No More Secrets
Ian McKeller shows how easy it is to find web API “secret keys” when the user has access to the (network) client code. It’s actually a nice little crash coarse in how to write cracking software (here “crack” means warez scene type “crack”). That crazy shit like this is possible is why I got into software in the first place. Completely
Extension/Scripting language comparisons - comp.lang.scheme
“While I do consider the adjective ‘baroque’ to be a compliment, I must point out that Perl is actually more of a romantic piece, with allusions to various classical motifs. My favorite composer is Mahler, which should surprise no one.” — Larry Wall
Ruby 1.9 - What's new? What's changed?
Markus Prinz with a nice review of important Ruby 1.9 changes.
rack-esi
Christoffer Sawicki has started in on a partial implementation of ESI (Edge Side Includes) as a Rack middleware component. Put something like this in front of Rack::Cache and things get real interesting real fast :)
Sanitize: A whitelist-based Ruby HTML sanitizer
Finally, a sane looking sanitization lib that doesn’t try to do too much.
Resourceful
Interesting looking HTTP client library for Ruby with support for HTTP caching (with pluggable backends), basic and digest auth, intelligent redirect handling. It’s been around for a while and looks like it could eventually become similar in feature set to Python’s httplib2.
cachet
Nick Kallen has started a project to implement a HTTP cache in Scala. Seems like an excellent idea given Java’s extensive collection of stable HTTP server libraries and Scala’s strengths in concurrency and performance.
Rails and Merb -- Why Merge At All?
A much more sober but constructive take on the plan to merge Rails and Merb.
Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs?
“The reflexive reverence for Revolutionary Road is a testament to the degree to which antisuburban sentiment is one of the most unexamined attitudes in American culture.”
Google Groups: rack-cache
Mailing list for Rack::Cache users and hackers. Come on in, the water’s warm.
The arc of history is long . . ..
Awesome photo of Obama addressing a massive crowd in front of the Old St. Louis Courthouse — the same place slaves were being auctioned as recently as 1861. Crazy.
CloudKit via cURL
Jon Crosby’s RESTful JSON-based data store with OpenID and OAuth support. It does versioning and produces HTTP cache friendly responses all in a Rack middleware component. Jon’s been working on this for some time and it shows in the code and docs. Awesome.
Concluding Remarks
Jean-Jacques Dubray: “How do the RESTafarians work? They take Roy’s REST, they try to use it for anything in their day to day activities, and then when they stumble upon a problem, they try to find a more or less ‘RESTful’ solution and post it on a blog.”
Precisely!
Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps
Peter Cooper: “Lots of awesome articles about Sinatra, Sinatra apps, and various links and resources have cropped up over the past few months. The remainder of this post links to the best we've found – most of which you should find useful as you start to explore Sinatra in detail.”
Introducing Rails Metal
David Heinemeier Hansson: “Rails Edge adopted Rack a while back and we’ve been exploring ways to expose that better. The first thing we did was to make it really easy to hook up any piece of Rack middleware in front of a Rails request. In your config/environment.rb file, you can do: config.middlewares.use(Rack::Cache, :verbose => true)”
Oh hell yes.
Rails Metal: a micro-framework with the power of Rails: \m/
Rails riding on Rack is going to be a big deal.
Introducing Cache Money
Bad-ass ActiveRecord extension that does read-through and write-through caching to memcached in a way that’s fairly transparent. This is one of the strategies the Twitter folks put in place recently to improve their response time and availability.
What’s Ruby’s future
Rafe Colburn: “On the other hand, I find programming in Ruby enjoyable and educational, so it’s not like I’m looking to give up. It’s just that even after a couple of years of doing it, I still feel like we’re dating rather than married.”
It seems like a lot of people are down on Ruby at the moment. Odd. I'm actually more excited about Ruby than I've ever been. Things seem to be moving along nicely, especially on the web tooling front.
ETags And Modification Times In Django
Nice look at caching idioms in Django and why you need to generate HTTP cache validators up-front and efficiently.
More Developers, Less Code
I never put it together that the teddziuba that wrote at lesscode.org in 2005 was that teddziuba. This is a great piece.
