Blog posts

This is a description of how I created a custom Vagrant box starting from a Lubuntu 14.04 desktop CD.

There are several technologies (in the Python world) to have isolated environments for projects. In this post I will describe how we use Virtualenv, Buildout and Docker for a project I’m working on at Fox-IT.

When I was experimenting with an SVG sprite to replace my current icon font, suddenly some of the icons disappeared without a clear reason. It worked fine when I accessed the demo page via the file URI scheme, but as soon as I used an HTTP server, some of them did not show up.

To introduce a coworker to our project and Django in general, I suggested that he would try PyCharm, a Python IDE. One of the (many) nice things of PyCharm is that you can easily jump to the place where something is declared—ideal for exploring a project.

The Heartbleed bug triggered a review of the configuration of my own web server. As a result I discovered that I had my Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) stapling configured wrong. In this article I will briefly explain OCSP and OCSP stapling, what I had done wrong and what is a—as far as I know now—right way to implement OCSP stapling in Nginx.

Django offers useful classes to easily send email. It is also easy to add attachments to emails. I did have to puzzle a bit to get embedded images working. This article describes the way I do it now. I will first describe the most important elements and then I will show a more complete example.

When I started on a project it seemed to make sense to put a part of the project in a separate Git repository. In hindsight that wasn’t such a smart move. Here’s how I fixed it.

A site I’m working on uses Font Awesome. Font Awesome is an iconic font designed for use with Twitter’s Bootstrap and currently (at version 4.0.0) includes 370 icons. It is an easy to use and nice icon font. But I needed PNG files of the icons so I could use the same icons in a different system.

Currently I’m working on a project where I have the staging environment running on a virtual machine in a vlan. However, the virtual machine cannot directly access the internet for security reasons. This is inconvenient when I want to e.g. run a buildout to update the project.

This week, on June 11th, Twitter retired version 1 of their API. As a result, the Twitter portlets of some of our customers stopped working. They are all using collective.twitterportlet so we created a quick (and slightly dirty?) fix to get them up and running again: edition1.twitterportletfix.