Use WordPress? Secure it!

by | Apr 17, 2008 | General

I got a reminder last weekend about just how critical it is to secure your WordPress-based Blog. Mine was hacked… My own fault, to be sure… Turns out that the installation scripts can be very easily hacked and SQL-injected. The end result is that your...

Starting The RDoc Server for Ruby on Rails

by | Feb 13, 2008 | Rails, Ruby

I don’t know why this isn’t better documented or stated anywhere so I’ll just iterate it here. If you want to peruse the documentation for Rails and your installed Gems type the following gem server And in your terminal prompt you should see Starting...

Zed Shaw: Rails is a Ghetto

by | Jan 4, 2008 | J2EE, Java, Rails, Ruby

Mongrel Developer/Creator, Zed Shaw, cut loose on the Ruby and Rails communities in a recent posting to his website. He gives some interesting insights into who the major players are, and cuts through some of the hype surrounding rails. While caustic in his delivery,...

Next-Gen Game Costs: A Burden on Development

by | Dec 30, 2007 | General

According to BBC, an average PS3 game costs nearly $15 million to make – and that’s before any marketing is done for the game. Not only is this bad news for gamers, as it almost ensures our store shelves will be stocked with sequel after buyer-recognizable...

Adding to the Ruby Library Path

by | Oct 20, 2007 | Programming, Ruby

My friend Lori noted a great way to Add to the Ruby Library Path. She also noted that I had no way to put comments on my blog. Users would get sent to a page telling them to log in, but I never provided the login link Fixed — check out the “Links”...

How Ruby Finds Libraries

by | Oct 20, 2007 | Programming, Ruby

In Ruby not library management is not always as simple as running gem install. Some Ruby code is distributed simply as libraries. So where do you put these libraries? The clue is in the Ruby $LOAD_PATH variable. irb(main):001:0> puts $LOAD_PATH...

Ruby Net::HTTP Vulnerability

by | Oct 9, 2007 | Programming, Ruby

I just saw on the Codegear Ruby newsgroups that a vulnerability on the net/https library was reported. Basically the library doesn’t validate the server certificate CN (Common Name). You can read the details here:...

How to Format Ruby Code for Blogs

by | Sep 23, 2007 | Mac OS X, Ruby

I saw this article on formatting ruby code for blogs. Nice article, but the code is Linux/KDE-specific. Also, OS X threw an error about the order of the require statements. Being that I use OS X (and so should you) I needed to make a couple of changes to the code that...

How fast does your Ruby run?

by | Sep 22, 2007 | Mac OS X, Ruby

Here’s a fun article on the Ruby Forum where someone provided a simple benchmarking utility. Several posters (including me) have run this to see how well Ruby runs on their system relative to other posters. n = 1_000_000 start_time = Time.now for i in 1..n t =...