Free SSL Certs, Automatically Renewed
Submitted by admin on Wed, 03/25/2020 - 8:48pm
SSL certificates are basically required for all modern web sites. The problem is that (1) they cost money, and (2) you have to renew them every year or so. It gets to be a real pain, especially if you manage multiple sites.
There is an alternative-- create a (free) self-signed certificate, and give it an expiration of 99 years, but anyone who visits your site will see a huge warning message that it is unsafe.
The solution: Let's Encrypt.
Every year or so, I enjoy going through some of the top websites in the world, and finding out exactly what OS their server is running. Usually, it's always some flavor of Linux. It's been a few years, so it makes sense to give it a fresh look.
In my previous post, I described adding an SSD to boost the speed of my mid-2011 Mac mini. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only issue. It won't let me upgrade the Mac OS past version 10.12. Apple refuses to let me upgrade to the latest version (10.15 at the time of this writing) without buying a newer computer. 
Like most of you out there, I have a handful of old computers sitting around, getting more and more out of date by the day. The worst of my collection, though, was my Mac mini from 2011. I originally bought it for iOS development, and it ran fine at the time. 
If you've used Xcode for iOS or Mac development, you know how handy the #pragma line can be. It makes it super-simple to group related functions or methods together in your outline. Well, for those wondering how to do something similar in Eclipse-- this blog post is here to help! It's a little hacky though.
As developers, sometimes it's necessary to create self-signed certificates on our servers, but it sure is annoying every time you visit the page and you have to click through Chrome's privacy warning screen. 
As a developer, you often need to create a secure environment on a real server (not just localhost) while you test things out, prepare for demonstrations, etc. This blog post will go over how to create not just a self-signed certificate (which is free), but how to also configure it as a "SAN" or Subject Alternative Names certificate. 
If you're used to using MySQL with PHP, you already know of the simple and easy to use functions like mysqli_query(), mysqli_fetch_object(), mysqli_affected_rows() and so forth. But, if you've ever gone to query from an Oracle database, you've no doubt noticed that Oracle's oci_* functions are much less pleasant. 
Since computers first entered the workforce, business applications (that is to say, all applications which weren't games) have been boring and to-the-point.