Security Tweets

No, not TWITs, but Infosec folks who are on Twitter. I might be pegging my SMS tolerance, but what the heck. Mediaphyter has collected some prominent ones.

See you in 160 characters or less!

Rails on Ubuntu

Aagh. Ubuntu has let me down (doesn't happen often). An install of everything Ruby like so:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

completes just fine, but gems is broken when you try to run an application:

ruby script/server

I found a great page to help here.

Rails

So I'm starting to learn Rails. I'm trying to get my head around MVC (model, view, controller) programming, and Java isn't helping. The first notable thing I've come across is that the testing subsystem is automatically generated when you create models. They're stubs, but filling them out before populating your models appears to be a way to write specifications into the testing harness before you actually create the code, which then forces you to wire the code to meet the tests (instead of the other way 'round).

There's some application here for high-assurance programming... Perhaps if a formal modeling system kicks out Ruby test cases instead of (or in addition to) ML we'd have something...

Charity of the Month

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). No foolin'.

They work to protect your rights in the digital domain. Because you didn't wake up this morning and decide you wanted to do less with your CDs, DVDs and other media.