Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Some thoughts on the new Microsoft browser

The plan seems to be that the new IE12 will not carry all that cruft, but be a forward-looking modern browser. If you need legacy stuff you must start up another browser.

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Internally, when talking to other web devs, you should treat the next Microsoft browser as IE12. Externally, however, when talking to clients and other non-techies, it could make sense to support the “Microsoft is creating a new browser” narrative.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/12/a_new_microsoft.html

I guess we'll see the new browser in action at the Windows 10 event on January 21st.

 

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Automatically reject packages with known security vulnerabilities

This package ensures that your application doesn't have installed dependencies with known security vulnerabilities.

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The checks are only executed when adding a new dependency via composer require or when running composer update: deploying an application with a valid composer.lock and via composer install won't trigger any security versions checking.

https://github.com/Roave/SecurityAdvisories

Awesome idea! It works by leveraging the "conflict"-property in the composer.json-file of the package.

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An overview of the command bus

A command bus helps separating business logic from all the stuff that needs to be done to communicate over the web.

Shawn McCool wrote up a good overview about the subject.

Think of a typical controller. Inside, you might find interactions with the model, form validation, and response generation; which includes view template rendering or redirect header generation. Some of these actions are related directly to the web, some of them directly to the core of your application.
http://shawnmc.cool/command-bus

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A HTML5 rich text editor

Squire is an HTML5 rich text editor, which provides powerful cross-browser normalisation, whilst being supremely lightweight and flexible.

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Unlike other HTML5 rich text editors, Squire was written as a component for writing documents (emails, essays, etc.), not doing wysiwyg websites. If you are looking for support for inserting form controls or flash components or the like, you'll need to look elsewhere.

http://neilj.github.io/Squire/

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Scan a https-site for mixed content

Last week Bramus presented a cool mixed content scanner on his blog. Just for fun/as an excercise I made my own version.

The core scanner is mostly a copy of Bramus' code but there are a few noticeable differences. My version:

  • can be installed via composer
  • uses the Symfony console component
  • uses Guzzle instead of naked curl
  • can write the scanresults as json to a file
You can install the scanner with this command: ``` composer global require spatie/mixed-content-scanner ```

You'll find the instructions how to use it on github.

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Create a global .gitignore original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Probably you're using a .gitignore file for every project. If you find yourself creating a .gitignore file for the same files on every project you should use a global .gitignore file. You can specify the location of the global .gitignore file with this command: git config --global core.excludesfile…

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How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 14.04

One of the easiest way of increasing the responsiveness of your server and guarding against out of memory errors in your applications is to add some swap space. Swap is an area on a hard drive that has been designated as a place where the operating system can temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in RAM.

The information written to disk will be slower than information kept in RAM, but the operating system will prefer to keep running application data in memory and use swap for the older data. Overall, having swap space as a fall back for when your system's RAM is depleted is a good safety net.

In this guide, we'll cover how to create and enable a swap file on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04

Adding swap is only to be used to give your server a bit of breathing space. If your server is constantly using a lot of swap memory consider upgrading the amount of RAM.

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