You ain't gonna need it… You ain't gonna need it…
Two parables about the YAGNI principle: both true stories. Long time ago in a company far far away there was a piece of software. Every time we designed a new […]
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How to copy trusted root certificates to another machine
I have created a VM from an image with a very clamp down security setup. In particular, it had a very limited set of trusted root CAs. It would not […]
Access denied when creating a certificate enrollment request
As part of creating self-signed certificate, we use the following code: var enroll = new CX509Enrollment(); enroll.InitializeFromRequest(cert); enroll.CertificateFriendlyName = friendlyName; string csr = enroll.CreateRequest(); // may fail with ACCESS DENIED […]
A year of using Git: the good, the bad, and the ugly
I have been working with Git for about a year now, and I think I am ready for some summary. Before Git, I used SVN, and before it Perforce, TFS, […]
Thank G-d for StackOverflow
I have just run into a problem: a test passes fine on the CI sever, but breaks on my machine. Reason: it gets a wrong config file. Root cause: when […]
PHP SimpleXml is Broken: Part 2
In a nuthsell, SimpleXMl has two things broken: 1. Elements that represent “emtpy” tags evaluate to false. This is weird design. 2. Other elements sometimes evaluate to false due to […]
PHP SimpleXML is broken: Part 1
The following code does not work as expected: $xml = simplexml_load_string(“<root><a/><b>text</b></root>”); $node = $xml->xpath(“/root/a”)[0]; if ($node) process($node); // process($node) may not be called for some valid nodes Unlike most other […]
PHP bug + version dependency hell
I have discovered a bug in PHP 5.4.4: a simple XPATH does not work. $xml = simplexml_load_string(“<root><a/><b>text</b></root>”); $node = $xml->xpath(“/root/b”)[0]; // $node is null $node evaluates to FALSE This is […]
WCF Restful service: returning data in different formats depending on request parameter
Suppose I want to return a list of users in JSON or CSV format depending on a query parameter. MyService.svc/users?format=json returns JSON MyService.svc/users?format=csv returns CSV The question is: how do […]
Christmas carol: XML Signatures
TL;DR: XML signatures are trouble, because they are ridiculously hard to implement right. XML signatures in PHP are double trouble, because of lack of decent libraries. .NET security libraries are […]