APC Quirks

I recently experienced some head scratching behavior from PHP's APC extension that I thought it'd be good to document. Mostly, because it isn't actually buggy behavior, just unexpected, until you've dived into the settings involved.

XKCD 1110 as a Google Map

A lot of people stitched together the source images from today's XKCD cartoon, but I really wanted to see it as a custom tile map so that I could zoom around to see all the interesting pieces. The end result can be seen here:

XKCD 1110 Map

CloudFlare Page Rules Being Bypassed

Recently, I noticed from my origin server logs that some of the rewrite rules I had setup for my domain in CloudFlare were being bypassed. My origin server has the exact same rewrite rules configured, so traffic was directed fine, but the fact that it was happening troubled me. So I set out to investigate why...

CloudFlare's direct-connect CNAME Fu

If you're using CloudFlare's CDN service, you may be surprised that certain types of common DNS configurations will create a well-known DNS record - direct-connect.[your domain]. This can make it easy for attackers to find your origin server's IP address and bypass the protection offered by CloudFlare. Fortunately, its not hard to correct as long as you understand what triggers its creation.

Wrapping iconv in Go with cgo

Currently, the standard library of Go doesn't have much support for character encoding conversions. Ideally, support should be built out in pure Go which I'm sure will eventually happen. However, iconv functionality is available on most systems and Go has nice support for calling into C code. So I decided to create an iconv wrapper myself - both to fulfill a personal need I had as well as to get familiar with cgo usage. I made my work available on GitHub:

https://github.com/djimenez/iconv-go

First, I'd like to acknowledge that this wrapper was not the first to exist. In fact, right on GitHub you can find https://github.com/oibore/go-iconv. This probably worked fine, though I did not try it myself since I wanted to use my own project as an exercise for understanding cgo. So let's look at some points I learned.

Adding a New Trusted Certificate on Ubuntu

How to add a new trusted certificate to a Ubuntu system.