The parent talks about the ignorance found in certain web development communities, but doesn't actually mention a single experience that he or his wife have had at any Ruby, JavaScript, or NoSQL conferences!
I, on the other hand, have *actually* attended many Ruby conferences (to pick one of these communities). I've attended: RailsConf, MWRC, LA RubyConf, GoGaRuCo... to name a few. I was one of the organizers of Arizona's first Ruby conference (SunnyConf) and I know some of the organizers of other Ruby conferences).
Here are some REAL experiences that I've had while attending Ruby conferences:
- I've seen a good (growing) number of female attendees
- I've seen a female speakers
- I've seen conference organizers react to potentially offensive content by getting on stage and asking the audience if the content was offensive to anyone (and following up by reiterating how open and accepting he wanted the conference to be)
- I've overhead and participated in multiple conversations with men and women actually TALKING with one another about the community and what Rubyists do well/poorly to attract women programmers. I recently experienced this at MWRC 2012 and GoGaRuCo 2011. Men and women talking ABOUT the current experiences of women in our community. How could this *possibly* be ignorant, when we're actually making it a topic of conversation and trying to do better?
At my current workplace, most of our developers are young men. But we also have women and older men.
The parent thinks that it's OK to call out whole communities (like the Ruby community) as being ignorant. With all due respect, it is HE who appears to be ignorant to other communities. I recommend that he and his wife actually *attend* a Ruby/JavaScript/NoSQL conference... who knows, might enjoy it!
ALL software communities should do what they can to provide an open, accepting environment to all.
----------------------
PS. The parent also calls out certain well-known, heavily used tools and technologies as being "horrible in every way" and "taken to be a joke by professionals." This is uncalled for. He's dissing every scripting language used for web technology. Either check the TIOBE or look at these languages yourself, but all of these technologies are fantastic when used properly: PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Perl, and many NoSQL (document oriented and key/value) databases.
Personal bias: I'm a professional developer. I currently code Ruby, but I have also professionally used (and enjoyed using) NoSQL databases (Mongo/Cassandra and Redis/Memcached key/value stores), relational databases (SQL Server/MySQL/Postgres/sqlite), scripting languages (Ruby/JS(CoffeeScript/Dart)/PHP/Python), other languages (C#/VB.NET/Boo, Java).
A good test suite == "best practice to avoid digging custom holes you can't climb out of"
I work at a Rails shop too and, when I/we need to do something highly custom, we create it as a gem (or a Rails plugin) and post it somewhere incase someone else finds it useful. None of the plugins/gems I've released have required any maintenance to speak of, unless I've wanted to add additional features.
Be sure to write tests for your customizations (gem/plugin)! This will make it really easy to discover if your plugin no longer works for the next version of Rails/ActiveRecord/whatever it is you're extending.
[open source!]
If your changes might help other developers (they're not very, very specific to your product), open source them as a gem and let people know how to use it.
Not only can others benefit from your changes, but they can commit back too! Put the gem up on github[1], as it's the current de facto standard home for such things.
[rack it up!]
If you really need crazy performance out of Rails, look into using Rack[2]. Rails 2.3 (currently Rails Edge, will be released this month) *finally* uses Rack. Something like Rails Metal[3] makes it easy to return directly from Rack, letting you *highly* optimize certain requests. This is like rewriting some of your Ruby as C extensions to speed it up - Rack is really easy to use.
I love my G1. It's more intuitive than any blackberry I've ever used (I've had 2) and more powerful than an iPhone (background processes, more advanced features imho).
In my opinion, the best things that Android has going for it are:
* easier development
* write once, run on any Android handset
Google treats Android developers better than Apple treats its iPhone developers. The NDA *still* isn't even fully lifted for the iPhone and you have to jailbreak your own phone just to run your own apps.
I bought my G1 specifically to develop for it, but I've been *really happy* with it so far, as a normal user. I can't wait to start writing apps for it!
You *WANT* these tools in the hands of web developers. You want the developers of all of the sites you visit to have these tools and to be able to use and test them. Application security is constantly changing, especially on the web, and we developers *NEED* to stay on top of it. Would you feel more comfortable browsing sites where the developers DO or DON'T know about these tools and howto use them?
Wanna know what the first thing I did when I got home from DEFCON was? I hacked one of my web applications (that I *thought* was secure, using all of the modern conventions we use for site security). And guess what! My applications will have better security after I learned different ways to hack apps. I might make greatly different security decisions, knowing how easy it would be for an attacker to do X, Y or Z.
Hackers have better ethics than you give us credit for.
The author of this post seems to be really, really confused. There were multiple presentations on ways to hack your Google accounts and Google security flaws, etc.
There was a presentation on howto exploit Google Gadgets (which have access to your local javascript), a few presentations on Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)(which you can do to send your own HTTP requests as the visitor if you have your own image or iframe on the page), and a presentation on hijacking your sessions if you ever access a site over plain-text (non-SSL), and putting the password page on SSL doesn't help (this requires the attacker to be on your local network!!!!!!!).
The title of the post sounds like they're talking about The Middler, a Ruby-based proxy by Jay Beale for intercepting all user data on a shared network, such as a coffee shop, where you can get users to go through your proxy.
If the author is talking about The Middler... that attacker has to be on your network!!! This is only an issue on untrusted networks.
Jay Beale's talk was the one the mentioned SSL the most, so I'm gonna guess that the author is talking about that, even tho the article seems to mix everything up.
