Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

Don't Put TEXT Fields in your Main MySQL Database Tables

I learned this lesson the hard way, so you should learn from my mistakes. Don't put big fields like TEXTs or BLOBs in your main database tables. Doing so will result in a negative step change in the performance of your database one day when you least expect it. You'll think your database is humming along when suddenly your database queries that used to finish in a couple milliseconds start taking hundreds of seconds.

coding | 2017.09.10 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Using curl in Ruby on Rails to Force Facebook to Rescrape a URL

I recently ran into a problem with the Facebook share button on my blogging platform, Bloopist. Whenever I shared an post, the share box from Facebook showed an incorrect image and description of the post. This led me to ask the question, "How can I force Facebook to rescrape or update a URL or Open Graph object?"

coding | 2017.09.03 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

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