Posts

This is a short post on using Let’s Encrypt to get TLS certificates for NGINX virtual hosts. The setup assumes: Ubuntu NGINX hosting multiple domains A scheduler (e.g., cron or Rundeck) Let’s Encrypt Let’s Encrypt offers free domain-validated (DV) certificates for HTTPS and other secure services. letsencrypt.org GitHub Initial Setup I run multiple web services on VMs behind a single public IP. My NGINX proxy manages SSL termination and routing using virtual host configs. ...

Previously, I described a Bencoding Library I made to simplify working with the Bencoding structure in .NET. I also published it on Codeplex. However, I discovered a flaw—if a string contains a null-byte (as most .torrent files do), it will fail. So I made a fix, which has been uploaded to Codeplex as changeset 1102. As can be seen in the changeset, a few files have been changed. Ignoring all the test files, the changes were made to: ...

I asked around while trying to learn how to use LINQ. LINQ is essentially SQL for .NET—it allows you to query objects directly in memory. For example: List<int> test = new List<int> { 1, 3, 5 }; List<int> testnew = (from a in test where a == 5 select a).ToList(); Someone claimed LINQ was faster than using foreach for selecting items. So, I tested it. The Benchmark static List<int> testlist = new List<int>(); static void Main(string[] args) { DateTime b, a; List<double> regularTimes = new List<double>(); List<double> LINQTimes = new List<double>(); for (int x = 0; x < 1000000; x++) testlist.Add(x * 5); // Foreach loop test for (int x = 0; x < 1000; x++) { b = DateTime.Now; TestRegular(); a = DateTime.Now; regularTimes.Add((a - b).TotalMilliseconds); } Console.WriteLine("Regular Avg.: {0}", regularTimes.Average()); // LINQ test for (int x = 0; x < 1000; x++) { b = DateTime.Now; TestLINQ(); a = DateTime.Now; LINQTimes.Add((a - b).TotalMilliseconds); } Console.WriteLine("LINQ Avg.: {0}", LINQTimes.Average()); Console.ReadLine(); } private static void TestRegular() { List<int> newlist = new List<int>(); foreach (int item in testlist) if (item % 2000 == 0) newlist.Add(item); } private static void TestLINQ() { var newlist = (from a in testlist where a % 2000 == 0 select a).ToList(); } This runs each selection method 1000 times on a list of 1,000,000 items. ...

An Introduction So, I’m moving into an apartment in the near future. Following that, I will have to learn how to manage my documents and ensure I can find them back in time. I’ve thought of a few solutions, one of them being what I do now – where I simply have a folder with PDFs of my documents (I digitalize everything). This works fine now… (I have like … 20 documents)… But it may not work in 2 years when I have a hundred documents spread over many different corporations and years. ...

I’ve long wanted to write a Bencoding library. Bencoding is an encoding format for encoding objects like text, lists, dictionaries, etc., into a single piece of text. It’s often used for transporting configuration files. Bencoding is most famous for its use in the Bittorrent protocol—it forms the basis for .torrent files. I wanted to create a C# library to support all known Bencoding object types. You can read more about the encoding here. ...