Labnotes

Jul 3rd, 2009
When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?

This is something I’m struggling with right now:

Once your data is cryptographically secured, all the computers on earth, working in unison, could not recover it on anything less than a geological timescale.

This is great news, of course. It means that I don’t have to worry about being mugged for my laptop, or having my office burgled (even the critical-files backup I keep on Amazon S3’s remote storage facility is guarded by industrial-strength crypto, so I’m immune from someone raiding Amazon’s servers).

But what if I were killed or incapacitated before I managed to hand the passphrase over to an executor or solicitor who could use them to unlock all this stuff that will be critical to winding down my affairs – or keeping them going, in the event that I’m incapacitated?

Do you have an in-case-of strategy for your passwords, keys and encrypted data? How are you managing it?

Image by chotda

Posted by Assaf Filed in general 3 Comments »
Jul 2nd, 2009
Rounded Corners 235 — Grand Theft Horse

Location, location, location. Tom Coats: Instrumenting your life from Webstock 09. Engaging presentation on how we use social data and location-aware services (or maybe how social data is using us).

Still growing. Ruby use on the rise (via @alexbarnett):

According to a new study from Evans Data, Ruby use is on the rise in North America. On a year-over-year basis, Ruby usage has increased by 40 percent so far in 2009.

But, even with the big increase, Ruby is still far from being pervasive. Evans’ study found that only 14 percent of developers in North America use Ruby some of the time. They are currently forecasting the number to rise to 20 percent for 2010.

GoGaRuCo The Golden Gate Ruby Conference videos are available online.

Let me guess how this ends. An epic story of bugwards compatibility:

And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include /com\d(\..*)?, /lpt\d(\..*)?,/con(\..*)?, /aux(\..*)?, /prn(\..*)?, or /nul(\..*)? in any of your routes.

There, I fixed it. Apropos MS Windows: Epic kludges + adventures in home ownership. Hilarious.

Image, via Carlo Zottmann.

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Jul 1st, 2009
Why do you use Buildr?

Q: Why use Buildr instead of Ant or Maven?

Daniel Spiewak:

If you think about it, the question isn’t “Why use Buildr?”, it’s really “Why use anything else?” The advantages afforded by Buildr are so substantial, I really can’t see myself going with any other tool, at least not when I have a choice.

Matthieu:

We used to rely on Ant, with a fairly extensive set of scripts. It worked but was expensive to maintain. The biggest mistake afterward was to migrate to Maven2. I could write pages of rants explaining all the problems we ran into and we still ended up with thousands of lines of XML.

unknown:

With BuildR, your build files are written in a real language (you can use variables, methods, loops, containers), which is needed because building a product requires custom logic (code). The myth that Maven tries to sell is that it is all just declaring what you wants (via properties) and a “maven” creates everything for you. You need your own code.

Tristan Juricek:

That’s still the strongest sell: it builds everything I need, and as I’ve needed more, I just got things working without a lot of fuss.

Martin Grotzke:

The positive side effect for me as a java user is that I learn a little ruby, and that’s easy but lots of fun… :-)

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Jun 30th, 2009
Rounded Corners 234 — RT

Gender inclusive. Check out the attendance for the Ruby on Rails outreach workshop for women.

And broader, Technically Women – tech professionals that just happen to be women (via @monkchips)

PubSubWebRabbitHubHook. Aside from the lack of HMAC authentication, I really like where PubSubHubBub is going, and the ease of letting RabbitMQ do the hard bits.

How not to win friends. The secret to writing unmaintainable code. (via @stilkov)

Revisionists. I want to correct a wrongful impression from Paul Downey’s excellent piece ETSI 2.0 (via @dehora):

Web services, not to be confused with The Web, evolved through privileged people in smoke filled rooms writing specifications which they then attempted to rubber-stamp in a number of different consortia.

I understand why people still feel that way, but given that time has passed and we’re well into the healing phase, I’d like to correct a common misconception. In reality there was no smoking allowed and the rooms were well ventilated. I should know, I was a smoker.

Drool worthy. Lots of cool milspec stuff at Country Comm.

