Simon Says

Tech thoughts

  • Simply serving WebP images with Apache

    WebP is an image format, comparable to for example JPEG en PNG, introduced by Google in 2010. It has slowly made its way into the browser ecosystem the last couple of years, up to the point where you can now almost be sort of certain that your average supports the Webp format. WebP images are […]

  • 10+ years developing with Yii

    Way back in my simple programming career, I kept reinventing the same wheel with every project: routing, user session management etc. At one magnificent evening of insight, I decided to sit down and learn a solid framework to use for all future projects. As these things go, the framework comparison turned out to be a […]

  • Cleaning audio speech files for tmi-archive

    Someone on the TheMindIlluminated reddit asked for help making a number of audio talks related to meditation available. We got into contact and I ended up making tmi-archive.com, a straight forward website where people can listen and search the talks and edit them if they feel like helping out. The interesting part of this small […]

  • A simple WPBakery bug

    A client requested to use the WPBakery plugin in their Wordpress installation. Due to some unknown factor, it had a unpleasant bug: elements wouldn’t save the first time after editing them in the backend editor. You had to open an element, close it, open it again, and only then would it save. The console throws […]

  • Vulnerability detection in 410k Wordpress websites

    Summary: I’ve scraped and analyzed 409943 Wordpress websites for security vulnerabilities; 42.3% contained at least one. These potentially vulnerable websites get a combined 14.6 billion page views per day. Even though this estimation is significantly higher then what can in practice be exploited, it’s clear outdated software is a serious problem within the Wordpress ecosystem. […]

  • Setting intentions can help with distractions

    The mind is a bit of a grey box, and in many cases things seem to work one way or another without being explicitly clear why. Lately I’ve been altering the start of my meditation sessions as explained in TMI, and I found an interesting effect of setting intentions before starting. Although there are countless […]