whateverthing.com

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Cyberspace. The freshest frontier.¹

These are the voyages of the cybership n00b, on its continuing mission to seek out new synergies and explore new business relationships. To boldly go where no information security model has gone before.

If companies don't smarten up and start taking security seriously, they might find that the tech frontier can burn them worse than they can possibly imagine.

This is what happened to Sony Pictures². This is what happened to Lenovo³. And if it happened to those companies, it can happen to yours.

There are a few things your company can do that might help prevent a catastrophic embarrassment.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of the Twig templating system. I like the syntax and flexibility far more than Smarty, PHP Templates, and other solutions I've worked with. I also like that it has minimal outside dependencies, so I can quickly add it to any project.

One of Twig's more interesting features is that it converts template files to PHP classes. This can really save processing power, because it only has to happen once and future references to that template can just invoke the saved PHP class.

However, if you forget to enable Twig caching, the compiled PHP classes are discarded after each page load - this burns a ton of resources and slows down your site.

Enabling Twig caching only requires a few magical incantations, and as luck would have it, I'm happy to demonstrate two common scenarios.

It started with a simple question:

Ever come across a suspicious short URL and wanted to know where it really goes?

I'd just encountered one too many bit.ly links, and decided that I wanted to know where it went before I clicked on it. It's a simple exercise to find out (you can probably do it in one line in Linux, for example), but I thought I'd use it as a way to learn something new.

AngularJS is a framework for single page web applications, and I've been wanting to learn a bit more front-end technology for a little while. Anything to give my javascript knowledge a boost would be helpful, too.

Square is often considered the go-to solution for mobile payment systems, but it has two shortcomings that could limit its uptake in Canada. Debit (via Interac) and Chip-and-PIN technologies are very popular here, and Square supports neither. As a result, there’s more of a competition opportunity here than there might be in the US.

Two competitors - Moneris and Chase - are big names in payment processing, and they are trying to get in on the mobile payments action in a big way. Intuit, a third competitor, is a very big name in accounting, and also wants a stake in the mobile payments arena.

If you’re considering getting a mobile payment device for your sales efforts, whether you run a street vendor booth or a full retail location, you should explore the pros and cons of each choice.