I'm unwilling to pay box office prices for crappo movies - I often watch bootlegs instead.
When movies are supposed to be good, however, I'm happy to give the theatre way too much money for tickets, popcorn, etc. I love going to movies and all of my fellow "pirates" do too.
I drove 40 minutes and waited in line for over an hour to see The Dark Knight at an IMAX theatre... and it was *AWESOME*
I was happy to pay for WALL-E too.
Keep making movies that *DON'T SUCK* and people will pay to see them... keep making pieces of sh*t and people will download them or wait for DVD.
All of the movies that I've watched bootlegs for... either: 1) the movie rocked, so I went to see it in the theatre after watching the bootleg 2) the movie sucked... I simply wouldn't have watched it, had the bootleg not existed... *maybe* I would pay to rent the DVD
^ all hypothetical, ofcourse... i've never _actually_ seen one of these so-called 'bootlegs'...
I use my keyboard for just about everything except for things like... selecting/moving moving windows... selecting input elements on the screen... etc.
I don't think I would actually notice much if I had a camera on my monitor that analyzed my eye movement. If it would work from 6-10 feet away, too, then I could easily drive my PC while standing nearby... very cool!
I would never use something like this for gaming, tho. I guess it depends on exactly how accurate it is... I feel like I would still want to use my mouse in a game...
Actually, with gaming and apps, the bummer is... a lot of the time I want to look at part of the screen WITHOUT moving my cursor there. This might drive me crazy in a FPS, but... then again... maybe they can make it so it works well.
I use my mouse ***WAY*** less than I use my keyboard, so, I could easily see this happening.
Usenet has child pornography - it MUST be stopped at ALL causes.
We should ban Usenet and, if after 30 days, anyone hasn't complied... we should NUKE the data centers!
Seriously.
The internet has child pornography! And what about TERRORISTS??? They use the internet all the time!!!!!!
What are we waiting for, people??? It's time to BAN THE INTERNET!!!!
I mean, honestly, what good has ever come from the internet, anyway?
While we're at it, I've heard that some child pornography comes from Eastern Europe... we've been waiting for decades for an excuse to NUKE the Russians back into the stone ages... NOW IS OUR CHANCE!!!!!
I, for one, would rather die of radiation sickness before the following nuclear winter than to see any child pornography in the world! WE MUST NUKE THE *ENTIRE* *WORLD*!!!!!!!
---------------
ISP's are taking away all of our freedoms. What the F%&K can we do about it? A few major ISPs dominate most of the US bandwidth market. Once they all start deciding what users can and can't view... it's all downhill from here. What can we do before all of our freedoms are taken away from us?
Twitter is a really, really simple application. So why should anyone care about alternatives. Anyone who wants to make their own twitter is likely a web developer and they'll likely code it themselves... or, not I guess they can use an alternative but... who cares?
The woes that Twitter has had have nothing to do with Ruby or Rails. It's a scaling issue. Even if Twitter were written in PHP or Python or Java or.NET or Perl or C or Assembly... it wouldn't matter much. You would still need to put lots of hardware behind it if you had lots of traffic.
Any competent web developer could make their own Twitter clone and deploy it as a small afternoon project... does doesn't meet it'll scale to support thousands (or millions) of users.
Insightful? Why would you have to troll thru thousands of lines of source code just to find a public method? Ever tried google? There's great Ruby/Rails API documentation out there...
You can browse API sites or you can just look at the same HTML documentation that's generated on your local PC when you install Ruby/Rails or any RubyGems. You don't need internet connectivity.
I don't know why people think that screencasts like those on Peepcode have *anything* to do with documentation because they don't. You can watch screencasts for learning C#/Java/etc too. It's not something that's unique to Ruby or Rails, it just so happens that there are some very nice Ruby/Rails screencasts (notable via Peepcode and Railscasts). Java has books - so does Ruby. Hibernate has books - so does Rails. They all have local and online documentation.
That said, I read the source code for Ruby apps to find the answers to my questions quite often. Ruby is very expressive so much of the code reads like documentation... if I want to see what is done with a variable I pass in, NO language's documentation could help that... you'll ALWAYS need to read the source code.
I'm baffled by why people think of Ruby/Rails screencasts negatively... I've never heard people bash Lynda.com before... what's wrong with people wanting to supplement the learning tools out there? Seriously. There's a lot of Ruby/Rails documentation... I've been using Ruby for 3+ years and Rails for 2+ and I can't remember ever having trouble finding documentation (and I came to Ruby/Rails from.NET & Java).
I'm sorry if you're using some old legacy Ruby library and the developers didn't provide any documentation but you can't generalize that to the whole of the Ruby and/or Rails communities. It's simply wrong. There's lots of great documentation out there.
No one said that screencasts are documentation. Also, how exactly is railscasts a 'marketing tutorial?' And how does railscasts ignore everything important or secure? Ryan Bates has released a number of railscasts that address security issues with Rails.
Railscasts is a free screencast site by Ryan Bates, recent recipient of the Ruby Hero Awards. I think you have Railscasts confused with something else.
Screencasts are merely a learning tool just like books, podcasts, tutorials, etc. There are some people out there who might want to watch howto use some of the latest Rails 2.1 features. Others will simply read the docs. So what?
Gem dependencies are awesome. RubyGems has been growing into a sweet package manager / deployment option and being able to easily handle gem dependencies is long overdue.
