tech

Nuclear Elephant: iPhone Wipe

Nuclear Elephant: iPhone Wipe: Since my posts regarding the iPhone restore mode being insufficient for wiping data (and Apple’s own refurbishing process also being insufficient), many have emailed me asking for instructions on how to properly wipe personal data off of the iPhone. I’ve been very quiet about how to properly lift data in a forensic manner, as my goal is to avoid seeing a bunch of evidence erasers pop up in the wild (I’ve already been approached by Symantec about this). What I will share, however, is the way in which I wipe my own devices before I resell them, which I believe the consumer has a right to do. Mind you, I make no guarantees about this and accept no responsibility for you hosing your iPhone. This is what works for me. [Anyone try this?]

Title Case for Ruby

Title Case for Ruby:

There’s been a great response to my request to convert Title Case, Gruber’s nifty perl-based title-casing tool into Ruby so the rest of the world (just kidding, Perl people!) can make use of it.

Here are the initial responders:

Source: The Hivelogic Narrative

Taking Things Apart

Taking Things Apart:

John August, asked by a working screenwriter how he can keep improving throughout his career:

My advice for you is to dedicate one day a week to disassembling good movies. Take existing films (and one-hour dramas) and break them down to cards. Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship. Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.

I think this true for any craft.

[It’s a great way to hone one’s touch and grow new skills. I especially like doing it as a group exercise to learn what others see in something that I don’t.]
Source: Daring Fireball

merb-slices

merb-slices are “Little slices of MVC cake”. These are self contained merb apps with models, controlers, views and assets that you can distribute as rubygems. You can mount a merb-slice at a specific point in your router definition and you can override any part of the slice up in your main app. So in a way these are similar to what Rails-Engines promise, except merb-slices are built into the framework and will not break when merb itself is updated.

Check out the tutorial/screencast for a peek at how merb-slices work.

[Nice. Merb continues to impress.]
Source: Brainspl.at

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes: This, in many ways, is like a tornado. Our ability to predict them sucks. Our responses are crude and they are quite damaging. However, predicting these Internet traffic events isn’t even possible — there are no building weather patterns or early warning signs. Instead we are forced to focus on different techniques for stability and safety. The idea of a DoS, a DDoS or the sometimes similar signature of a sudden popularity spike doesn’t increase my heart rate anymore — it’s just another day on the job. However, I thought I’d share the four guidelines that I believe are key to my sanity in these situations [Good article… from someone who knows. I worked with Theo & Co. back in ’00-’01. They do this stuff all day every day.]
Source: The Scriptures of Jesus

Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places)

Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places): All of these bogus scaling wars and indented code battles are a huge waste of time. Do we still have to be better than each other in 2008? No way, Rufus said, “Be excellent to each other.” [Wow, that would be awesome and awful at the same time. Awesome because less is more, awful because it could easily cause things to stagnate for everyone. But still.]
Source: hackety org

Hey Rails, nice Rack!

Hey Rails, nice Rack!: So i’ve spent this week hacking on Rails, specifically going spelunking in ActionPack and porting Merb’s rack machinery to rails. I figure that merb is a very nice experimentation ground and decided it was time to give some love back to the framework that inspired merb. [Nice stuff. I worked with Engine Yard not too long ago. Recommended.]
Source: Brainspl.at