Online Tool of the Month – FakeNumber.org

I don’t know about you but I get a little hacked off when I want to sign up for a simple something but have to give up so much of my personal data that I sometimes just look elsewhere.

Now I’m not talking about my name or even my email address, but why would a service want my home address when I’m not going to be sent any physical goods or my telephone number …. at all? Depending on the service/company I may see the need for this information and will provide it if it is really needed – but a lot of the time this information is just going to be sold on or used for sales calls that I neither signed up for or wanted.

On The Fence Development – What’s All That About Then?

I’ve been contracting for over seven years now and during that time I’ve had a number of clients, friends fellow contractors ask me “…why ‘On The Fence‘? What’s that all about??”.

Ignoring the fact that the blog I initially hosted on this domain was about my experiences with Linux and Open Source while working day to day as a .NET Developer using Windows, I think that the name fits – it’s all about not putting all your eggs in one basket as it were.

I think that there is quite a wide line between trying to be a ‘Jack of All Trades’ and a ‘One Trick Pony’ and as a Contractor I think that this is a good place to be.

Online Tool of the Month – unminify.com

Minification and bundling of Javascript and CSS files is obviously a good idea when you are deploying your websites to production – but if you want to use a third-party, minified, resource and want/need to look at the unminified version – it can be a bit of a pain.

I recently purchased a theme for a website which came as a set of CSS, Javascript and image files. There were a number of pages which demonstrated the theme and it was pretty much what I wanted – but not quite, I needed to make a few very minor changes.

Online Tool of the Month – SelfSignedCertificate

In this day and age everything needs to be encrypted to prevent nefarious access to our data. Whether it’s our banking or medical records, our online email inboxes or our browsing and searching habits.

So, when developing websites or APIs I always start with an SSL enabled configuration – and in Visual Studio that’s a pretty easy thing to do, it’s just a checkbox really.

When deploying websites to production servers I, like millions of others, use LetsEncrypt to generate and renew my SSL certificates.

But what about that gap between Development and Production? I am of course talking about ‘Test Servers’.

I’m currently working on a few ASP.NET Core projects that will ultimately be deployed to Linux servers and in order to test this type of deployment I normally like to use a Virtual Machine (VM). This give me good flexibility and allows me to deploy to locally hosted systems with the ability to easily rollback configuration changes etc through the use of snapshots.

But what about the SSL certificate? I can’t use LetsEncrypt because the VM won’t be externally accessible for their system to interogate and validate. What I need is a Self Signed Certficate that I can install on my development system and the VM.

Personal Encryptor CLI v1.1.0 Released

It’s been a good seven months since I released the initial version of the PersonalEncryptorCLI project and in that time I’ve had more than a handful of emails asking me about the utility. Most of these were asking if I could/would be creating a Desktop version, i.e. something with a GUI. It seems only geeks like the Command Line – who knew 😉

Well the answer is yes, but I needed to clear the remaining issue that I had identified with version 1.0.0 – the need for the recipient to know the context of the encrypted content, i.e. whether it was a text file, an image or a Word document.

This was due to the initial release of the utility requiring the filename to be specified during the decryption process – including it’s extension. Now, if the user didn’t know that it was a Word document, how would they know to specify a filename with a .docx (or .doc) extension?