To be honest, I've seen experienced computer users have more trouble doing the above tasks when switching from windows to OS X. You're so right.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and I switched to Ubuntu 2 years ago. I'm a sysadmin and a programmer.
That said, we have a few Macs at work that our designers use that I have to administrate and help with. While I find Windows and Linux quite easy (even tho I use them totally differently... I live in the terminal when on Linux), Mac OSX has a tendency to baffle me and I end up IMing my Mac buddies for help.
Example: the first time I installed Firefox, I tried installing it twice and couldn't figure out why it disappeared upon reboot and why no other user accounts could get to it. I used a Windows-type install approach (download installer from the internet, run, keep clicking 'Next'). When I was finished, a Firefox icon appeared on my desktop. Done? NO! How the hell was I supposed to know that you have to drag the stupid thing to your Applications folder?
Also, on both Windows and Linux, it's easy to get to the computer's root partition (C:\ or/)... on OSX, I have yet to be able to get to / in finder, although I can get there in the terminal?
If OSX is supposed to be the king of usability, desktop linux is seriously catching up. OR... no one who knows what a partition is should use a Mac.
I've had a similar experience to the one mentioned in the parent post, but with Ubuntu instead of OSX.
After I moved my home and office PCs to Ubuntu, I've had a lot of people (house guests, employees, clients) ask me what's running on my computer... I explain a bit... and many of them leave with the name "Ubuntu" written on a post-it note, because they want to try it out.
Some employees have, without my advocating it or "preaching Linux," installed Ubuntu on their home machines and told me about their experiences. They're always glowing when they tell me how cool the effects and other eye-candy are, that they enabled.
A lot of people ask me things like "why isn't *everyone* running this?" because they like it so much, plus it's free, etc. I know it's a big joke to mention "the year of the linux desktop," but times are certainly changing when "regular people" (not IT people) are installing linux on their home machines and big name stores/manufacturers are selling linux desktop machines, etc etc.
I've had 2 Apple lovers tell me that they likes Ubuntu's "eye-candy" more than OSX's and they wish they wish Apple would catch up with open-source!
( none of this is necessarily specific to Ubuntu - there are lots of great linux desktops, but I've had these experiences with Ubuntu )
If you really need to get your ActiveRecord pattern on (it's the name of a pattern, not a product)... We know what ActiveRecord is;)
Thanks for the reply - SQLAlchemy looks great, tho it kindof "feels" like talking to a database, rather than objects, with "fetching" and "executing." I like ActiveRecord because you could swap out the backend of your objects, re-implement the API, and everything would still feel right. Even when I use plain text files as my backend, I try to implement an API compatible with ActiveRecord so, if I move to a database, it'll be easier to refactor.
Ruby's got tons of ORMs, as well. I knew there were lots of great Python ones out there, I just didn't know them.
These make for a sweet excuse to play with Python:D
I'm with you 100%, except, I think the parts where the newbs say "wtf? how does this work?" is the important part, where they DO get to learn how Ruby works.
But you're right... a lot of the answers that newbs find to their "why?" questions won't actually teach them Ruby, it'll teach them about Rails magic, instead.
However... I probably wouldn't know any of the meta-programming magic that I *love* about Ruby if it weren't for my learning cool DSLs. Take something like Builder, where you get code like: builder = Builder::XmlMarkup.new xml = builder.person { |b| b.name("Jim"); b.phone("555-1234") } xml #=> <person><name>Jim</name><phone>555-1234</phone></person>
You, the Ruby newb, say "woah... wtf is going on there..." and you get to learn about method_missing, which you otherwise might have missed.
When you answer all of your "why" questions about the Rails code above, you learn about to_proc and metaclasses and... all kinds of great Ruby magic.
But... then again... as I'm typing this, I realize that's a LOT of "magic" and it can easily drown a new programmer, putting them in *way* over their head and making it harder to learn Ruby.
In the end, I think you're right, but the fact is - lots of people learn Ruby from Rails. If I could recommend anything, it would be to find a small project that Ruby can help you with *before* digging into Rails, so you feel somewhat comfortable with Ruby before being confused by Rails' magic.
If you're going to be using Ruby on the web, *learn eruby first!!!!* Use Ruby just like you use PHP, so you get to know Ruby before Rails.
If you're going to be using Ruby for sysadmin stuff, *learn irb first!!!!* Use Ruby in the interactive console, just like you might use BASH, so you get to know Ruby before Rails.
You must have been absent all of those days in kindergarten when they emphasized *sharing*
Typical situation:
* programmer needs X (to "scratch own itch")
* programmer makes X and realized that, wow, other people might want to use it or contribute to it
* programmer releases source
* FIN
A few things might happen:
* people contribute to X and make it better, for friggin FREE!
* companies use X - programmer helped out other human beings
* depending on license X was released under, if companies make their own improvements, they have to release the source code... once again... making your software better for FREE
You can be a douche bag and spend lot of time packaging EVERY projects you EVER make, and charging $19.95 for it... or you can be productive, not worry about trying to sell every piece of code you've EVER written, and release the code as open source to help other programmers.
Make something seriously cool that's worth marketing and selling... SELL IT.
But if you don't get how anyone might want to... I dunno... share with the community to help others... then what the friggin Hell are you doing on slashdot? Seriously? Well. Nevermind... I suppose we all need some flamebait, now and again, eh?
