Thanks to @jodosha efforts and praising the
former Javaday event, now renamed into codemotion
that brought in Rome many Ruby developers from Milan, Padua and other parts of
Italy – the first official Ruby Social Club in Rome has been a great success.
Of course, officialty is measured only in the amount of twitter spam
posted about it! :-): earlier RSCs in Rome go back in time to
2006
organized by current mikamai members and more meetups
promoted by @jekoin
2007.
What matters is that there’s a community, there’s a passion, and there’s love
to share knowledge - no matter who holds the meetings, the important thing is
that they’re being held :-).
The event was simple and direct - some beers first, then my keynote on RVM and
Ruby interpreters, then Luca’s one announcing his
minege.ms project and after real social networking
:-). I met @gravityblast after much time we
didn’t meet, knew the PIP group and met
@svarione,
@punkmanit,
@leonardoperna,
@riggasconi,
@ogeidix and other smart people. Moreover, we
spent quite some nice time together, making up a really lousy and funny
week-end. Of course, huge kudos to @nhaima’s car
- that tirelessly carried us around Rome for two days :-)
Now, looking forward to the next meetup, thanks everyone who participed,
who offered me beers and, last but not least, thanks to
@etapeta for bringing me in time at the meeting -
you’re the real hero :-).
I spent the last two days trying to set up the Aluminium Mac Mini (rev. 4,1)
as a home NAS server with encrypted storage, and I
wanted a BSD system on it. There’s already an
embedded OpenBSD onto the soekris gateway, and another companion would have
been nice. :-)
FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 boots but, due to the same bug, doesn’t recognize any
SATA drive nor any USB
umass device;
NetBSD 5.1 boots fine, handles SATA disks via the generic pciide driver (no DMA, thus quite slow) but, unluckily, doesn’t handle
the BCM57762 ethernet controller. I tried with quick
and dirty patches to bring the
bge driver up to date with -current, but still no luck: the MII link detection works, the card transmits but
doesn’t receive. The sdmmc controller as well works with -current but not
with 5.1-RELEASE. ACPI works correctly;
OpenBSD 4.8 boots, can access the SATA drives
without DMA, and recognizes the bge network card, but
exposes the very same behaviour as NetBSD 5.1 with the -current driver fitted
in;
DragonFlyBSD 2.8.2 doesn’t even enter kernel mode, I suspect
due to ACPI bugs;
PureDarwin didn’t
inspire me too much, due to the many blocking issues.
All of them support encrypted storage, I built up a NetBSD CGD disk flawlessly onto dk wedges; FreeBSD has got the
interesting gbde(8) and
geli(8) GEOM-based tools that I wasn’t able to test, while OpenBSD
supports crypto via a softraid
personality. Unluckily, support for the, nowadays, exotic Apple hardware is
a no-brainer.
Out of curiosity, I was looking how a browser interacts with the Google Instant
backend. While looking at the HTTP exchanges via Firebug, I first asked myself
why they’re encoding HTML and JS with \xYY escape sequences, then why the
very same JS functions are sent back and forth on every request, and later I
stumbled upon the google.com/s?q=QUERY JSONp service.
Give it a query, and it’ll return the suggested related phrases that are used
to build the menu under the search input while using suggestions and/or instant
(didn’t dig too much into all the other parameters).
Anyway, what’s interesting is that, of course, the suggestions are customized
on a per-country basis. To show the differences explicitly, let’s ask the
service the simplest query possible, a:
aer lingus, aib, argos, amazon.co.uk, argos.ie, asos, aa route planner, amazon, aldi, aib internet banking
Lastly, because I’ve been there lately and it has been a profound experience, Cuba:
asus, antonio maceo, amor, amigos, ain, antivirus, avira, alba, aduana, as
I’m sure @nhaima is smiling while seeing these words, because hell yeah, over
there they really google antivirus software (avira is one of them) a lot
because it’s a world without the Internet, thus without free software: you’re
condemned in using Windows stuff, and you take what you pay for. Antonio Maceo
has been an hero of the 19th century revolution, and it’s in the heart of Cuban
people. Amor, Amigos! :-)
On July 22nd 2010, Mikamai hosted a Ruby Social Club in
Milan, where
nearly 50 people attended watching five speeches about Ruby, Web development
and Startups. I was glad to be one of the speakers, and I presented a set of
Rails plugins we spinned off from our latest (and
greatest) project: Panmind (read more on the about
page) and released as Open Source on
GitHub.
