OAuth2 Grant expiration choice

The Auth2 specification is a fantastic and very well thought out document. It’s a surprisingly pleasant read compared to the overly complicated technical document I expected to read but it nonetheless is incredibly comprehensive and thoroughly explains the reasoning behind every step of the process. It goes so far as to explain how an attack could be carried out if it weren’t for the preventative measures put in place. Continue reading OAuth2 Grant expiration choice

Halloween Photobooth

A good few years ago I used to work alongside some fantastic chaps who were working on a business called adforesight. The company had large digital displays for advertisements and had a fantastic backend system for quickly updating the screens with new content. They were nominated for a “best startup” award and were invited to take a screen along with them. They had the fantastic idea of turning a screen into a photobooth that you’d commonly see at those sorts of social gatherings, however this photobooth had a HD TV as the screen, a huge plunger button to trigger the photo, and could put the photo onto the website and given back a QR code that would provide the link to the photograph. It was a fantastic little project to work with them on. Continue reading Halloween Photobooth

Your password expiry rule doesn’t work

We have a very good password policy where I work for accessing our cloud. I was reminded of it this week when I had to update my password. There is a small notice that appears a week or so in advance of your password’s expiry date that usually bugs me once or twice before I get around to creating the new password, but this time I was conscious that I hadn’t logged into our cloud for a while. It must’ve been months since I was last on it. My day is almost exclusively made up of local development work and I rarely need to worry about anything in the cloud. As expected I was immediately directed to create a new password whether I liked it or not. Inconvenient, but at least it’s secure, right? Continue reading Your password expiry rule doesn’t work

Inject your DateTime instance

One of the first things you learn in PHP is how to use the DateTime object – especially using it to get the date and time of “now” – but how often do we really want “now” in code? More often than not what we really want is the date and time of the execution of some code. Continue reading Inject your DateTime instance