tech

Prepare Your App for Rails 4 and Ruby 1.9

Prepare Your App for Rails 4 and Ruby 1.9:

The Rails master branch was moved to 4.0 two months ago, almost 6 years to the date of the announcement of Rails 1.0, and the primary cited reason for doing so is to get everyone using Rails on Ruby 1.9.

[I understand the lack of migration all too well. Some codebases require a tremendous amount of work to move forward, and may not be worth the investment from a business point of view. But at some point, that app either needs to be sunset or worked on. Now’s the time to decide which category it fits into.]

Source: Union Station

Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web

Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web:

Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness.

Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript:

Going back to the larger issue, Rails definitely went off the rails. Cleaner, more modular APIs are an important goal, but they’re way less important than speedy development, a modern feature set — why is Rails not staying up to date with HTML5 the way it did with Ajax? — and, above all else, programmer happiness. The Merb integration rewrite was a giant, time-wasting threadjack with only a few small payoffs, and DHH, who wrote two whole books about why you should turn down feature requests, should have nixed the whole thing. I’m still going to keep using Rails, because it’s still a terrific framework, and I still enjoy it a great deal, but I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Rails 3 is a step backwards from Rails 2, and that Bundler, although very useful, is clearly not even close to finished. They say they’re at version 1.0, but I don’t think they’re fooling anybody.

[Lots of food for thought… in the end though the ten year old in me really enjoyed this. Good one Yehuda! (And everyone, try and remember that this is a rant… it gonna be extremely one sided. I’m not endorsing anything here. Just listening to what people are saying.]

Not Just Safari

Not Just Safari:

Dean Hachamovitch, vice president of Internet Explorer:

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9’s Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.

We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.

Guess what the answer is. Just guess.

[Google continues to redefine “evil”. They’ve completely lost their way.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Samsung is wrong about TV

Samsung is wrong about TV:

And that basically is the business Appe is in, taking advantage of people who employ obsolete ways of thinking. TVs are not ultimately about picture quality. In fact picture quality isn’t even number one. Integration, connections — that’s the first thing. If I can get great picture quality, and you can be sure Apple will give it to us (probably made by Samsung) that’s fine. But first I want to use the tool the way I want to use it.

Source: Scripting News

Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled

Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled:

Yes, the price is $4.95, but nonetheless, a long-lasting, efficient LED bulb for $4.95 is a win! The announcement was just made a few minutes ago, as Lemnis unveiled three new lines of its Pharox LED replacement bulb. The 200-lumen Pharox BLU is the bulb selling for $4.95, and the 350-lumen PHarox Blu is selling for $6.95. They are, apparently, only sold through the Pharox website.

[That’s a small step. More please.]

Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security

Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security:

An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail, online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.

The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) to be presented at a cryptography conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million 1024-bit RSA keys published online. By subjecting what’s known as the “modulus” of each public key to an algorithm first postulated more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek mathematician Euclid, the researchers looked for underlying factors that were used more than once. Almost 27,000 of the keys they examined were cryptographically worthless because one of the factors used to generate them was used by at least one other key.

“The fact is, if these numbers had the entropy that they were supposed to have, the probability of even one of these events happening in 7 million public keys would be vanishingly small,” James P. Hughes, an independent cryptographer who participated in the research, told Ars. “We thought that was rather startling.”

[Oy.]