Have you ever seen your home Internet speed topping 50MB/s?

Here is a comparison between Comcast in the United States and Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan:

ShellShock is a Bash vulnerability, which allows bypassing environment restrictions in certain environments. See Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2363-1. And for more detailed description, see CVE-2014-7169.

This Bash bug can be potentially bigger than the Heartbleed bug, because Bash shell is usually the default shell for the user, and many commands will also spawn Bash to execute. See this answer http://askubuntu.com/a/528102 from StackOverflow.

Running the following command will determine if the system is vulnerable or not:

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$ env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"

Source: http://t.co/nfDCUdRnb5

Luckily, this is relatively easy to patch. Simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will patch the Bash with the latest security fix. For example, this is a patched Bash version:

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$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.2.25(1)-release

This is for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. If you are running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, you have to
upgrade to Bash 4.3-7ubuntu1.3.

Node’s global object __dirname returns the name of the directory that the currently executing script resides in. However, if a directory is symbolic linked or a symlink, it still return the original path.

For example, the following directory structure:

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/tmp/dirname/
├── foo
│   └── app.js
└── lib
    ├── bar -> ../foo
    └── util.js
3 directories, 2 files

The app.js contains the following line:

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console.log(__dirname);

Run the script:

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$ cd /tmp/dirname/foo && node app.js
/tmp/dirname/foo

You get the directory the app.js script is residing it. But if you do the same from the symlinked directory:

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$ cd /tmp/dirname/lib/bar && node app.js
/tmp/dirname/foo

Well, you get the same answer, even the current working directory is different:

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$ cd /tmp/dirname/lib/bar && pwd
/tmp/dirname/lib/bar

The return of __dirname does not follow symbolic link.

So, have to be extra careful when requiring files that is symbolic linked. If you think you are in lib/bar directory and try to require the util.js script in app.js:

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var path = require('path');
console.log(require('../util'));
console.log(require(path.join(__dirname, '..', 'util')));

Both statements will throw module not found error. Path join does not help either.

The best practice is to avoid symlinks and relative directory requiring. Instead, set up required as modules, and install them in node_modules directory, then they will become top-level modules.

To build Redis from source, we first need to install TCL 8.5 or newer, this is needed for make test later:

$ sudo apt-get install -y tcl

Now clone and make:

$ git clone https://github.com/antirez/redis
$ git checkout 2.8.13
$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make install
$ sudo utils/install_server.sh

Binary (redis-cli and redis-server) will be installed into /usr/local/bin.

The last command with utils/install_server.sh is an interactive command. Since the script is a shell script using the read built-in command and -p option for prompt, we can make it non-interactive by redirecting input from echo command:

$ echo -n | sudo utils/install_server.sh

Without pumping any value into the script, the default values are used.

If really want to customize it, we can add our own values:

$ echo -e \
  "${PORT}\n${CONFIG_FILE}\n${LOG_FILE}\n${DATA_DIR}\n${EXECUTABLE}\n" | \
  sudo utils/install_server.sh

There are 6 read statements, hence n - 1 newline characters. Without using -n, the last newline character is supplied by echo.

Here are the default values:

PORT=6379
CONFIG_FILE=/etc/redis/6379.conf
LOG_FILE=/var/log/redis_6379.log
DATA_DIR=/var/lib/redis/6379
EXECUTABLE=/usr/local/bin/redis-server

The utils/install_server.sh script should return something like this:

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Welcome to the redis service installer
This script will help you easily set up a running redis server
Selecting default: 6379
Selected default - /etc/redis/6379.conf
Selected default - /var/log/redis_6379.log
Selected default - /var/lib/redis/6379
Selected config:
Port           : 6379
Config file    : /etc/redis/6379.conf
Log file       : /var/log/redis_6379.log
Data dir       : /var/lib/redis/6379
Executable     : /usr/local/bin/redis-server
Cli Executable : /usr/local/bin/redis-cli
Copied /tmp/6379.conf => /etc/init.d/redis_6379
Installing service...
 System start/stop links for /etc/init.d/redis_6379 already exist.
Success!
/var/run/redis_6379.pid exists, process is already running or crashed
Installation successful!

