rbenv is the best way to set up a Ruby environment. It’s pretty essential since you can test your stack against different versions of Ruby and gems such as Rails.
… It’s pretty much like virtualenv for Python.
I don’t always use Ruby but when I do I use rbenv (said in the Dos Equis man voice).
Install rbenv and ruby-build via brew
brew update
brew install rbenv
Add rbenv init to your shell to enable shims and autocompletion.
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile
Select the version of Ruby to install. First list all the available versions
rbenv install -l
For example, let’s install the latest version in the 1.9.3 branch
export VERSION=1.9.3-p392
Build and install Ruby without documentation (saves time)
CONFIGURE_OPTS="--disable-install-doc" rbenv install $VERSION
Set the global Ruby version
rbenv global $VERSION
Disable ri and rdoc documentation for Gems. Add to ~/.gemrc
install: --no-rdoc --no-ri
update: --no-rdoc --no-ri
Or:
cat << EOT > ~/.gemrc
install: --no-rdoc --no-ri
update: --no-rdoc --no-ri
EOT
Bonus points. Install Rails
gem install rails
I bet this is the last Mac Pro. If you wanted to kill a product line, an “update” like today’s would be a good way to clear out parts and keep selling to a few desperate buyers for a bit longer without any real investment.
This is pathetic.
No. What’s pathetic is the sense of entitlement that certain Mac users have.
Relax, the Mac Pro will get a proper update next year. It’s as if the 2012 debut of an iPad with retina display, the debut of a MacBook Pro with retina display and new form factor for the future of that line and an upcoming iPhone 5 wasn’t good enough for some people.
Our pro customers are really important to us…don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year.
Apple hasn’t forgotten about ‘pros’. They fully understand their roots in the desktop publishing market and other professional industries. It’s just that Apple has changed as a company and is now the biggest technology company in the world with a different product line from 10 years ago. With that new found status comes priorities, increased shareholder interest and increased competition. Perhaps the picture of where Apple is now with the general computing market is where Apple always wanted to be when they first began in the late 70’s? I think so.
Nonetheless, Apple will always give you the power to create.
United States Senator Al Franken spoke to the American Bar Association last night on the topic of antitrust laws and privacy in the US. Page 18 to 27 discuss Google and Facebook.
… accumulating data about you isn’t just a strange hobby for these corporations. It’s their whole business model. And you are not their client. You are their product.
In an article that was originally more harshly entitled “Harder than opting out of TSA screening” judging from the permalink, Ben Brooks requests a cancellation of his of Readability publisher account:
I asked them to do this five days ago and not only has it not happened, but they seem to just be ignoring the request.
That seems awfully shady.
Writing an article entitled “You Can Sign-up, But You Can Never Leave” seems a bit spiteful to me. “Never” is a long time but according to Ben, “never” counts as longer than 2 business days.
Why the delay?
From Ben’s screen shot, he emailed Rich Ziade (not their Support staff I might add) on 6:58pm on Wednesday night directly. Let’s also consider that Rich Ziade has been on vacation since Wednesday night according to Chris Dary.
Had Ben had emailed their Support staff of 2 people his opt out would have been processed within a day or 2 according to Chris.
It all seems very spiteful towards Readability and their small team. Ben even went to the extent of requesting that his web site be blocked by Readabilility.
Personally I feel that previously being announced as iPhone App of the Week and launching an Android version of their app today is a big achievement for the small team at Readability. They don’t deserve to be accused of being called “shady”.
Chris Sauve on Android apologists:
Some folks have told me that it is unfair to compare iOS and Android on this metric because iOS is effectively just three devices (iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone), whereas Android is a multi-manufacturer ecosystem with dozens of devices. This line of thinking is extremely frustrating to me. Developers and users don’t care that the two platforms aren’t the same. Users want the most recent features and security updates, and will demand them either directly (by complaining) or indirectly (by making a different purchasing decision), and developers want a unified base to minimize testing. Android apologists can list off the differences between the two all day long but it doesn’t change the fact that more versions with smaller share is worse for, at the very least, developers and users.