As a side note... the more open source software you release, the better the chances of someone actually being helped by it, the better the chance of it becoming well known or used... the more visitors your site gets... the more you SELL SELL SELL to your visitors ( commercial software or support or consulting )
I follow a lot of what the writers of my favorite libraries do/blog and I'd love nothing more than to, one day, release projects that help others, as I've been helped by so, so, so many open source projects.
Finally, I'd reiterate that a lot of the open source projects our there are there because someone made something to scratch his/her own itch... then released it. Many of these projects would be VERY hard to sell, and would take TIME to sell... so, instead, people offer them up to others to use / improve / etc. But, for those of use who prefer licenses like the GPL, the code is offered up such that any improvements need to be open source, as well... thus, everyone can work to make it better! If you want to be able to sell your own "Professional" or "Advanced" version of your software, release it under a license that lets you do so.
A lot of these projects would NOT SELL on their own. Other people use them because they exist, but, if they didn't exist for free, the companies would likely program it themselves. When a company uses your code in their software, you simply end up getting more exposure and... hell... they might even hire you for programming / consulting. Honestly, where's the downside?
People like you would rather have an apple rot than give it away to others. If your apple's ripe and you're not going to eat it... see if someone else wants it. If you're a programmer, I bet you've got atleast a dozen finished or half-finished project that you're not making ANY money from, nor are you ever likely to. Don't you understand that you could open source them and... maybe someone'll find them via google one day and you'll have helped someone else? You might even get a patch in the email one day from someone who's dramatically improved your code... or just from someone thanking you for releasing it! At the very least, it'll make you feel good about yourself whereas, if you hadn't released the code, you never would've felt good about helping that person. It's really that simple.
As much as I agree with the parent that learning from DSLs / specific libraries can make it more difficult to learn Ruby, I disagree that Rails isn't a good way to learn Ruby.
Why? Because Rails gives you a *reason* to learn Ruby. How often do people learn a certain programming language "just cause"? While I love to learn new languages, I tend to learn them when I need to or when there's a great reason to... for instance, to learn Rails!
I actually didn't learn Ruby by learning _all_ of Rails... I learned Ruby by using Rails' ActiveRecord implementation.
With 1 line of code ( to set the database connection ), I found that I was more productive in an interactive Ruby console than I was using SQL or using many of the libraries that wrapped the databases I was using. That was my *reason* ( or rather, *excuse* ) to learn Ruby.
So... while I agree that DSLs can lead to one learning a language slower, I think that they're a great *excuse* to learn the language, and the slowdown is worth it ( because you probably wouldn't have learned the language, otherwise! )
P.S. If you're curious about what I'm talking about, using Ruby / Rails' ActiveRecord to work with your database(s)? Let's say I wanna interact with a little sqlite database... open up $irb and: require 'activerecord' ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection:adapter => 'sqlite3',:database => 'mysites.db'
class User < ActiveRecord::Base; end class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many:users end
Does Python have something equivalent? Sure, I'm sure Python's database ORM's make it just as easy (altho I doubt something as dynamic as Dr. Nic's Magic Models exists... but maybe it does).
Depends on what you mean by "normal Ruby." Because Ruby is so flexible, it's a great language for writing domain-specific languages (DSLs). You could argue that these aren't "normal Ruby" because they're specific to certain libraries/gems, but... they really are just Ruby.
Take this bit of Ruby code, from _why's poignant guide to ruby... class Dragon < Creature
life 1340 # tough scales
strength 451 # bristling veins
charisma 1020 # toothy smile
weapon 939 # fire breath end
or checkout some Ruby code, using Markaby... ( also written by _why ) html do
head do
title 'Ruby is Fun'
link:rel => 'stylesheet',:type => 'text/css',:href => '/style.css'
end
body do
p flash[:notice],:style => "color: green"
self << @content_for_layout
end end
... is that conventional Ruby? Well... it's plain-old Ruby... it's just uses Ruby's meta-programming magic to make DSLs. Ofcourse, DSLs aren't always what you may want, but Ruby is really, really great at making them, so you can make your code better represent what you're really programming. Like the Dragon class above... if you've got lots of creature classes in your application, isn't that a nice and clean example of some syntax you could use?
Ofcourse, cleverness isn't good simply for cleverness' sake. If a DSL really helps, or using some other Ruby "magic," then you should use it... but these things shouldn't be used just because you can. It can lead to overly complicated code.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent talks about the ignorance found in certain web development communities, but doesn't actually mention a single experience that he or his wife have had at any Ruby, JavaScript, or NoSQL conferences!
I, on the other hand, have *actually* attended many Ruby conferences (to pick one of these communities). I've attended: RailsConf, MWRC, LA RubyConf, GoGaRuCo ... to name a few. I was one of the organizers of Arizona's first Ruby conference (SunnyConf) and I know some of the organizers of other Ruby conferences).
Here are some REAL experiences that I've had while attending Ruby conferences:
- I've seen a good (growing) number of female attendees
- I've seen a female speakers
- I've seen conference organizers react to potentially offensive content by getting on stage and asking the audience if the content was offensive to anyone (and following up by reiterating how open and accepting he wanted the conference to be)
- I've overhead and participated in multiple conversations with men and women actually TALKING with one another about the community and what Rubyists do well/poorly to attract women programmers. I recently experienced this at MWRC 2012 and GoGaRuCo 2011. Men and women talking ABOUT the current experiences of women in our community. How could this *possibly* be ignorant, when we're actually making it a topic of conversation and trying to do better?
