The blog of Kristóf Kovács

Latest Post

Exploiting web development worst practices: file upload

If I can upload a file to your website, like, for example, an avatar, a picture, or a document for review, do you protect your website from that file?

Featured Post

How not to mess up encodings

I'm not the kind of pedant guy who always fights for right language, right syntax, or right accenting. In the twentieth century, when there was no standard way to use accents, I wrote my emails, documents, etc even in Hungarian without accents, rather than using the half-cooked solutions that were around, like the multitude of character mappings (for us Hungarians, there were ISO-8859-2 aka Latin-2, ISO-8859-16 aka Latin-16, Windows-1250, CP852, Mac CentralEurRoman, and CP437 that almost had all of our characters). I guess there are nations where it was even worse.

Asides

• My brief take on the "help, the electronic media is killing us!" screaming: If you are a "breaking news"-based (print or electronic) outlet, Twitter & co will kill you. It was nice knowing you. If you are bringing news analysis or situational analysis to the table, stop trying to charge for your archives! Charge for fresh content, show older for free. If you write content that has value for a long time (i.e. NOT based on the news), THEN charge for you archive. It's not that hard. #
• To make MacVim zoom in both directions, open a Terminal window, and enter: defaults write org.vim.MacVim MMZoomBoth 1 #
• I finally put my "kkrc" script and the accompanying .rc files (.vimrc, .screenrc, .zshrc) on github, under the BSD license. Check it out at kkrc.git! Feel free to fork it if you don’t like my defaults, and update the .rc files with your ones. #
• Hey, I worked for this guy who is in the Economist's "face value" column! Not for him personally, of course, but I was on the team that developed Meinl Bank's web-trading system. #
• NOTE TO SELF: To fix the HTTP 500 error in Mercurial's hgwebdir.cgi, it was needed to change the first line from  "#!/usr/bin/env python" to "#!/usr/local/bin/python" . #