For all the press that Android’s recent release Ice Cream Sandwich has received, the fact remains that from latest figures it only runs on 1.6% of devices.
iOS 5 is the operating system’s most important release as it offers over the air updates. The adoption curve for any major or minor release of iOS is now measured in days as opposed to weeks.
An interesting story found on Hacker News where a VPS running on Linode was compromised. Most interesting was Marek’s support ticket log since it sounds like he is well versed technically. Here is some of my analysis and thoughts.
From the article, the root passwords were changed through the “Linode Manager” which would initially suggest a compromised Linode Manager account.
The support person rules out the possibility of a brute force login attempt and Marek then asks for the records of Linode Manager logins and notices no false login records. This would indicate to me a security compromise across Linode Manager itself through an alternative access method. Linode has also just released a status update to this security incident which indicates that 8 customers had their Linode Manager account compromised which would indicate what I said is true. The Linode Manager compromise then meant the attacker was able to target customers who ran Bitcoin servers.
The support ticket then concludes with Linode admitting that yes, the Linode Manager was accessed through compromised credentials through Linode’s customer support interface. Yes, this does mean that any Linode customer was vulnerable.
Through further research, the Linode wiki mentions the functionality of the root password reset:
Log into the Linode Manager and select the Linode that you wish to reset the password on. Shut down the Linode and navigate to the “Rescue” tab. From this tab, you can use the “Reset Root Password” utility to enter your desired password and apply the change. After the task has completed, you may boot your Linode and log in.
This sounds like the Linode VPS root password is reset through single user mode.
Linode should immediately disable root password resets through the Linode Manager. Root passwords should only be reset by a customer service representative and only after the identidy of the authorized user for that Linode VPS has been confirmed.
Linode also states that they are further reviewing their policies which is the correct course of action.
“GitHub has changed the way that people approach development,” says Tom Preston-Werner, the company’s chief technology officer. “They realize that it doesn’t have to be so complex.”
From my experience, GitHub has really revolutionized the sharing of libraries and smaller code sets that you can easily clone and integrate into your own projects. Previously free software was about monolithic standalone projects (and larger code bases) and didn’t have the emphasis on smaller libraries. The structure of GitHub has also greatly simplified the process of contributing and importantly accepting code changes to an upstream project.
The other site I use often is Stack Overflow which in one sense further breaks down code in a social question and answer format. With Stack Overflow code is broken down into individual functions, modules and lines of code.
Interestingly the Wired article has a recent picture of Linus Torvalds and it looks like he is running Linux on an 11" MacBook Air.
In the wake of the recent controversy of Google bypassing the Safari browser setting for disabling third party cookies, I decided to review my settings in Firefox which is my desktop browser of choice and implement the same setting. I have been running this mode for over a week now without any noticeable issues with general web browsing.
John Gruber on Daring Fireball has a great response to John Battelle who argues that accepting third party cookies is how things are “done on the open web”.
In further research I was interested to learn that in the first formal specification for cookies, RFC 2109, identified the privacy threat of third party cookies and explicitly states that third party cookies should be disabled by default.
In section: 8.3 Unexpected Cookie Sharing:
A user agent should make every attempt to prevent the sharing of session information between hosts that are in different domains. Embedded or inlined objects may cause particularly severe privacy problems if they can be used to share cookies between disparate hosts. For example, a malicious server could embed cookie information for host a.com in a URI for a CGI on host b.com. User agent implementors are strongly encouraged to prevent this sort of exchange whenever possible.
RFC 2109 was superseded by RFC 2965 in October 2000 but contains the exact same section and wording.
Below is how you implement disabling of third party cookies in Firefox for Windows and Mac.
Windows
Open Options → Privacy → Select Firefox will: Use custom settings for history → Uncheck Accept third-party cookies
Mac
Open Preferences → Privacy → Select Firefox will: Use custom settings for history → Uncheck Accept third-party cookies
Julian Angwin of the The Wall Street Journal writes:
Thursday’s announcement means they will work to begin adopting and honoring the [‘Do Not Track’] system within nine months, according to the coalition, the Digital Advertising Alliance, which represents over 400 companies.