At my current workplace, most of our developers are young men. But we also have women and older men.
The parent thinks that it's OK to call out whole communities (like the Ruby community) as being ignorant. With all due respect, it is HE who appears to be ignorant to other communities. I recommend that he and his wife actually *attend* a Ruby/JavaScript/NoSQL conference ... who knows, might enjoy it!
ALL software communities should do what they can to provide an open, accepting environment to all.
----------------------
PS. The parent also calls out certain well-known, heavily used tools and technologies as being "horrible in every way" and "taken to be a joke by professionals." This is uncalled for. He's dissing every scripting language used for web technology. Either check the TIOBE or look at these languages yourself, but all of these technologies are fantastic when used properly: PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Perl, and many NoSQL (document oriented and key/value) databases.
Personal bias: I'm a professional developer. I currently code Ruby, but I have also professionally used (and enjoyed using) NoSQL databases (Mongo/Cassandra and Redis/Memcached key/value stores), relational databases (SQL Server/MySQL/Postgres/sqlite), scripting languages (Ruby/JS(CoffeeScript/Dart)/PHP/Python), other languages (C#/VB.NET/Boo, Java).
Wow. Microsoft really pwned everyone with this!
Doesn't everyone realize that Microsoft *faked* this crash as a publicity stunt?
Seriously. Who would download Windows 7? And, of those people, who would download it *legally*???
[test!]
A good test suite == "best practice to avoid digging custom holes you can't climb out of"
I work at a Rails shop too and, when I/we need to do something highly custom, we create it as a gem (or a Rails plugin) and post it somewhere incase someone else finds it useful. None of the plugins/gems I've released have required any maintenance to speak of, unless I've wanted to add additional features.
Be sure to write tests for your customizations (gem/plugin)! This will make it really easy to discover if your plugin no longer works for the next version of Rails/ActiveRecord/whatever it is you're extending.
[open source!]
If your changes might help other developers (they're not very, very specific to your product), open source them as a gem and let people know how to use it.
Not only can others benefit from your changes, but they can commit back too! Put the gem up on github[1], as it's the current de facto standard home for such things.
[rack it up!]
If you really need crazy performance out of Rails, look into using Rack[2]. Rails 2.3 (currently Rails Edge, will be released this month) *finally* uses Rack. Something like Rails Metal[3] makes it easy to return directly from Rack, letting you *highly* optimize certain requests. This is like rewriting some of your Ruby as C extensions to speed it up - Rack is really easy to use.
Good luck!
[1]: http://github.com/
[2]: http://rack.rubyforge.org/
[3]: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/17/introducing-rails-metal
I love my G1. It's more intuitive than any blackberry I've ever used (I've had 2) and more powerful than an iPhone (background processes, more advanced features imho).
In my opinion, the best things that Android has going for it are:
* easier development
* write once, run on any Android handset
Google treats Android developers better than Apple treats its iPhone developers. The NDA *still* isn't even fully lifted for the iPhone and you have to jailbreak your own phone just to run your own apps.
I bought my G1 specifically to develop for it, but I've been *really happy* with it so far, as a normal user. I can't wait to start writing apps for it!
I really don't think you understand.
You *WANT* these tools in the hands of web developers. You want the developers of all of the sites you visit to have these tools and to be able to use and test them. Application security is constantly changing, especially on the web, and we developers *NEED* to stay on top of it. Would you feel more comfortable browsing sites where the developers DO or DON'T know about these tools and howto use them?
Wanna know what the first thing I did when I got home from DEFCON was? I hacked one of my web applications (that I *thought* was secure, using all of the modern conventions we use for site security). And guess what! My applications will have better security after I learned different ways to hack apps. I might make greatly different security decisions, knowing how easy it would be for an attacker to do X, Y or Z.
Hackers have better ethics than you give us credit for.
The author of this post seems to be really, really confused. There were multiple presentations on ways to hack your Google accounts and Google security flaws, etc.
There was a presentation on howto exploit Google Gadgets (which have access to your local javascript), a few presentations on Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)(which you can do to send your own HTTP requests as the visitor if you have your own image or iframe on the page), and a presentation on hijacking your sessions if you ever access a site over plain-text (non-SSL), and putting the password page on SSL doesn't help (this requires the attacker to be on your local network!!!!!!!).
The title of the post sounds like they're talking about The Middler, a Ruby-based proxy by Jay Beale for intercepting all user data on a shared network, such as a coffee shop, where you can get users to go through your proxy.
If the author is talking about The Middler ... that attacker has to be on your network!!! This is only an issue on untrusted networks.
Jay Beale's talk was the one the mentioned SSL the most, so I'm gonna guess that the author is talking about that, even tho the article seems to mix everything up.
To see the descriptions of the actual talks and whatnot, visit the DEFCON schedule: https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-schedule.html
I'm unwilling to pay box office prices for crappo movies - I often watch bootlegs instead.
When movies are supposed to be good, however, I'm happy to give the theatre way too much money for tickets, popcorn, etc. I love going to movies and all of my fellow "pirates" do too.
I drove 40 minutes and waited in line for over an hour to see The Dark Knight at an IMAX theatre ... and it was *AWESOME*
I was happy to pay for WALL-E too.
Keep making movies that *DON'T SUCK* and people will pay to see them ... keep making pieces of sh*t and people will download them or wait for DVD.
