Author: hatem

Carnival Cruise – Professional stateroom theft

If you think that while you are off an about on or off the ship the cabin steward and assistants are carefully cleaning your room and making towel animals, and that’s it, you are wrong. Unfortunately they also go through all your luggage and try to find anything they can take that you might not…

continue reading
No Comments

Wget and long filenames [Vulnerability]

Recently taking a pen-testing course made me realize that security is such an important topic in software design, more so than I ever realized. Being a professional programmer for the last 15 years and attaining both undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science helped me find only the basics of security. It took getting into…

continue reading
No Comments

Google Chrome 58 making NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID all over the place

We use self signed certificates at LeadSift for our dev and qa servers behind the firewall and have our team just import the certificate into their computers. Recently after months of it working just fine, I got an error on Google Chrome which looked like this. Attackers might be trying to steal your information from…

continue reading
No Comments

Where are you running from you little cron?!

A tale as long as time, the forgotten cron. During dev we had a cron that we wanted to put in prod right away and ended up putting on a server where it didn’t belong just to get things going. Days later we got the cron installed properly and decided to leave the other one…

continue reading
No Comments

Asus RT-N66U broken power switch and how I learnt to stop worrying and love google

Walked into the office this morning to find that there is no wifi. Checked the router and found that the power switch doesn’t turn on. Just keeps flipping back to off. After calling a co-founder and asking her to stop by the store on her way in to pick up a new one. I took…

continue reading
5 Comments

Dear @Hackerrank your platform is buggy

I would like to start by applauding your initiative. Your team has created a really cool site that has this viral feel to it. I got addicted from my first shot. Since I love python, my first competition was the Pythonist2 challenge, I loved it. I believe it went downhill from there for me. I…

continue reading
No Comments

Python Memory Footprint

This is a cross listed blog post. I had posted this blog on my company’s blog and wanted to repost here as it is a topic that very few python developers understand. Python has a high memory footprint, understanding that is the key to writing very space efficient python programs.Note there will be a follow…

continue reading
No Comments

LDAP Groups Conflict

Scratching my head on this for a while, didnt really affect much so never dug deep. If you have duplicate entries in your /etc/groups or duplicates in general, in our case the same group in /etc/group that was also in ldap. So essentially “`getent group“` returns duplicates with different ids. The first entry will take…

continue reading
No Comments

Slack vs Hipchat

At our company we had used hipchat for a little over 2 years, back when it was charging for when you had more than 5 users. I had previously tried to get the founders to try slack (since it was all the buzz) and failed. Since nothing was broken, I decided that hipchat was good…

continue reading
3 Comments

uWSGI vs Gunicorn

TLDR; Gunicorn isn’t just “trendy” it actually works really well, in some cases (like mine) works much better than uWSGI. (also it seems that uwsgi is now becoming trendy, so am I just a hipster for switching to the uncool optionĀ :P) History I have always been a big fan of the uWSGI project. It has…

continue reading
12 Comments