The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Just because there's a standard doesn't mean it's consistent

I came across this URL today that has some base64 encoded data in it. Curious as to what it might be, I tossed the data into a base64 decoder only to have it reject the data as bad.

Okay. It certainly looks like base64 encoded data. But the data doesn't match the RFC-2045 specification. Don't tell me there's more than one … oh for heaven's sake! Really? Thirteen variations?

Standards! There are so many to choose from!

An unexpected feature

As I was writing the link to RFC-2045 in the previous post, an idea suddenly struck me—why should I have to type out the entire URL? I already have a shortcut to link to Amazon (all I have to do is write a link like <a href="asin:B00BWQW73E"> and mod_blog converts it to <a class="book" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00BWQW73E/conmanlaborat-20">) so it shouldn't be that hard to add.

I was fully expecting it to take maybe fifteen minutes or so to add the code, but to my surprise, no code change was required! The configuration file has this bit:

affiliate =
{
  {
    proto = "asin",
    link  = "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/conmanlaborat-20"
  }
}

It was originally intended for affiliate links, but it'll work for this as well. A slight modification:

affiliate =
{
  {
    proto = "asin",
    link  = "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/conmanlaborat-20"
  },
  {
    proto = "rfc",
    link  = "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc%s.txt"
  },
}

Now all I have to do is write <a href="rfc:2045"> and mod_blog will convert it to <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt">. I love it when stuff like this happens.

Beware typosquatting

When I initially added the links to the IETF RFC database I made a typo. Instead of linking to “I-E-T-F dot O-R-G” I instead typed it as “I-E-F-T dot O-R-G” and … wow. Easily a dozen redirects, probably half a dozen attempts to infect my computer and landing on some company website I never heard of hawking seminars to help you pass Cisco training and certificaitons.

Shudder.

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