PLANET Ruby on Rails

This one's a quickie: Thomas, with a little help from his friends, has put out the first alpha for Scripty2 (aka Scriptaculous 2.0).

While there are lots of things missing (autocompleter, etc.), it's pretty damn stable. That's what we've been using for Twistori, the various Zeitgeists, and of course, Freckle time tracking.

Thomas has written a blog post about the update, to which I'd like to add:

I’m proud to see that more people are forking and using my little planetoid, a rails application for building small communities online, with feed aggregation. I started building this feed aggregator as we needed a planet for our Spain.rb association of Spanish rubyists, but I wanted to keep in mind that if this was helpful to a group like us, it could help other groups with similar needs.

Hace un par de días contraté el servicio de internet móvil por modem 3G (GPRS) de Simyo, la tarifa de 5G al mes que viene con un módem Alcatel HSPA, para poder trabajar este verano desde la playa. En principio se supone que es un módem USB plug-and-play, pero en la práctica tuve algún problemilla para hacerlo funcionar en el macbook. Finalmente, googleando un poco y fijándome en los parámetros de configuración al instalarlo en un ordenador con windows, pude ver qué le faltaba a la instalación en el macbook.

La instalación es sencilla: enchufas el modem USB, y aparece una unidad de disco. Dentro hay un instalador (.PKG), doble clic, instalar y reiniciar la máquina. A partir de ahí basta con lanzar el programa HSPA USB MODEM, te pide el PIN de la tarjeta del módem, lo introduces y en principio pulsarías Conectar y ya está. Pero esto es en Windows, en el macbook está mal hecha la instalación y falta configurar un perfil de conexión.

Para ello clica en el último icono de abajo de abajo a la izquierda y selecciona “Perfil de conexión” en el menú desplegado:

Hate cuss words? Avert thine eyes! (What are you doing reading this blog, though, I'd be interested to know. Oh right. You already looked away. I'm just holding a conversation with myself. Ladeeda...

George Carlin is one of my heroes: hilarious, self-deprecating, edgy without being bitter, envelope-pushing without resorting to valueless shock, remarkably poetic, a dancer with dirty words, and, of course, in possession of an amazing voice I could listen to all day.

He's also dead. Goddamnit.

Use a virtual attribute to implement a simple tagging feature. In this episode I show you how to assign virtual attributes through a callback instead of a setter method.

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be conducting the morning tutorial session at the upcoming Windy City Rails Conference.

It’s a 3-hour tutorial called REST 101: Best Practices for Rails Developers.

If you’re relatively new to Rails, especially if you’re currently a .NET or Java developer who’s trying to figure out how to really get started with Rails, this tutorial is for you. If you’re a more seasoned developer, then you should still attend the conference. There’s a great lineup of speakers, all-day coding sessions, and more.

After reviewing the feedback on the two recent security announcements we’ve made a few minor changes to the Ruby on Rails security policy.

The first change we’ve made is to include more information on what to do if you don’t receive a response from the security team. In general reports to the security address should receive a response within 24 hours, however the sheer volume of spam to the address can, and has, lead to messages being caught in spam filters. In the event you don’t receive a response there are now two direct-emails to the people currently looking after security reports. That page will be kept up to date as responsibilities are reassigned.

The second change is to more clearly outline the announcement policy for rails vulnerabilities. In short, we notify vendor-sec ahead of the public notification to allow time for people distributing rails to prepare packages for their distributions. Then when the time has come for public notification an email is sent to the security announcement list. Finally the announcement is posted to this blog.

Metric Fu is a compilation of several tools to help find areas of code that could be improved. In this episode I show you how to setup this tool on the railscasts.com source code.

This week I’m happy to tell you about a new set of articles which will be appearing here on the Rails blog called “Community Highlights”. This new series will feature people/projects/sites from the Rails community that may deserve a little extra recognition.

This week, we’re going to start with a few people who received awards on stage at Railsconf 2009, this years Ruby Heroes.

Brian Helmkamp

The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries -- certainly a grand adventure!

— Richard Feynman, 1955 address to the National Academy of Sciences (full text)

Most of you git geeks probably already knew this, but recently I learned how to make git a little more usable for me.

One of the things I appreciate about Subversion’s command line interface is that, usually, you don’t have to type the entire command name. As long as you enter enough of the command so it can’t be confused with another subversion command, it will work.

For example, instead of doing:

Thinking is supposed to be a question mark. But most people treat it like a period.

Terry Pratchett's always written about witches and, by extension, the essence of humanity.

But his Wee Free Men trilogy is the best yet, and the most true to life. He names the fundamentals that separate a fearsome, clever, Headology-wielding, seldom-magic-using witch from a superstitious, ignorant normal person: "First Sight and Second Thoughts."

A Denial of Service vulnerability has been found and fixed in ruby. The vulnerability is due to the BigDecimal method mishandling certain large input values and can cause the interpreter to crash. This could be used by an attacker to crash any ruby program which creates BigDecimal objects based on user input, including almost every Rails application. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE name CVE-2009-1904.

For upgrade instructions and information on affected ruby versions please see the ruby security team’s announcement.

All users are advised to upgrade their ruby installations immediately to avoid this problem. In the event that you are unable to upgrade your ruby installation, or are using an out-of-maintenance ruby version, there is a workaround available on github. You can either install it as a gem, or simply copy the file bigdecimal-segfault-fix.rb into config/initializers of your rails application.

Use checkboxes to select multiple records and edit them all in one form as shown in this episode. With virtual attributes you can even edit values relatively!

“this article shows how I used test-driven development tools and processes on a Greasemonkey script.” Though it also includes free ninjas.

I almost never link blog, but these tabs have been sitting open in my browser for ages because I thought they were truly worth sharing:

Enjoy!

Back to book layouting for me...