Make Love not War

Hackers vs CarrierIQ

2011-12-16

Did “hackers” lose their edge in CarrierIQ case? So maybe stop labeling good engineers as “hackers”?

For the past year I was watching the rise of “hacker” label applied to software engineers. First time I saw it on StackOverflow/YC job boards it amused me. Today it still strikes me that companies would use this word to attract “exceptional” developers. But this post is not about it. Here’s the issues:

How in hell did we have CarrierIQ installed on our mobile phones for YEARS and none of those “hackers” could track it down?

I’m sure it was not a secret and certain people knew but it takes a certain critical mass for the media to pick something up. But what happened to all those people who used to sniff traffic with Ethereal all night long? So why don’t we stop this lingo and start calling people properly. If you hack someones computer – you are called a “hacker”, if you code well – you are a “good engineer”

p.s. Maybe there are almost no “exceptional” individuals left in networking area since the hype mobed to Mobile/Social/Design?

RubyStand is A Gallery in Rails

2011-12-08

As an avid photographer I always try to keep with latest trends in areas around photography and photo management. Several months ago I decided to move my old (plain html + images) gallery of family photos to somethin more modern. I also like to customize things so I started looking at Rails gallery app and found … almost nothing. What a shame I thought. So being a Rails developer and one free weekend later and you get this: RubyStand

RubyStand is build on top of Rails3 and uses a plain file system to store photos (I plan to extend it later to support S3 to make it easier on traffix to the site). Core RubyStand featues are

database free
relies on plain image files on the disk
defines albums as sets of images
each album has title, year and a description
expects thumbnails along with normal files (will be automated in future versions)
can read basic metadata about albums and photos from YAML files

I have had it deployed for my personal photos for several months and it was working flawlessly so far.

OK Computer Lives

2011-10-09

I know the title of this post is a bit cryptic. It is not about computers but about Radiohead’s album called “Ok Computer” and “In Rainbows” and music.

I generally try to keep blog posts to technology but sometimes I just have to share amazing music facts and tunes. I have always been a big fan of Radiohead especially “Ok Computer” album. It had a perfect mix of slow, moody and downbeat rock which was soooo un-pop. It was literally a biggest and brightest albums of late 90s. It also was a cornerstone of Radiohead’s music career. After “Ok Computer” they shifted into more electro-sounding music. It is not like their music changed, they just started to use other instruments and techniques which was not to my liking.

Fast-forward 11 years to 2008 and a release of double CD album “In Rainbows” which put everything back on track. The music, the melody, the acoustic guitar – everything is back, tuned to perfection, spiced up by Thom’s voice. Recently I re-listened to “In Rainbows” and tried to get more information on songs, where they came from and what they mean. And it turns out that one of my favourite songs “Last Flowers to the Hospital” is an outtake from the “Ok Computer” sessions. Which expianed a lot especially the resemblance of two albums and matching music styles. I highly recommend Radiohead to anyone who is not familiar with their work. Try “Ok Computer” and “In Rainbows” and you’ll like them.

Here are some YouTube clips you should watch:

Amazing Dribbbling

2011-09-05

There’s an interesting website that looks very useful for amateur (like myself) as well as seasoned web designers. It is called Dribbble

So what’s the idea behind the site? It is simple: you create small (400x300 pixels) ‘shots’ of your work and post it for everyone. Shots are small screenshots posted by members to show what they are working on. Some have called Dribbble “Twitter for creatives.” Shots are to Dribbble as tweets are to Twitter. People post sketches, logos, web site mockups, iPhone and iPad UIs, buttons, badges, typography, wallpapers, photos and even napkin doodles.

The site itself is themed around basketball with players split into Rookies, Prospects and All-Stars. The shots can be “rebound' meaning that the ‘shot’ was changed based on the feedback. Each shot can be ‘Liked’ and commented on.

