The Rietta Blog

04/18/2012

mod_deflate: Dramatic website speed increase with Apache compression on Ubuntu Linux

by Frank Rietta

How to supercharge your mobile visitor's experience with mod_deflate, which tends to provide a 62% to 72% savings on bandwidth required to deliver each page.

04/17/2012

Big data a big deal for SQL Server 2012, users say

by Frank Rietta

04/05/2012

What is Protected Personally Identifiable Information? Do I really have to hash users' passwords?

by Frank Rietta

02/22/2012

Startup Riot 2012 is done; congratulations to the winners

by Frank Rietta

02/03/2012

[Rails] Good Random Positive Integer

by Frank Rietta

01/27/2012

Generate OpenSSL RSA Key Pair from the Command Line

by Frank Rietta

How to generate a 2048-bit RSA key pair with OpenSSL from the command line. Updated for 2026 to match current OpenSSL output and ciphers.

01/24/2012

Rails: Point DNS to 127.0.0.1 to Test Wildcard Subdomains on WEBrick

by Frank Rietta

Point a subdomain and wildcard subdomain of your DNS to 127.0.0.1 to quickly test domain and subdomain-based routing in your Rails applications locally.

01/18/2012

Rails: Gmail Reply-To on Contact Form Email

by Frank Rietta

01/17/2012

Wikipedia blackout tomorrow in protest to SOPA/PIPA

by Frank Rietta

Wikipedia goes dark for 24 hours on January 18 in protest of SOPA and PIPA, showing the chilling effect of shutting down websites without due process.

01/14/2012

Rails: TypeError: nil can't be coerced into Float

by Frank Rietta

In Rails, whinny nil exceptions are a real pain. I like to use to_f when computing float values because nil.to_f is 0.0.

The Rietta Blog is a publication of Rietta, covering application security, software development, and legal and policy topics in technology since 2005. It is edited by Frank Rietta, computer scientist, OWASP Life Member, and expert witness in cases involving computer science and encryption, who founded the firm in 1999. Every article carries the byline of its actual author, and most are written by Frank himself.