazi party, Google).

I use XP because I have to, and when I don’t, I use OS X. The only ‘market share’ reports are for Linux on servers, not for Linux on the desktop. It would be interesting to see how MANY people use Linux as a desktop computer, and how MANY use it for HOW LONG.

My two cents.

Connect360 HOWTO

So after a few hours of trying to get connect360 to sync with my xbox, I finally figured out how.

1. Download Connect360 from Nullriver’s Site.
2. Make sure your Xbox 360 is connecting to your network automatically. Manually assigned IP Addresses FTL
3. Turn your Xbox off
4. Install the Connect360 Preference Pane, and configure it to share your iTunes, iPhoto Library, and your Movies.
5. Turn your Xbox on
6. Connect360 should automatically pick up your 360, and you’ll hear a little chime
7. Navigate to your Movies / Music section on your Xbox, and hit X to change the Source of your media to your computer.
8. Watch all your Torchwood glory

You may need to install the optional media update, to get everything working, but once that’s done it’s good as gold.

Sigh

Yoraps player finally finished. Ignore the song choice, only artist I recognised on the site lol.

Hmm, seems I can’t post embed tags? A shame, wordpress. A shame.

http://haxd.blogspot.com/

Hype Machine

I love hype machine.

http://hypem.com/robinduckett

I also dislike wordpress’ inability to detect wether I’ve selected text via the keyboard. People still use shift guys.

Hypem Remixes

So I’ve become quite in love with Hypem, and more specifically – The Remixes.

That’s right, type in any band or song, and more than likely as well as the song / artist you’re looking for, you’ll get a remix of one of their songs.

This is too good to be true D:

iPlayer: One – Sky Player: Nil

So I turn on my Macbook. It’s running Leopard, 10.5. It’s an Intel Mac, running Mozilla Firefox as the main web browser and has the latest version of Flash.

I log onto http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and I click the latest Doctor Who episode. It starts streaming. I recognise Wales. Glorius.

I log into http://skyplayer.sky.com and it asks me to login with my Sky account. Fair enough, I log in. It asks me if this is the computer I’d like to use with Sky Player. I say yes.

It proceeds to direct me to download a Windows Executable. Uh oh. Luckily, I have Parallels Desktop for Mac installed. I boot up windows. I download the executable, run it and install their P2P downloading software, their client, their Windows Media 11 update, their .NET framework update, their Windows DRM option. I log into their client. I am running in offline mode. I try to log into http://skyplayer.sky.com again. Server not found. I flush my DNS cache. Server still not found. I try again the next day.

I open the Sky Player client. It runs, and crashes.

I reopen the Sky Player client. It runs, and asks me to login. I log in. It tells me to update my Windows DRM (For the second time). I do so. Nothing happens. I close everything and reopen Sky Player. It tells me to login. I login.

I recieve this:

I refrain from bashing my head against the table.

I log onto http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and I click the latest Doctor Who episode. It starts streaming. I recognise Wales. Glorius.

Strategies against XSS

So I was reading a journal about XSS and strategies that some malicious people could potentially use to exploit your web app and decided I should probably go back and take a look at my own work and see where I’m vulnerable.

One particular hack they mentioned known as the “iframe hack” was where a user would go onto a maliciously crafted site with some hidden iframes. Those iframes would target a site they were still logged into (either by session cookie or regular cookie) and use some automated methods to do some bad naughty things.

There’s two ways I can see to combat this kind of hack, the first would be to have cookies expire after five minutes or so, but that would create some problems for the usability.

The second way I can see is to use authentication by way of CAPTCHA or just a token so that you can’t go and access just one page.

Of course, using CAPTCHA when you’re dealing with things like user settings and other areas which need to be secure, is always a good idea, but again, usability is the first thing to go and I know it annoys me.

Remember when Facebook required you to enter a CAPTCHA every time you added a friend?

The fact is that the only way to protect your users from some of these hacks is to put CAPTCHA in place, because a token alone is not going to protect you. You don’t have to put protection in place for every action. One of the best ways to do things would not to have your forms posting to a URI like this:

http://www.yourwebapp.com/settings/update

Obfuscating your sensitive access points will help, as well as never taking GET for POST variables. It’s harder (although not impossible) for attackers to utilise this sort of cross site vulnerability if you do this.

All in all, having security in mind at every step of the way is very important when building your web application.

Cross-site Scripting @ Wikipedia

Hello!

Welcome to my blog. I’ve decided to keep a record here on things I think about at odd times. You have been warned