April 21, 2016 by Daniel P. Clark

Encrypted Linux Backup with Google Drive and Duplicity

When it comes to protecting your important data it’s best to have at least 3 copies of your things backed up.  One should be air-gapped (not actively connected) and another be offsite (not at the same building).  The air gap will protect against malicious code that would encrypt all your files and force you to…

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January 16, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

The 500 Millisecond Rails Partial

Click… 15 seconds later: “Something went wrong”.  So that happened.  I’d written a web based email client and it was taking too long to load.  If it reached 15 seconds it would quit because of the servers time-out setting.  Here’s my journey into finding out what went down. First things first, I needed to know…

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Encryption in Ruby on Rails

January 9, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Encryption in Ruby on Rails

When I had first looked into encrypting data in my Rails database I found on a couple of forms, and StackOverflow issues, they recommended two gems: attr_encrypted and strongbox.  Besides that there where a few do it yourself examples with Ruby’s built-in OpenSSL library and some other small libraries like AESCrypt.  After examining these gems…

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