<? DriftLogic ¿>

Noticed this on Reddit this morning. Google has open sourced one of their internal security testing tools called RatProxy.

Apparently it's a passive vulnerability scanner all done up as a proxy style interaction for sites. I haven't played with it yet, but I'm not aware of many other passive scanners, so this warrented a mention. Mainly so that I remember to play with it later myself.

As usual, I've managed to make a habit of neglecting this blog. But since it also serves as a bit of a record, check out my name in the finest of print over at Linux Magazine.

Courtesy of one of my most memorable professors at Seneca, the witty and charming Emma J.

It's hard to believe that a year has already passed since my first introduction to Drupal.

DrupalCon Toronto marks my one year anniversary, give or take, working with the CMS. A year ago we were evaluating different options for the redesign of the primary company website and Drupal was near the top of the list. I attended DrupalCamp Toronto then to try and get a first leg up on the system and see if it would really meet our needs. It did, without a doubt, so for the last year I've had fun picking Drupal apart and putting it back together in various ways.

Slides:

http://driftlogic.net/files/LeanandLight.ppt

Referenced Links:

http://drupal.org/project/javascript_aggregator
- Drupal 5 Javascript Aggregator

http://drupal.org/project/sprites
- CSS Sprite Generator

http://blamcast.net/articles/override-default-system-css-drupal
- Remove CSS Files

Javascript Minifiers:
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/

CSS Minifiers:
http://csstidy.sourceforge.net/

http://tinyurl.com/5kgr4g

Sprite Maps:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites

You can find the slides at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/5p5u7g

Code Samples:

http://driftlogic.net/files/XMLMigration.php.txt
- XML to CCK Nodes
http://driftlogic.net/files/InAndOut.php.txt
- Jumping in and out of external databases plus caching

I'll give the internet credit, it took two full days to really start tearing into AppEngine.

From screams of vendor lockin ( here and here) to purists calling the framework a pollution of python and django (here and here) criticism has been swift and some times rather vicious.

The size of Google has made people start to put on tinfoil hats with every new product. Considering the scope of AppEngine, it's not that surprising that it gets conspiracy theories right from the start.

As I've had my nose buried in PHP and Drupal for what amounts to most of the last year, Google's announcement of AppEngine took me a bit by surprise.

A few months ago, we looked into setting up a production server using S3 + EC2. The combination works well and is a fraction of the cost in comparison to the fully managed hosting we currently use. The lack of an Amazon backed persistent storage filesystem forces you to have a solid recovery plan, but in all other regards, Amazon's scalability lets us compete at a level not possible without serious infrastructure investment. From a business perspective, Amazon is cost effective and accessible provided you have some linux sysadmin talent sitting around (or are willing to hire some).

After a long period of talking about making the jump to an independent ISP, I finally made the jump this morning and moved to TekSavvy. I've got a close friend using their service currently and he's happy. They've got good reviews on CanadianISP as well, so I'm fairly comfortable making the leap-of-faith. What drove me to make the jump from Rogers is my first encounter with their content modification. Saturday morning I saw my first cap warning pop up when I was browsing through various reddit stories. Rogers has always had the threat of caps looming over subscribers collective heads, but hasn't made a major issue of enforcing it in the past.

Being things were a little exhausting yesterday with the party at Felt the night before, there wasn't quite enough energy to update this thing. But I've been a little off on my daily post ideal since coming to Boston anyway.

Something about Boston food doesn't agree with me. But that said, yesterday was informative, with Dries being the highlight.