The keynote is split in two parts: the first one explains why you should
follow the sane software engineering principle of writing modular and
interest-separated code and then how you could (and should) extract it from
your Rails application by decoupling configuration and then prepare for the
Open Source release, by writing documentation AND presenting to a Ruby
event so, hopefully, someone else will write unit tests! :-)
We released an SSL helper plugin that
implements filters (like Rails’ ssl_requirement) but also named route helpers:
no more <%= url_for :protocol => 'https' %>! You’ll have something like
plain_root_url and ssl_login_url - like they were built into the framework.
Then, a Google Analytics ultra-simple
plugin, with <noscript> support, a couple of test helpers and an
embryo
of a JS Analytics framework - hopefully it’ll evolve into a complete jQuery
plugin. Then, a ReCaptcha interface,
with AJAX validation support and eventually a
Zendesk interface for Rails.
As most of you already know, there are two open, critical
vulnerabilities in iPhone
OS versions from 3.x up. The first one resides in the Compact Font Format
component of the PDF renderer and the second one an error in the kernel,
allowing attackers to bypass the sandbox (SeatBelt) inside which applications
are run on the iPhone.
The two vulnerabilities were discovered by @comex,
@chpwn and other people.
Only few weeks later the .lnk design
flaw on windows (guys, you’re using
LoadLibraryW to load a damn icon!), these iPhone OS vulnerabilities are even
more interesting, because of the way the release is being handled by the
community and the vendor.
I spent 3 hours last night trying to find detalied information about the bug,
and except confused (and propagandistic) blog posts the only bit of
information is in this tweet,
and in the actual pdf exploit running on
jailbreakme.com. Where are the security lists
posts? Where is the CVE? Even the CERT still doesn’t say anything about this
vulnerability.
There’s something terribly wrong going on: the
cat-and-mouse-game that is making
the iphone-dev team researchers not disclose any
of the vulnerabilities they find has become very dangerous for end users: an
exploit that allows remote code execution and jail escape without no
interaction whatsoever by the user, carried via something that’s used to
consider “safe” (a PDF file) is what is called a critical hole; while the
exploit that uses it is called a 0-day. It’s the first time in my life I see
a 0-day packaged and distributed explicitly via a web site.
In a nutshell, it adds support for unmarshaling 1.9 strings, and implements the
last missing type (TYPE_LINK) that was missing from the code. Tests still
lack, can someone help ? :-)
Added TYPE_LINK, needed because of how ruby 1.9 marshals strings.
In 1.9, Ruby marshals the string encoding in the binary output, and
uses an Ivar construct (TYPE_IVAR) to wrap the string and adds an
"encoding" instance variable (notice: without a leading @) whose
value is the encoding itself.
While the Ivar code worked correctly, the values of the encodings
are actually *strings*, that are being reused via the TYPE_LINK
construct, that wasn't implemented.
So, the get() and put() primitives are being used to store not
only tuples {id, sym} for symbols, but now store either
{{symbol, ID}, sym}
OR
{{value, ID}, val}
for the other types that use TYPE_LINK.
By reading the ruby marshal.c source code, it looks like that MANY
data types save their values in the arg->data hashtable, but by
inspecting the binary marshal output of, e.g, an array of floats,
links aren't used.
Thus, in this unmarshaler, links are considered, for now, only for
strings and regexes.
If your CouchDB 0.11 gives you the “Invalid UTF-8 JSON” error on every POST
or PUT you issue to it, make sure that in your
$prefix/usr/lib/couchdb/erlang/lib there aren’t leftovers from previous
installations.
On our dev server, I found there two directories
(“couch-0.10” and “mochiweb-r97”) from the old 0.10 setup that were causing
this issue.
This applies if you upgraded from source, as you’ve probably did, because there
aren’t too many packages of CouchDB 0.11 as of April 2010 :-).
From the stage of web2.0 Expo 2008 in San Francisco, Clay
Shirky talks about the social revolution carried by
web2.0 into contemporary society, from TV to Wikipedia and World of Warcraft.
And twitter still had to be globally recognized, in 2008.
Original video file and related discussion here
(courtesy of blip.tv). Score: 5 (insightful)
For those who understand italian, I’ve just published
an article on therubymine.com on the
upcoming Ruby on Rails framework release,
version 3.0: the big news is the merger with another ruby web framework, merb.
The sad conclusion: “humans are such herd animals”
The good conclusion: “virality has always existed, it’s not an invention
of Web2.0. Social networking is just a powerful tool for everyone that wants to
change the world”
The mean conclusion: “how much does it take to get people from their
computers to the real world after a virtual ‘heads up’ by some ‘dancing man’?”
