Monthly Archives: August 2010

Playing With Rails

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I need to prepare for my upcoming speaking engagement, so I’m playing around with Ruby on Rails today. Excellent opportunity to learn a new web technology. No, the speaking gig has nothing to do with RoR: this is pure procrastination.

Learned a couple of interesting things:

  • When you run gem outdated on a stock Snow Leopard system, it pulls information from an outdated source which makes it fail to run the next time. Only successfully updating RubyGems itself solves this issue.
  • Nobody ever tells you that after sudo gem update rubygems-update, you have to run sudo /usr/bin/update_rubygems. Otherwise, it will keep using the old version and a) can’t update sqlite3-ruby which needs the newer RubyGems and b) will try to keep accessing the outdated source.
  • When you want to use Aptana Studio with Eclipse 3.6 (Helios), make sure to install the plugin in the Eclipse installation itself, not under your own user account. This seems to be a bug in Eclipse itself that affects all plugins: if installed under a user account (for instance because the application installation directory is not writable by the user), the plugins don’t show up in the IDE and can’t be used.

There is no better way to procrastinate than to go learn something, and there is no better way to put off learning something than to mess around with tools.

Speaking at SofTECH

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I will be speaking next Wednesday at the monthly meeting of SofTECH. The topic will be Security and Open Source Software:

Many software choices are available to professionals who need to run applications in their business. Some of these will be delivered by conventional vendors who have full control over the product and its development. However, over the past decade many Open Source applications have emerged as viable alternatives, developed using an open process by volunteers from many different companies.

Speaking from his experience as an Open Source Software developer, Sander will compare some security aspects of Open Source and Closed Source software, likely debunking some myths along the way. We will examine the security vulnerability mitigation process used by the Apache Software Foundation and discuss how an open development process can provide enhanced security.

See the meeting page for details. An RSVP link is at the bottom of the page.