Words, code, and information security in Portland, Oregon
This is the website of Erik L. Arneson. I am a freelance writer and software developer in Portland, Oregon.
- Read more about me or enjoy my blog posts listed below.
Blog Posts
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The History of Cryptography at PUGS
Portland Underground Graduate School (PUGS) has invited me to teach a class on the history of cryptography starting May 4th. The class will be four sessions and is very affordable: only $40!
We will cover the basics of cryptography, where it came from, and why it’s important. In addition, I will teach you how to use a number of manual cryptographic techniques. I’m really excited about this class, and I can’t wait to share my knowledge!
To learn more and to sign up, please visit the PUGS class listing here.
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Should WordPress Encrypt All Email?
WordPress sends out email sometimes, and it doesn’t encrypt any of them by default. Integration of WordPress and OpenPGP for a better security is a case study by Paweł Bulwan that examines the security implications of all of these emails. Are they leaking important information? Should WordPress site owners worry about them?
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Please Use Version Control
Stack Overflow released their 2015 Developer Survey this week, and it has some interesting results. There are plenty of articles being written about their findings, so I’m only going to focus on one of them: version control.
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Link Rodeo: Go Package Management and Boring Technology
Here are a number of interesting topics for you to think about this week.
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Create a Document From Twitter with TweetBook
I just released TweetBook, a web application to transform a Twitter stream into a simple document that can easily be turned into a photo album.
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Don't Modify the Clipboard with JavaScript
Recently, I was reading an article about a newly published book that I’m interested in. However, the article didn’t include a link to the book, so I copied the title by highlighting it with the mouse and hitting ‘Ctrl-C’, and opened a new browser tab to do a search. However, upon pasting, I saw the book title along with an annoying addition: “To read more, visit our website at [redacted].”
This sort of website behavior is not okay.
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Pansophie Online Color Test
Pansophie Personality and Color is focused on mapping personalities to colors. Alexandra Hall wanted an online testing platform with flexible questions, testing mechanisms, and report generation. I built a full-featured web application to meet Pansophie PC’s requirements. This was one of my early Zend Framework projects, but it ended up with some neat features.
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Prime Number Service on Google App Engine
As I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve decided to learn the Go programming language. I’ve also been very interested in Google App Engine, which lets you deploy applications to the cloud from a development sandbox. It’s like magic for web and mobile applications!
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Random Link Rodeo
I’ve been working on a few projects, but nothing I can share publicly. However, I’ve also been out in the world of the Portland tech community, which has been excellent. If you haven’t heard of Calagator yet, go check it out.
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How to Enable XPath in Internet Explorer
Yesterday, I shared a little bit about using a virtual machine to test frontend code under Internet Explorer (IE). My goal was to use Wicked Good XPath to add the proper XPath features to IE so that EPUB.js would work correctly, thus making the Philalethes E-Bulletin Online Reader work on all major browsers.
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