The site membership is invite only and you get to ‘draft’ people you know as members. There’s also a ‘PRO’ membership which gives you nice statistics, ability to attach larger images, have a ‘Hire Me’ badge next to your profile avatar and more. There’s also a nice JSON/REST API in case you want to integrate your (or others) work with your blog.

You can find my work here: Zepplock

Paper Taxi

2011-08-23

Couple of days ago I decided to find a wiki based engine for Rails 3 and make an app with the intent to store loosely connected personal knowledge base. After searching for rails3+wiki and miserably failing at it I decided to see if there are any simple rails3+cms kind of apps. I have compiled the following list:

After trying those out for a while I realized that all of them are BLOATED. All I needed is a simple blog like way to create an article and link the article one to another…

That’s how Paper Taxi was born, featuring:

Rails 3
MongoDB with Mongoid
Markdown style text editing with easy linking of articles
Devise for authentication (only one default user)
Tags for articles and tag filters
Simple HTML5+CSS3 UI
Russian I18n as a bonus

Here’s an example (in Russian) site which it is used for: Ayurveda

and of course some screenshots:

Do use parentheses in Rails

2011-08-23

In this article I will explain why you should ALWAYS use parentheses in method calls.

Assume you have the following code in your Rails views:

link_to 'Articles', articles_path

then you decide that you need to add I18n (internationalization) to your application and you replace all strings with

I18n.t 'ui.articles'

which gives you:

link_to I18n.t 'ui.articles', articles_path

See the problem? This line will not raise any exceptions. Just link to the wrong page. Very hard to catch unless you have proper tests set up.

Game of Thrones

2011-06-27

Being a big fan of fantasy literature I have been neglecting this genre for awhile. Past five years were dedicated to software engineering books and classic Russian literature. So I decided to read something epic and “Game of Thrones” by George RR Martin did fit the bill perfectly. Especially with the series being on HBO it is getting wildly popular.

Not to spoil it for anyone I’ll say that this is not a typical “book about dragons” (in fact dragons died many years ago). Readers should expect more of a “behind the throne” story with a bit of adventuring and very rich characters. There are two more books in this trilogy A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords that continue the story.

Here are some useful maps to help you navigate the land:

Update: Actually, dragons actually survived…

And some art from HBO:

RESTful HTTP Response Codes

2011-06-24

Recently I have been building RESTful APIs in Ruby on Rails so I decided to compile a list of HTTP Status Codes to use. This is just a guideline.

Successful Responses:

200 (OK) – everything is fine
201 (Created)– resource successfully created
202 (Accepted) – the call returned but the request was queued up. Somewhat async behavior. Unclear how to communicate error, possibly through the resource state
204 (No Content) – A successful DELETE

Unsuccessful Responses:

400 (Bad Request) – the request could not be understood
401 (Unauthorized Access) – need to authenticate the client
404 (Not found) – the resource was not found, for requests like /resource/id
415 (Unsupported Media Type) – wrong content type in either “Content-Type” header or “Accept” header
422 (Un-processable Entity) – The request had right content type and the request was understood but the logic of the app prevented it from being complete
500 (Server Error) – something bad happened on the server, unexpected error

One blog to rule them all

2011-06-06

About two years after my last blog article I decided to continue blogging. My goal it to produce at least one meaningful article a week(!). To prove to myself that I am on the right path I chose a new blogging platform called toto. It is built on top of Rails 3 and database-less. Very simple to customize and maintain. Pretty cool.

Here are the advantages:

No database to manage and backup
Minimal external dependencies
Easy to customize HTML and CSS
Just copy files for backup
Can be used with git to store content
Rails 3

Counter one liner in Ruby

2009-07-19

Many times I have to make a counter that starts with 1 and monotonically incremented by 1 in Rails view. The typical example is when showing a list of things like:

7.1
7.2
7.3
....

The nice trick is to make it in 1 line:

<li>7.<%= n = n + 1 rescue n = 1 %></li>

instead of initializing “n” before the loop (which requires extra line of code).