Easy SSH tunnelling for the Mac

Yes, I know I fit the cliche here, but I like to work outside my office in a coffee shop or another public location. It’s a good feeling to have some people around instead of seeing the same faces all day long – or even no faces when you’re a lonesome freelancer like me ;) However, there are two drawbacks I was never happy with: First almost all public WLAN hotspots are unencrypted, which is quite a security problem, and second some networks don’t allow the use of certain services (e.g. the network at my university doesn’t allow me to send emails via secure SMTP). Luckily the solution to this problem is quite simple: We need a local SOCKS5 proxy that routes all internet traffic through a secure SSH tunnel.

All you need is a working Mac OS X, my WiFiTunnel script (Installer or ZIP archive) and a SSH Server outside of your local network. No idea where to get such a server? Well, there are some public SSH servers out there, but almost all virtual server packages offer SSH, so just try to connect to a server that hosts one of your websites. All necessary  details are explained during the script installation, but you should read on if you want to get the whole story.

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Sticky CSS footers: The flexible way

Update: I’ve developed the idea of this article a bit further to a simple CSS based layout grid, which also includes flexible columns and some other improvements. However, this article is still worth reading to get a basic idea of how the flexible footer works.

A CSS sticky footer is an area, that stays at the window bottom if there is not enough content to fill the complete window height, but stays below the content if its height exceeds the window height. There are several ways how to achieve this circulating in the web, but they all have some flaws: Most of them (e.g. CSSStickyFooter) require a fixed height footer and the only flexible solution I’ve found needs jQuery. However, here is an easy and plain CSS solution for sticky footers with fluid height that works perfectly with IE8+, FF2+, Chrome9+, Safari3+ and Opera 8+ (probably more) and returns acceptable results in IE7 and IE6.

For those of you, who don’t care about big explanations, I’ve made a simple example page and a bit more complex one to show you how it will look like. You can check out the code (it’s quite simple) in your browser or download everything as an ZIP archive or read on, if you want to know all the details.

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