One of the things that surprised me when I first started with iPhone development is the verbosity of the built-in classes for making HTTP requests. (see: Using NSURLConnection ) So I quickly started looking for a wrapper library that simplifies this process. I found two candidates ASIHTTPRequest and httpriot. For no reason other than some familiarity with the Ruby library that inspired it, I chose httpriot.

It turned out to require a BIT more code than I had expected, so I’ve documented my setup, and hopefully some of my reasoning here. I’m probably wrong in …

I’ve recently started working on a yet to be announced iPhone application. This is my first serious foray into mobile development. I’ve written an occasional script for ASE or way back in the day for my Sharp Zaurus, but nothing serious for the new breed of smartphones. This post is a simple list of surprises that I’ve stumbled across thus far. I’m sure many of these are documented elsewhere, but I felt like documenting them all in one place.

The default buttons suck

Every app you’ve ever used on an iOS device, uses very little of the …

Web App Security – an intro

In modern web applications there is an an alphabet soup of acronyms to keep in mind when writing your code, SQL injection, XSS, XSRF, SSL, just to name the common ones. SQL injection attacks tend to make big news , but due to their publicity are also the most commonly secured vulnerabilities. There is tons of documentation on preventing sql injection but significantly less on properly handling XSRF and XSS attacks. While these kinds of vulnerabilities can be seen by an experienced developer …

Now that we’ve established that this blog is now running on Jekyll, let’s get down to the business of looking at the setup of Jekyll, and the customizations that I’ve made.

For starters I took an existing published setup, and used it as my base instead of a vanilla Jekyll install. The particular setup I used was iruel.net, by Bruno Antunes. You can check out his repo for the list of changes over vanilla Jekyll, but they’re fairly basic. The majority of his enhancements revolve around Rakefile tasks to fit his deployment system. I wanted a different setup, …

Apparently Google is abandoning FTP support for Blogger blogs this next month. As I’m sure none of you were aware, this blog was hosted via that service. Instead of waiting until the service went away and then cursing loudly, and flailing my way into a new blog platform, I got proactive, and made the move over a month ahead of time.

Being a geek of epic proportions, I couldn’t just use Wordpress or something similar. No, I needed to find something esoteric, complex, hackerish. And I found exactly what I was looking for in Jekyll. It’s a …