RubyConf 2008: Lightweight Web Services
Adam Wiggins and Blake Mizerany’s presentation on Sinatra and RestClient.
ncache
An Nginx module that acts as a gateway cache. I haven’t tried it yet but it’s a really good idea.
Code for Christmas
Xavier Shay:
Ticking off an amazon wishlist never really resonated with me, so this year here is what we are all doing instead:
- Find someone’s pet open source project – I’d start at github
- Contribute! It doesn’t have to be much – a spec or two, some documentation, or even just a “hey it works on my box”. Fork, commit, pull request.
- Wish them a Merry Christmas!
Great idea. I feel like I finally have something worthwhile to give this year.
Building a iPhone web app in under 50 lines with Sinatra and iUI
Nicely done. I have to take a serious look at iUI one of these days. It sounds like you can get really close to a native app experience.
Debug your shell scripts with bashdb
“The syntax for many of the commands in bashdb mimics that of gdb, the GNU debugger. You can step into functions, use next to execute the next line without stepping into any functions, generate a backtrace with bt, exit bashdb with quit or Ctrl-D, and examine a variable with print $foo.”
Ruby on Rack #2 - The Builder
Pratik continues his series on Rack with a deep dive into Rack::Builder.
Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs
Smashing Magazine shows off a massive catalog of minimalist designs and then attempts to deconstruct them.
Obama 'could stop using e-mail'
BBC: “The paper quoted aides saying that his emails, sometimes sent as late as 0100 or 0300, were ‘generally crisp, properly spelled and free of symbols or emoticons’.”
Can you imagine?
Dear Mr. Karzai,
im in ur country, bombing ur lands. =p
k thx.
--
- O
Ruby on Rack #1 - Hello Rack!
Pratik’s first in a series of pieces on Rack: how it came to be, why you need to understand it, along with some simple examples. Future installments will cover Rack::Builder and Middleware.
Things Caches Do
An illustrated re-introduction to HTTP caching with a focus on gateway caches and their potential benefits within the context of modern, dynamic web applications.
How to Write With Style
Kurt Vonnegut: “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.”
An Introduction to A/B Testing
I've read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.
How can C Programs be so Reliable?
Laurence Tratt: “I had implicitly bought into the idea that C programs segfault at random, eat data, and generally act like Vikings on a day trip to Lindisfarne; in contrast, programs written in "higher level” languages supposedly fail in nice, predictable patterns. Gradually it occurred to me that virtually all of the software that I use on a daily a basis – that to which I entrust my most important data – is written in C. And I can’t remember the last time there was a major problem with any of this software – it’s reliable in the sense that it doesn’t crash, and also reliable in the sense that it handles minor failures gracefully."
The Road to HTML 5: getElementsByClassName()
Includes a brief history of native support for getElementsByClassName in Mozilla and other browsers.
FreshPorts -- textproc/rdiscount
RDiscount, a fast Markdown library for Ruby, is now included with the FreeBSD ports collection thanks to Daniel Roethlisberger.
Rack cache headers
Interesting approach to setting cache related headers using a Rack middleware component.
minigems
An interesting RubyGems mod by Fabien Franzen that seems to fix the memory hit a process takes on require 'rubygems'. Unfortunately, you have to code for it in your app and apply it to installed ruby commands explicitly. Fabien has submitted a ticket and patch to the RubyGems project, however. You should +1 it (after reviewing the code, of course).
Hofstadter's Terrible Law
Adam Gomaa: “… this state of affairs doesn’t really help my general feeling of hopelessness when it comes to programming – I know that no matter how good I get, I'm still stuck at being just one person, and the code a single person can write is pitifully small.”
I've come to the same conclusion within the past couple of years. I take on much smaller projects now and try to contribute more to existing projects rather than playing mad scientist on massive works that will never see the light of day. I've also come to appreciate the idea of paying lots of attention to detail on one small thing rather than churning out large quantities of half-baked features.
Reverse HTTP
Allows a server to turn the tables and make HTTP requests to the client. I've been trying to come up with some use for this for 45 minutes and I'm totally baffled but it’s kind of interesting anyways.