All of the movies that I've watched bootlegs for ... either: ... I simply wouldn't have watched it, had the bootleg not existed ... *maybe* I would pay to rent the DVD
1) the movie rocked, so I went to see it in the theatre after watching the bootleg
2) the movie sucked
^ all hypothetical, ofcourse ... i've never _actually_ seen one of these so-called 'bootlegs' ...
So, there are lots of Lightbox-like DHTML popups (including Lightbox, itself) which are all styled specifically to look like Facebook's popups.
Why doesn't Facebook sue all of them?
I mean, seriously ... open source javascript tools have to be stopped! They do nothing but help us! Stop them now!
Facebook ... wow. I really, really love you, facebook, but ... keep this kindof crap up, and I'm looking for another social networking site.
Unbelievable.
I use my keyboard for just about everything except for things like ... selecting/moving moving windows ... selecting input elements on the screen ... etc.
I don't think I would actually notice much if I had a camera on my monitor that analyzed my eye movement. If it would work from 6-10 feet away, too, then I could easily drive my PC while standing nearby ... very cool!
I would never use something like this for gaming, tho. I guess it depends on exactly how accurate it is ... I feel like I would still want to use my mouse in a game ...
Actually, with gaming and apps, the bummer is ... a lot of the time I want to look at part of the screen WITHOUT moving my cursor there. This might drive me crazy in a FPS, but ... then again ... maybe they can make it so it works well.
I use my mouse ***WAY*** less than I use my keyboard, so, I could easily see this happening.
Make an open source project or open source one of your current side projects. Or contribute to an existing project.
Direct them to the projects' websites and/or online source code browser.
If someone wanted to see my code, I'd just send them to my git repo with many of my open source side projects.
If you're a coder and you don't have side projects ... you're not a coder :P
Honestly, I don't get what all the fuss is about.
Usenet has child pornography - it MUST be stopped at ALL causes.
We should ban Usenet and, if after 30 days, anyone hasn't complied ... we should NUKE the data centers!
Seriously.
The internet has child pornography! And what about TERRORISTS??? They use the internet all the time!!!!!!
What are we waiting for, people??? It's time to BAN THE INTERNET!!!!
I mean, honestly, what good has ever come from the internet, anyway?
While we're at it, I've heard that some child pornography comes from Eastern Europe ... we've been waiting for decades for an excuse to NUKE the Russians back into the stone ages ... NOW IS OUR CHANCE!!!!!
I, for one, would rather die of radiation sickness before the following nuclear winter than to see any child pornography in the world! WE MUST NUKE THE *ENTIRE* *WORLD*!!!!!!!
---------------
ISP's are taking away all of our freedoms. What the F%&K can we do about it? A few major ISPs dominate most of the US bandwidth market. Once they all start deciding what users can and can't view ... it's all downhill from here. What can we do before all of our freedoms are taken away from us?
This Sucks.
Twitter is a really, really simple application. So why should anyone care about alternatives. Anyone who wants to make their own twitter is likely a web developer and they'll likely code it themselves ... or, not I guess they can use an alternative but ... who cares?
The woes that Twitter has had have nothing to do with Ruby or Rails. It's a scaling issue. Even if Twitter were written in PHP or Python or Java or .NET or Perl or C or Assembly ... it wouldn't matter much. You would still need to put lots of hardware behind it if you had lots of traffic.
Any competent web developer could make their own Twitter clone and deploy it as a small afternoon project ... does doesn't meet it'll scale to support thousands (or millions) of users.
Insightful? Why would you have to troll thru thousands of lines of source code just to find a public method? Ever tried google? There's great Ruby/Rails API documentation out there ...
... if I want to see what is done with a variable I pass in, NO language's documentation could help that ... you'll ALWAYS need to read the source code.
... I've never heard people bash Lynda.com before ... what's wrong with people wanting to supplement the learning tools out there? Seriously. There's a lot of Ruby/Rails documentation ... I've been using Ruby for 3+ years and Rails for 2+ and I can't remember ever having trouble finding documentation (and I came to Ruby/Rails from .NET & Java).
If you google something like 'Ruby String' you get the normal documentation, often on ruby-doc.org ( http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html )
If you google something like 'Rails Activerecord' you get the normal documentation, often on api.rubyonrails.com ( http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html )
You can browse API sites or you can just look at the same HTML documentation that's generated on your local PC when you install Ruby/Rails or any RubyGems. You don't need internet connectivity.
I don't know why people think that screencasts like those on Peepcode have *anything* to do with documentation because they don't. You can watch screencasts for learning C#/Java/etc too. It's not something that's unique to Ruby or Rails, it just so happens that there are some very nice Ruby/Rails screencasts (notable via Peepcode and Railscasts). Java has books - so does Ruby. Hibernate has books - so does Rails. They all have local and online documentation.
That said, I read the source code for Ruby apps to find the answers to my questions quite often. Ruby is very expressive so much of the code reads like documentation
I'm baffled by why people think of Ruby/Rails screencasts negatively
I'm sorry if you're using some old legacy Ruby library and the developers didn't provide any documentation but you can't generalize that to the whole of the Ruby and/or Rails communities. It's simply wrong. There's lots of great documentation out there.
Wow, what a useful comment.
What?
No one said that screencasts are documentation. Also, how exactly is railscasts a 'marketing tutorial?' And how does railscasts ignore everything important or secure? Ryan Bates has released a number of railscasts that address security issues with Rails.
