While I'm not generally someone to advocate Security through Obscurity, I do believe that it helps to make it harder for an attackers, because if they don't know what you're using, they may follow the wrong path (trying out hacking tools geared towards IIS on Apache, or believing you're running Apache when you're using thttpd) […]

Hardly anyone uses telnet to log into their UNIX shell anymore. And with good reason; the idea of having your password transmitted in clear text (i.e. unencrypted), thus easily obtained by nosey people equipped with the proper sniffing tools, just isn't all that appealing. The replacement for telnet is SSH, which stands for SecureSHell and […]

Time to upgrade, folks. I'm currently still using Firefox 0.9.3, and it's proven itself to be an excellent replacement for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I'm a big fan of Subversion and use it for nearly every project I work on. I work on our software projects in several ways: On the Linux development server directly, which I access from a Windows desktop using UltraEdit (Load/Save via SFTP), WinSCP, PuTTY, and the command line svn client. On my Windows PC, […]

There's a rather handy command in Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MySQL (since version 3.23.3) called COALESCE(). Its purpose is rather simple: return the first non-NULL value (If you're used to older versions of MySQL, the IFNULL() is quite similar, if not as flexible). This comes in handy when you want to use fallback values in […]