Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

Fixing CORS Security Holes

I recently received an email alerting me to a security vulnerability in Bloopist, my custom blogging platform. The security vulnerability would have allowed attackers to impersonate other users on Bloopist after getting them to visit a web page containing malicious JavaScript. I have no proof that this was done, and the security vulnerability is now closed. The root cause was a CORS misconfiguration.

coding | 2017.08.27 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

My Experience with a Hit and Run in Texas

My wife was recently the victim of a hit and run. It was a traumatizing experience for her, but luckily she's fine. The car she was driving at the time, my 2002 Pontiac Bonneville, didn't fare as well. My insurance declared it a total loss. I learned a lot about accidents and insurance that I think you should know too.

life-lessons | 2017.08.20 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Solutions to Common Altium Problems

Typically I enjoy using Altium at work for schematic capture and PCB layout, but occaisionally it'll give me some problems when I try to synchronize my PCB file with my schematic. When syncing, I'll get a lot of error messages about unmatched nets and failures when matching unique identifiers. In the past I'd try my best to backtrack what I'd changed in the schematic until I could get an error-free sync. Recently I found there are a couple things that I can do to quickly and easily fix these problems in 99% of cases.

electrical-engineering | 2017.07.09 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

React and Ruby on Rails Lessons Learned

I recently started using React in my web apps to make them more interactive. React is great for the view layer of an application, but it needs to be paired with a backend of some sort. In my web apps, I use Ruby on Rails to generate a JSON API that is consumed by my React views. In getting started with React and Ruby on Rails, I learned a few things. I'd like to share those with you today.

coding | 2017.06.25 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Ruby on Rails Status Page

I like knowing what's going on on my servers, but I haven't had time to set up a real monitoring system. Usually when I want to check on my servers, I just remote in with SSH and fire up top and a couple other utilities. After I realized I tend to always check the same things again and again (CPU usage, RAM usage, free disk space), I decided to dump all those things into a page that my server would then serve up. This way I can check my server's health with from anywhere with an internet connection, and the time it took to set up was just a couple minutes.

coding | 2017.06.18 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson