A wayward journey into the depths of sanity
Sometimes you have to kill the sacred cows in the room to get the job done. Some times the cows kill you.
I think that we have moved past “ruby does not scale” or “rails does not scale”. However the feedback that I have gotten over the last few months is more along the lines of “Rails is just kids, hackers and rockstars. It’s not a serious contender”.
One of the perceived issues with the increased use of social networks and pervasive online activities is eroding of personal privacy. Some would have us believe that there will be no privacy in the future, and we just need to accept that fact.
One of my favorite linux distros has been archlinux since the early oughts. It’s default install is super lightweight, and it’s configuration system is a joy (especially after working with several distros with many rc directories and hundreds of symlinks).
One of the things that I like to do it launch my VM's with out a GUI - it takes a little less resources, and it does not clutter up my Mac's desktop with windows that I do not need. It's been hard to do in the past.
I just had an interesting woops. Installed iPhone SDK onto my snow lepoard machine (for the first time) and it added a PATH= to the /etc/profile file. That took a little working around!
One of the tools that I use on an almost daily basis is the Binary Search. I think that this tool is one of the ways that a good troubleshooter seems so much more efficient then a mediocre troubleshooter.
People are very poor at risk analysis. As such, people “in the biz” come up with metrics to determine ROI. This might seem cold hearted. Since money is not infinite, we need to have some tool that we can use to measure the effectiveness of each dollar that we put into mitigating risks.
So, I’ve had this curse since I was a kid. I just cannot sleep sometimes. I’m still really tired and groggy, I just can’t sleep.
In a recent blog post, Brian Krebs mentions the following:
I also urge users to segment their systems so that important data files are on a separate chunk of hard drive space than the Windows operating system, which tends to make restoring backups a far simpler affair.
rvm (ruby version manager) is a kick ass tool that I use on a daily basis. It allows you to install lots of ruby versions, gems, gem sets, and what have you. You can test your app against new (or old) versions of ruby easily. You can also use it to manage rubies on a production system, for all users of that system.
One of the interesting paradigms in the technology field now days is “cloud”. I think that I have seen it bandied about more then “web 2.0” a few years ago. It’s hit required buzz word compliance status in market-speak. I believe that is it over used, misunderstood and used to mislead. Let’s cut through the hyperbole and see what is really going on.
One of the things that I get to do is advise folks on web application architecture and backend process optimization. All of that is to say that I need to know how certain versions of things like ruby perform under different loads, and be able to advise people on when and where to deploy each one. For testing ruby and ruby programs, RVM is invaluable. I’ll take you through how I tested a slew of ruby version automagically in this article.
Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.
After fooling around with creating a VM for the RailsBridge Bugmash insta-server, I decided that it was just too unwieldy. There are simply too many moving parts to make a small VM. That got me thinking…
I have run into this three or four times now. Each time takes some googling, and that is counterproductive. So here you go. For all of the times you get a new mac, or install a new version of OSX, and you start seeing weirdness in terminal.app while SSH’d into a *nix box..
