HTML5, Google I/O, DDG, IPoDNS, uWSGI, Unicode, Java or Turbo Pascal

Post date: Nov 6, 2011 2:54:29 PM

• Some light reading: Appscale design and implemetation Technical Report and Symantec Security Responce W32.Duqu: The precursor to the next Stuxnet, SSL False Start (Google Chrome stuff), many many articles from a smart bear, more OpenVZ and uWSGI documentation.
• Watched: Lyndia / HTML5 tutorial, tons of stuff from Google I/O 2011 about Scaling and Deploying.
• I've been using DuckDuckGo (Wikipedia) as my default search engine for over a month, and I'm happy with it. I also love !Bang syntax.
• Experimented with IP over DNS (Iodine) and it seems to work very well with my test server. It's bit slow, but point was just to try the concept so in case it's required, I'm able to get it in use quickly.
• Tried web knock and port knock technologies with one of my test servers. After some consideration I didn't leave those in use. It's too dangerous with test servers, when I don't have console access in case something gets badly messed up.
• Attended customer service web portal seminar. It was interesting to hear how badly requirements are conflicting. Easy access, public data versus strong authentication and privacy. But in general I really didn't learn anything new.
• Had a lot of fun configuring uWSGI for my Nginx test server. Phew, now it finally works as expected, performs well and serves as one of primary web DNS servers used by 9ox.net. 9ox.net also got two secondary servers, which aren't being used unless both primary servers are unreachable.
  • Server 1: Ubuntu, Apache2, CGI, Python 3.2
  • Server 2: Debian, Nginx, uWSGI, Python 2.7.1+
  • I wrote compact web-service for both servers to communicate with App Engine requests asking for DNS information. All connections are secured using SSL and light authentication.
  • I needed to do this because you can't access DNS information using App Engine without external DNS web-service proxy.
• Urllib2.quote function doesn't work at all with unicode strings. Now I first encode Unicode strings to UTF-8 encoding and then convert those to urlencoded strings. It seems to be working.
  • Unicode string: '€uro-on-tässä' # Some Finnish stuff with Scandinavian characters and euro sign.
  • UTF-8 encoded string: '\xe2\x82\xacuro-on-t\xc3\xa4ss\xc3\xa4'
  • URL encoded string: '%E2%82%ACuro-on-t%C3%A4ss%C3%A4'
• Updated one 12 years old project, due new customer requirements. I'm glad picking Java over Turbo Pascal when I started that project.