Parallels/Cisco VPN/Verizon EVDO Problem and Solution

I recently got a Verizon USB720 for my MacBook Pro and installed the software that Verizon provides. I frequently use the Cisco VPN software to connect to my clients’ networks to do work and I also use Parallels to test software on Windows.

There’s a little known (as far as I can tell) interaction between the three, where the Cisco VPN won’t allow you to connect anywhere and if it does, only for a few seconds. To get this feature back, all you have to do is disable the network ports that Parallels creates for NAT networking when you’re connecting to the Verizon card.

Go to System Preferences > Network > Network Port Configurations and uncheck the boxes that say Parallels like the image below.

Once you do that, you’ll be able to connect to the VPN just fine.

December 25, 2007 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment 

AntiSamy - HTML In Web Apps

A big problem right now in web application development is allowing users to add in HTML and then protecting them from malicious javascript. Fortunately, someone is working on this problem and giving the rest of us the results for free.

The “AntiSamy”:http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_AntiSamy_Project library is named after the samy “worm” that hit MySpace and infected many thousands of pages before it was contained.

The page mentions that there is very little interest from the Rails community on this. I know there are plugins like the “whitelist plugin”:http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/whitelist, but AntiSamy looks at least to be a nice compliment to something like whitelist.

December 3, 2007 | Filed Under Code, Design | Leave a Comment