Railscasts is a free screencast site by Ryan Bates, recent recipient of the Ruby Hero Awards. I think you have Railscasts confused with something else.
Screencasts are merely a learning tool just like books, podcasts, tutorials, etc. There are some people out there who might want to watch howto use some of the latest Rails 2.1 features. Others will simply read the docs. So what?
You can see howto use some of the new features at http://railscasts.com/
:)
Gem dependencies are awesome. RubyGems has been growing into a sweet package manager / deployment option and being able to easily handle gem dependencies is long overdue.
Psyched for Rails 2.1
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and I switched to Ubuntu 2 years ago. I'm a sysadmin and a programmer.
That said, we have a few Macs at work that our designers use that I have to administrate and help with. While I find Windows and Linux quite easy (even tho I use them totally differently
Example: the first time I installed Firefox, I tried installing it twice and couldn't figure out why it disappeared upon reboot and why no other user accounts could get to it. I used a Windows-type install approach (download installer from the internet, run, keep clicking 'Next'). When I was finished, a Firefox icon appeared on my desktop. Done? NO! How the hell was I supposed to know that you have to drag the stupid thing to your Applications folder?
Also, on both Windows and Linux, it's easy to get to the computer's root partition (C:\ or
If OSX is supposed to be the king of usability, desktop linux is seriously catching up. OR
I've had a similar experience to the one mentioned in the parent post, but with Ubuntu instead of OSX.
... I explain a bit ... and many of them leave with the name "Ubuntu" written on a post-it note, because they want to try it out.
After I moved my home and office PCs to Ubuntu, I've had a lot of people (house guests, employees, clients) ask me what's running on my computer
Some employees have, without my advocating it or "preaching Linux," installed Ubuntu on their home machines and told me about their experiences. They're always glowing when they tell me how cool the effects and other eye-candy are, that they enabled.
A lot of people ask me things like "why isn't *everyone* running this?" because they like it so much, plus it's free, etc. I know it's a big joke to mention "the year of the linux desktop," but times are certainly changing when "regular people" (not IT people) are installing linux on their home machines and big name stores/manufacturers are selling linux desktop machines, etc etc.
I've had 2 Apple lovers tell me that they likes Ubuntu's "eye-candy" more than OSX's and they wish they wish Apple would catch up with open-source!
( none of this is necessarily specific to Ubuntu - there are lots of great linux desktops, but I've had these experiences with Ubuntu )
actually, to be truly fair, "Hello World" is *identical* in Ruby / Python
print "Hello World!" # Python
print "Hello World!" # Ruby
They both work and both satisfy "Hello World." Only different is that Ruby's print doesn't print a newline (puts does, as in your example).
WOW. You go, Mr. Computer Science.
Now go tell that to the managers of programming teams that have dramatically increased their output since moving to Ruby.
Get a job!
Thanks for the reply - SQLAlchemy looks great, tho it kindof "feels" like talking to a database, rather than objects, with "fetching" and "executing." I like ActiveRecord because you could swap out the backend of your objects, re-implement the API, and everything would still feel right. Even when I use plain text files as my backend, I try to implement an API compatible with ActiveRecord so, if I move to a database, it'll be easier to refactor.
Ruby's got tons of ORMs, as well. I knew there were lots of great Python ones out there, I just didn't know them.
These make for a sweet excuse to play with Python
I'm with you 100%, except, I think the parts where the newbs say "wtf? how does this work?" is the important part, where they DO get to learn how Ruby works.
... a lot of the answers that newbs find to their "why?" questions won't actually teach them Ruby, it'll teach them about Rails magic, instead.
... I probably wouldn't know any of the meta-programming magic that I *love* about Ruby if it weren't for my learning cool DSLs. Take something like Builder, where you get code like:
... wtf is going on there ..." and you get to learn about method_missing, which you otherwise might have missed.
... all kinds of great Ruby magic.
... then again ... as I'm typing this, I realize that's a LOT of "magic" and it can easily drown a new programmer, putting them in *way* over their head and making it harder to learn Ruby.
But you're right
However
builder = Builder::XmlMarkup.new
xml = builder.person { |b| b.name("Jim"); b.phone("555-1234") }
xml #=> <person><name>Jim</name><phone>555-1234</phone></person>
You, the Ruby newb, say "woah
When you answer all of your "why" questions about the Rails code above, you learn about to_proc and metaclasses and
But
In the end, I think you're right, but the fact is - lots of people learn Ruby from Rails. If I could recommend anything, it would be to find a small project that Ruby can help you with *before* digging into Rails, so you feel somewhat comfortable with Ruby before being confused by Rails' magic.
If you're going to be using Ruby on the web, *learn eruby first!!!!* Use Ruby just like you use PHP, so you get to know Ruby before Rails.
If you're going to be using Ruby for sysadmin stuff, *learn irb first!!!!* Use Ruby in the interactive console, just like you might use BASH, so you get to know Ruby before Rails.
( etc etc etc )
You must have been absent all of those days in kindergarten when they emphasized *sharing*
... once again ... making your software better for FREE
... or you can be productive, not worry about trying to sell every piece of code you've EVER written, and release the code as open source to help other programmers.
... SELL IT.
... I dunno ... share with the community to help others ... then what the friggin Hell are you doing on slashdot? Seriously? Well. Nevermind ... I suppose we all need some flamebait, now and again, eh?