Set an alias for Redis client:

$ cd /usr/local/bin && sudo ln -s redis-cli redis

For more advanced install, see the README file.

Gulp API does not have a method to create an alias task. But, there are two ways to do this now:

1. Create a task alias by dependency
2. Create a task alias by duplication

Dependency

Gulp dependency system can be used to create an alias of a task:

gulp.task('task', function(){});
gulp.task('alias', ['task']);

Here, task alias is the alias of the task task. When list the tasks, it shows the dependency tree:

$ gulp --tasks
Tasks for ~/gulpfile.js
├── task
└─┬ alias
  └── task

When running the tasks, the dependency is obvious:

$ gulp alias
Starting 'task'...
Finished 'task' after 49 μs
Starting 'alias'...
Finished 'alias' after 6.83 μs

Duplication

Another way to create a task alias is by duplicating the task definition:

var task = function () {};    
gulp.task('task' , task);
gulp.task('alias', task);

But in this way, there is no implicit relationship that will indicates that one task is an alias of another. As you can see from the task list:

$ gulp --tasks
Tasks for ~/gulpfile.js
├── task
└── alias

To Gulp, there are two different tasks. But when the alias task is run, the console log is cleaner than the dependency one:

$ gulp alias
Starting 'alias'...
Finished 'alias' after 45 μs

Gulp is still involving, therefore, API might change regarding for creating alias of a task. At the moment, I like the second option. Alias and dependency are two different concepts. Dependency should be left as dependency. Alias is just another name to run the same task.

In Javascript, define a property prop as an accessor property via getter/setter:

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var obj = {
  get prop() {},
  set prop() {}
};

And the property will have the following attributes:

> Object.keys(obj)
[ 'prop' ]
> Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(obj, 'prop')
{ get: [Function: prop],
  set: [Function: prop],
  enumerable: true,
  configurable: true }

Now, create a new object that inherits obj, and attempt to overwrite the accessor property by a data property:

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var foo = Object.create(obj);
foo.prop = 'data';

But, the same property of the new object cannot be created:

> Object.keys(foo)
[]
> Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(foo, 'prop')
undefined

That is because that the property is an accessor property and it cannot be overridden by a data property. It can only be overridden by an accessor property:

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Object.defineProperty(foo, 'prop', {
  get: function prop() {},
  set: function prop() {},
  enumerable: true,
  configurable: true,
});

Then, the foo object will have its own property named prop:

> Object.keys(foo)
[ 'prop' ]
> Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(foo, 'prop')
{ get: [Function: prop],
  set: [Function: prop],
  enumerable: true,
  configurable: true }

A JavaScript identifier must start with either a letter, underscore, or dollar sign:

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> function 7/11(){}
SyntaxError: Unexpected number
> function '7/11'(){}
SyntaxError: Unexpected string
> var 7/11 = function(){}
SyntaxError: Unexpected number
> var '7/11' = function(){}
SyntaxError: Unexpected string

But object property does have such a limitation:

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> var obj = { '7/11': function(){} }
> obj['7/11']
function (){}

And it works with accessor properties or getter and setter methods:

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> var obj = { get '7/11'(){ return '7/11'; } }
> obj['7/11']
"7/11"

The syntax get '7/11'(){} looks like function '7/11'(){}, but it is not, getter and setter are still object properties. That is why it works. That’s another reason to use JavaScript object.

The left-to-right mark character is an invisible control character. If you open up a text file in VIM containing such a character, you will see it as <200e> in Unicode.

If you want to get rid of all occurrences of this control character, you can do:

:%s/<ctrl>+<shift>+u200e<enter>//g

That’s <ctrl>+<shift>+u to enable entering the character by Unicode code points, followed by the actual character code and <enter> key. It will loke like this:

:%s/<200e>//g

However, not all terminals are supported.

This is a simple way to run a tiny web server via command line:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

which will server static files from the current directory.

There is Knod for Ruby, and of course there is one for Node: http-server.

To install:

$ sudo npm install -g http-server

To run:

$ http-server

Server will be accessible via http://localhost:8080/.