This is a big step in the right direction for user privacy.
Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, said the company is pleased to join “a broad industry agreement to respect the ‘Do Not Track’ header in a consistent and meaningful way that offers users choice and clearly explained browser controls.”
I’m pretty sure this is mostly in reaction to all the recent bad PR that Google has received but nonetheless it is good to have Google on board.
Google is expected to enable do-not-track in its Chrome Web browser by the end of this year.
That would be great to see.
The video’s slow reveal approach just reeked of ‘hoax’ or ‘viral ad campaign’. The subtle facial language smirks.
In a quick search on the web I couldn’t find anything which officially tied the campaign to Dell but the production values of the video indicate that a fair amount of funding must have gone into the project. To me that ruled out the chance that this would have been a random creator or a competitor’s smear campaign. The marketing department at Dell hired an ad company and approved this.
A quick whois search also shows that the domain claytonsotos.com was registered on February 2nd this year. The domain visualinnovators.com was only registered a few days ago on February 19th. A Tumblr account for Clayton Sotos exists with posts dating back to January this year.
I understand the concepts of a viral ad campaign but to me this comes across as tasteless. Is Visual Innovators the first in the series of a tasteless viral ad campaign from Dell?
Josh Smith relays his experience moving from programming in Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation to Apple’s iOS:
When you move to iOS, you will need to leave behind most of what you know about UI programming from the .NET world. Fundamental things like object-oriented programming, virtual methods, properties, and loops are still relevant, and having knowledge of those things is essential. But knowledge alone won’t be enough to get you up and writing an iOS app.
You will need to re-map your existing concepts and knowledge onto a new programming language, UI platform, APIs, operating system, IDE, keyboard shortcuts, debugger, error messages, etc. This takes time, and can be frustrating for people who are accustomed to being competent and productive in another environment.
It may take any decent programmer a week or two to pick up the basics of Objective-C or any language for that matter. The next steps and real challenges involve learning the frameworks and API’s. There’s a certain amount of basic knowledge you need to commit to memory and beyond that comes expertise.
What defines you as a software engineer is where you decide to devote your time and energy. Your brain has a finite capacity so you need to make conscious decisions on what you want to fill it with. You need to believe that taking those next steps will get you somewhere you want to go.
To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings. While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form. So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.
It should be noted that the default setting on Safari is to block cookies “from third parties and advertisers” unless a user interacts with the third party in some way. This is a perfectly fair default which increases the privacy for users and does not break any obvious web browsing functionality.
On mobile Safari (on the iPhone and iPad) a similar default is in place, albiet with a more cryptic wording. Theoretically, cookies from third parties and advertisers should be blocked in a similar manner as with desktop Safari.
Is it fair that Google purposefully circumvented these default privacy settings using a browser exploit? Definitely not.
Expect to see Apple to address this legitimate browser exploit in the next security updates to OS X and iOS.
UPDATE: Jonathan Mayer, the grad student at Stanford whose research brought this issue to the WSJ, has recently put up a detailed post with further technical details.
“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
A fair and reasonable response from Apple.
In terms of usability and actual user comprehension, I believe the alert box is the best way to ask users that a certain permission (such as permissions for Location and Twitter account details) is required. The main difference with iOS and Android is that iOS asks you for permission when you are performing a task which requires the permission at that time. If you never use a particular feature of an app which requires the Address Book permissions, you won’t be asked for that permission. Android asks you for permission(s) upon app installation which are usually blindly clicked through by users who just want to start using the app they downloaded.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
So Apple is the only participating technology company in the FLA and somehow people still believe Apple is the enemy?
The newly announced Droid 4 by Motorola ships with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. I guess the “4” in Droid 4 doesn’t refer to Android 4.
The Samsung Galaxy Note (that 5.3" screen phone that advertised during the Super Bowl) also ships with Android 2.3.