Video: can your PC do that? (via @sireland)

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Jun 30th, 2009
Designing with Psychology in Mind

Great presentation by Joshua Porter:

Via Alex Barnett

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Jun 17th, 2009
The Buildr book, available from Amazon

The Buildr project documentation, in 6″x9″ paperback. Because there’s something magical about a book that you don’t get from reading online.

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Jun 11th, 2009
Ruby at ThoughtWorks

Martin Fowler reviews over 3 years of Ruby experience at ThoughtWorks:

ThoughtWorks started using Ruby for production projects in 2006, from then till the end of 2008 we had done 41 ruby projects. In preparation for a talk at QCon I surveyed these projects to examine what lessons we can draw from the experience. I describe our thoughts so far on common questions about Ruby’s productivity, speed and maintainability. So far our conclusions are that Ruby is a viable platform that should be seriously considered for many forms of applications – in particular web applications using Ruby on Rails. I also go through some technical lessons, including some thoughts on testing with Active Record.

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Jun 10th, 2009
Confessions of a PackRat
A presentation by Scott Raymond about PackRat, scaling with AWS and the big rewrite. 60 minutes of wisdom and experience.
- Using the cloud: the pros and cons of running a popular app on EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB.
- MySQL pitfalls: how scaling the database tier nearly killed us, and how we survived.
- Caching strategies: memcached vs. memoization, and the best of both worlds.
- Interacting with Facebook: third-party libraries vs. rolling your own.
- Dealing with cheaters: detecting and thwarting duplicate accounts, bots, and GreaseMonkey hacks.
- Why we re-wrote the application from scratch, and switched from Rails to Merb in the process.
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Apr 15th, 2009
Rounded Corners 233 – In plain view

LLVM JRuby 1.2 is out and I’m hearing good things about performance. Then there’s MacRuby, which besides having an awesome Cocoa API, also gets LLVM performance. That’s some serious juice compared to Ruby 1.9, and MacRuby is still in early stage.

Unladen Swallow is Python on the LLVM, with the goal of 5x speedup over CPython. Something tells me the VM race is heating up, and JVM is no longer the safe bet.

Quick dev setup. Setting up Ruby is really easy … if you follow the instructions of someone who’s done it before. Dan Croak covers Ruby, Git, MySQL on OS X. Also using Fluid for gems.local, Github and other dev-friendly sites.

gem install oauth If you’re curious, John Nunemaker has a brief intro to OAuth and how to use it, and ready to use Twitter gem.

From the other side. Eight reasons CIOs think developers are clueless. Worth reading. The end sums it up in a self-referential way:

Notes one CIO, on why each side can appear clueless: “Failure of the organization to provide transparency between business units to help everyone understand each other’s role in supporting the vision and mission.”

In plain view. I’m a sucker for applications that do one thing, but do it well. Plainview is a full screen web browser designed specifically for presentations. You can load it up with a sequence of URL and navigate them like a slideshow. I’m waiting for a chance to use it.

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Mar 26th, 2009
Rounded Corners 232 — Hardcopied

More cuke. Did I mention Cucumber before? I did. And I’m going to mention it again. Good write-up from Noel Rappin on using Cucumber for acceptance testing:

An easy-to-use tool that lets users read or create requirements that developers can build from and run as acceptance tests would be great. Somebody should definitely write a blog post about that.

Even better RDoc. I’m really digging the Rails searchable API, available online and offline. Better yet, SDoc is now available as a standalone Gem for use in your own project. Clean theme, awesome search, easy navigation (but mostly, search just works), and it can even link methods to their source code on Github.

Roy Okays POST. There’s just too much HTTP method fetishism going around. I understand the appeal, I don’t mind what other people do in the privacy of their own service invocation, and I can see how it acts as counter balance to the SOAP fetish of yore. But it confuses people who should know better, leading them down the path of really creative (read: tightly coupled, unnecessarily complex) verb-based protocols. Hopefully, not for long.

Books are the new LP. Emmet Connolly took his Instapaper backlog and hard copied it. And James Bridle’s My Life In Tweets has that distinct hardcover smell to it. Kindle be damned, books are still getting a lot of action.

Clouds as a Fad @FakeYossiVardi “Are cloud based services going to disappear by the summer?” What’s your take, how long will the hype last?

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