Today, I had the need to replicate an encrypted query string token to inter-operate with a third-party commercial application. I was able to determine the library, symmetrical algorithm and secret key being used to create the token. Turns out, it was an ASP.net web application using the Chilkat .NET library to do the encryption and decryption. Specifically, it was the Chilkat AES (aka Rijndael) methods being used.
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Arthur
Pemberton
Full-stack web applications developer
Welcome to my blog
As I discover new things in my field and solve troublesome problems, I will attempt to document my finds here.
Installing pgAdmin4 Web on CentOS 7
I have had problem previously installing pgAdmin4 on CentOS 7, so I wanted to document my steps this most recent time.
Openfire certificate import
Working with SSL certificates in Openfire are surprisingly troublesome, at least as compared to popular web servers (Apache hTTPd, Nginx, IIS).
I recently needed to update an expiring certificate (having once, previously, figured out how to successfully import a purchased, SSL certificate.
This time I found a nice tutorial: https://alpha-labs.net/2014/12/openfire-and-ciphers/. Thanks to Christian for that.
I’ve made some slight modifications to his Shell script, and I just wanted to share:
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Adding version numbers to your static files
When I started with Django, the version at the time was 1.5. Back then, we prepended STATIC_URL to our static assets to reference them in our templates. With recent release, best practice is to you use the static [1]. I often find myself wanting to append a version number to my static files, at least my CSS and JS files to ensure that browser see my new versions when I push an update. In this post, I make use of the `static` tag and its URL building to easily append a version number.
got an unexpected keyword argument ‘server_hostname’
If you’re seeing this exception, you’re probably using some combination of the Python requests library, and gevent.
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Sample settings.py for a Django microservice project
I present a sample settings.py for a Django project, setup to accomplish the following requirements.
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PgBouncer giving you “No such user” errors?
If you’ve just setup PgBouncer, and you’re getting errors such as `closing because: No such user: *****` , especially if you’ve installed on CentOS the problem may be simple.
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Request specific URLs in Django
Do you have a need to use different URL pattern sets based on specifics of an HTTP request? Recently, I needed to choose from a predefined URL pattern (ie. URLConf module) based on the domain name of the request, ie. HTTP_HOST. The URL patterns themselves are not dynamically set, just dynamically chosen.
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Changing the “Archive Title” used by WordPress
If you are using an SEO plug-in with WordPress, you may have changed the <title> of one or more of your archives pages. However, the theme you are using is probably making use of the get_the_archive_title() WordPress function to get the title that is used in, for example, the <h1>.
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Google Apps DNS Entries
Every now and again I find myself having to rebuild DNS entries for a client who has Google Apps hosted email. Googling for the appropriate queries gets me there, but in a round about fashion, so I’ve decided to collect the relevant pages here.