I looked around on “The Google” (as our late GW would say) to find a non-nonsense walk through on setting up SSH tunnelling w/ Firefox, and although I found a few pages that, when combined together, got me set up, I didn’t see one that was near foolproof from start to finish. Thus, my gift to the internet is this.

Steps for SSH Tunnelling and secure web browsing with Firefox:

Note: oddly enough, you need a working SSH server login in order for this to work.

Tunnelier:

• Open Tunnelier (download page)
• Open it up, enter your SSH server details on the first tab
• Click on the “Services” Tab
• Check the “Enabled” box; you’ll see “Listen Interface” should be 127.0.0.1 (your computer) and “Listen Port” should be 1080
• Click the “Login” button

Firefox:

• Open Firefox (download page)
• Type “about:config” in the address bar ( and then press enter, obviously )
• Filter for “socks”
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks” to “127.0.0.1″
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks_port” to “1080″
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” to “true”
• Select “Tools” -> “Options” -> Click the “Network” Tab
• Select “Settings…”
• Click the “Manual Proxy Configuration” radio
• HTTP Proxy, SSL Proxy, FTP Proxy, and Gopher Proxy should be BLANK
• “SOCKS Host” should be 127.0.0.1 on port 1080
• Click “OK” and whatnot, and give it a try – should work assuming you’re connected to your SSH server

OK – that was easy, no? Happy safe and secure tunnelled browsing!

So – I was setting up a WAMP server with the most recent CVS version of our site, and for some reason CSS wasn’t working at all – internal or external, in both Firefox and IE8. I searched around for a bit and found the usual PEBCAK issues on Google, and then just started removing things to see what might cause the issue. Answer: Yahoo Analytics breaks CSS on my local dev server – no idea why, and frankly I don’t have the time to look into it.

The offending code is (basically) as such:

<!-- Yahoo! Inc.
var ysm_accountid  = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";
document.write(some stuff);
// -->

Removing that from your template/html file should fix the css woes you may experience during development (assuming that your issue isn’t caused by something else, of course).

Yet another reason to choose Google over Yahoo, in my opinion. Google Analytics is leagues ahead of the competition and they don’t release the documentation for it in a fifty page beast of a PDF file. So – a heads up to all on this rather odd issue with Yahoo Analytics – it’s certainly not an obvious one. If anyone knows the reason for Yahoo Analytics causing this issue, please let me know, as although I’m not intolerably curious, I am reasonably curious.

I just recently got my new laptop (Acer Aspire 8730 for CAD 900!) and it’s excellent despite being a behemoth. Anyhow – I decided to take a new approach to work stuff, so instead of installing AppServ as I’d formally used, I decided to go with WampServer – and I’m glad that I did. WampServer essentially does what AppServ did for me, but I like it more already. It incorporates some stuff like cURL without additional fuss, and it apparently makes it easier to switch between PHP versions. Honestly – after having used WampServer – even for this short amount of time – I see absolutely no reason to use AppServ, but I certainly don’t think AppServ is necessarily terrible. I encourage you to check WampServer out if you’re doing any PHP development work.

Anyhow – I also am just starting to realize the full benefits of Eclipse and the advantages and convenience that it offers, particularly with respect to CVS. It finally clicked that I could just point my Eclipse workspace to my WampServer directory, and then checkout my CVS project there while adding the config files to .cvsignore. This would seem really intuitive, but it always seems to be these “obvious” things that end up taking up copious amounts of my time.

I’m also generally focussing on getting better at using CVS and knowing proper development practices – I found an excellent article that does a good job of explaining branching with eclipse that you might want to check out. We have a new workmate as well, and she’s experienced with development practices, and hopefully some of that will rub off on me in the weeks to come as well.

I know it may seem that all I write about these days is work, but I’ve really been quite busy apart from a long weekend in Shanghai recently. I’ll try to get some non-work blog updates posted soon