... the more open source software you release, the better the chances of someone actually being helped by it, the better the chance of it becoming well known or used ... the more visitors your site gets ... the more you SELL SELL SELL to your visitors ( commercial software or support or consulting )
... then released it. Many of these projects would be VERY hard to sell, and would take TIME to sell ... so, instead, people offer them up to others to use / improve / etc. But, for those of use who prefer licenses like the GPL, the code is offered up such that any improvements need to be open source, as well ... thus, everyone can work to make it better! If you want to be able to sell your own "Professional" or "Advanced" version of your software, release it under a license that lets you do so.
... hell ... they might even hire you for programming / consulting. Honestly, where's the downside?
... see if someone else wants it. If you're a programmer, I bet you've got atleast a dozen finished or half-finished project that you're not making ANY money from, nor are you ever likely to. Don't you understand that you could open source them and ... maybe someone'll find them via google one day and you'll have helped someone else? You might even get a patch in the email one day from someone who's dramatically improved your code ... or just from someone thanking you for releasing it! At the very least, it'll make you feel good about yourself whereas, if you hadn't released the code, you never would've felt good about helping that person. It's really that simple.
Typical situation:
* programmer needs X (to "scratch own itch")
* programmer makes X and realized that, wow, other people might want to use it or contribute to it
* programmer releases source
* FIN
A few things might happen:
* people contribute to X and make it better, for friggin FREE!
* companies use X - programmer helped out other human beings
* depending on license X was released under, if companies make their own improvements, they have to release the source code
You can be a douche bag and spend lot of time packaging EVERY projects you EVER make, and charging $19.95 for it
Make something seriously cool that's worth marketing and selling
But if you don't get how anyone might want to
As a side note
I follow a lot of what the writers of my favorite libraries do/blog and I'd love nothing more than to, one day, release projects that help others, as I've been helped by so, so, so many open source projects.
Finally, I'd reiterate that a lot of the open source projects our there are there because someone made something to scratch his/her own itch
A lot of these projects would NOT SELL on their own. Other people use them because they exist, but, if they didn't exist for free, the companies would likely program it themselves. When a company uses your code in their software, you simply end up getting more exposure and
People like you would rather have an apple rot than give it away to others. If your apple's ripe and you're not going to eat it
</rant>
hehehehehehehehe ... I'm glad *someone* read it and enjoyed it :D
As much as I agree with the parent that learning from DSLs / specific libraries can make it more difficult to learn Ruby, I disagree that Rails isn't a good way to learn Ruby.
... for instance, to learn Rails!
... I learned Ruby by using Rails' ActiveRecord implementation.
... while I agree that DSLs can lead to one learning a language slower, I think that they're a great *excuse* to learn the language, and the slowdown is worth it ( because you probably wouldn't have learned the language, otherwise! )
... open up $irb and:
:adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'mysites.db'
:users
...
:adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'mysites.db'
... (uses database tables and relations)
... but maybe it does).
Why? Because Rails gives you a *reason* to learn Ruby. How often do people learn a certain programming language "just cause"? While I love to learn new languages, I tend to learn them when I need to or when there's a great reason to
I actually didn't learn Ruby by learning _all_ of Rails
With 1 line of code ( to set the database connection ), I found that I was more productive in an interactive Ruby console than I was using SQL or using many of the libraries that wrapped the databases I was using. That was my *reason* ( or rather, *excuse* ) to learn Ruby.
So
P.S. If you're curious about what I'm talking about, using Ruby / Rails' ActiveRecord to work with your database(s)? Let's say I wanna interact with a little sqlite database
require 'activerecord'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
class User < ActiveRecord::Base; end
class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many
end
puts Site.count
puts Site.find_by_name('Slashdot').users.map &:email
Or, if I have Dr. Nic's Magic Models
require 'dr_nic_magic_models'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
# don't even have to define a classes
puts Site.count
puts Site.find_by_name('Slashdot').users.map &:email
Does Python have something equivalent? Sure, I'm sure Python's database ORM's make it just as easy (altho I doubt something as dynamic as Dr. Nic's Magic Models exists
Depends on what you mean by "normal Ruby." Because Ruby is so flexible, it's a great language for writing domain-specific languages (DSLs). You could argue that these aren't "normal Ruby" because they're specific to certain libraries/gems, but ... they really are just Ruby.
...
... ( also written by _why ) :rel => 'stylesheet', :type => 'text/css', :href => '/style.css'
:style => "color: green"
... is that conventional Ruby? Well ... it's plain-old Ruby ... it's just uses Ruby's meta-programming magic to make DSLs. Ofcourse, DSLs aren't always what you may want, but Ruby is really, really great at making them, so you can make your code better represent what you're really programming. Like the Dragon class above ... if you've got lots of creature classes in your application, isn't that a nice and clean example of some syntax you could use?
... but these things shouldn't be used just because you can. It can lead to overly complicated code.
Take this bit of Ruby code, from _why's poignant guide to ruby
class Dragon < Creature
life 1340 # tough scales
strength 451 # bristling veins
charisma 1020 # toothy smile
weapon 939 # fire breath
end
or checkout some Ruby code, using Markaby
html do
head do
title 'Ruby is Fun'
link
end
body do
p flash[:notice],
self << @content_for_layout
end
end
Ofcourse, cleverness isn't good simply for cleverness' sake. If a DSL really helps, or using some other Ruby "magic," then you should use it