El Capitan and the evils of OpenSSL

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DERP

Are you having trouble with SSL on El Capitan (OS X 10.11)?

Me too.

Here are the things I know about it right now:

  1. OS X’s OpenSSL is ancient (0.9.8-ish).
  2. SecureTransport (OS X’s replacement for OpenSSL) may fall back to using
    OpenSSL if the environment variable SSL_CERT_FILE is set.
  3. Lots of places are “cross-signing” their intermediate certs to upgrade from
    SHA-1 to SHA-2 for security reasons.
  4. OS X’s OpenSSL cannot handle the intermediate cross-signing and report that
    it cannot verify certificates. SecureTransport handles this just fine.
  5. HomeBrew applications usually don’t support
    SecureTransport and instead use HomeBrew’s OpenSSL.
  6. /usr/bin/curl uses SecureTransport directly, unless you set
    SSL_CERT_FILE (see above).

Normally, the above is just fine assuming you don’t set the SSL_CERT_FILE
environment variable.

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Tracebacks in bash

Posted on (last updated ) by
Argonaut Shell

I don’t like to write programs in bash. It’s not a very pretty language. But it has one advantage over a lot of other languages:

It’s on your system. Every Unix-like system has /bin/bash; Redhat, Ubuntu, and even OS X.

But bash is still a lousy language.

This is where bash tracebacks come in…
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Busting cached 301 redirects in Chrome.

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Chrome icon in a Latte

The Chrome browser caches HTTP 301 permanent redirects very aggressively. This is normally a good thing, unless you’re the one setting up the 301 and you make a mistake…

There is no obvious place in chrome to refresh that cache, but there is a nifty trick.

Go to the URL:

view-source:http://cached-url/

This causes Chrome to recheck the page and will update any cached 301 rules.

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40days – Simple isn’t easy

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Screenshot of 40days

I wrote a simple one-page web application called 40days. It shows you what the date is for 40 days in the future. I say “simple” but really, simple isn’t easy. It never is.

I wrote 40days because my orthodontist would schedule my appointments 40 days apart and it was a hassle for me and secretary to figure out exactly what date that was.

It’s written with coffeescript and scss and is licensed under the MIT LICENSE.

This actually was harder than I thought. I created a really crappy-but-works version quickly. But I always forget that polishing things is so hard.
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