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For a demo project I had at work recently, I wanted to incorporate some imagery from the client’s web site. I discovered their web server was configured to generate an index page for the directory containing their images, but I didn’t want to click through each one individually to figure out if it was what I wanted. (An auto-generated index page is something like this, but imagine it having hundreds of entries.)

I was pretty sure that I’d encountered some javascript many years ago that would render a thumbnail gallery for just such an occasion, but I was unable to locate it. Thankfully, I’m a software engineer, and I’m easily distracted by tangential pursuits, so I just wrote my own! If you’re not a nerd, but want to see what it is, copy the text below, visit the index page mentioned above; in your browser address bar, delete the address that’s currently there, manually type javascript: (make sure to get the colon), and then paste the text from below. (Browsers strip the javascript: from the text if you paste it.)

If it works (tested in Chromium 47 and Firefox 43), you should be presented with a little gallery of images! You can also search the web for index of jpg or something similar and test it out there, but you can stumble across some…interesting…things that way. You’ve been warned.

Also, it’s got the potential to crash your browser (or at least really slow things down) if you run it in a really large index. For better or for worse, I don’t do any intelligent loading/unloading of images, so it just ends up rendering a page with ALL OF THE IMAGES from the index. I have no doubt that this can be dramatically improved in a variety of ways; I very infrequently touch JavaScript, so this was a bit of a refresher exercise for me. Pull requests welcome!

One of the sites I run, Techware Labs, uses WordPress for its CMS. (As an aside, we previously used our own home-grown CMS, which had a variety of benefits, but didn’t provide quite as much flexibility as we wanted. Rather than putting significant effort into rewriting or massively upgrading it, we decided to leave that heavy lifting to the pros.) We began using WP around May, 2009 (v2.7.1), since which point 17 major releases have occurred (and significantly more minor releases). We selected the Multi-Page Toolkit plugin to paginate articles (since WordPress just sticks the entire post on a single page by default), which seemed reasonable at the time—it was relatively popular, and had been updated a few months prior. Unfortunately, that update a few months prior [to early 2009] is the last update the plugin has received at the time of this writing.

A lot can happen in seven-plus years, especially in a popular software project like WordPress, but miraculously this plugin mostly kept working through it all. Mostly, however, isn’t quite the same as entirely, and some people get cranky when one thing goes wrong. (Take the Hindenburg, for example; why doesn’t anyone talk about its 62 successful flights?)

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I got curious today about the CA certificates present on my current phone, the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact (E5823), running Android 5.1.1.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to pull the CA certs from an Android device (even easier than before). Assuming you have adb set up and working with your device already:
$ adb pull /system/etc/security/cacerts cacerts

The certificates are now stored in standard PEM format, so they’re super easy to use in formats we want. I’m running an Ubuntu 15.10 system currently, so I’m using that as a baseline to ‘diff’ the Android CA certs against (using an admittedly cursory check to just match the first line of the cert):
$ for i in cacerts/* ; do if ! $(grep -q $(sed -n 2p $i) /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt) ; then echo $i ; fi ; done

This turned up a list of six root certificates trusted by my phone that aren’t trusted by my desktop:
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