I heard about Rails back when I was a programmer at BlueHost / Hostmonster since they are one of the “preferred” web hosting companies for Ruby on Rails type applications. There weren’t very many clients who used it, but when questions came in about it, I always seemed to be approached with them. I guess tech support people think that if you are generally willing to help them out and you know a programming language, you know them all. Well, I eventually got sick of saying I don’t know and got some basic knowledge going of Ruby on Rails, and was pleasantly surprised!
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Category Archives: Internet
Remember WebTV?
It seems that Intel and Yahoo are teaming up to create a new version of the failed WebTV. An article on bbc describes it pretty well. The main difference here is this new chip from intel, designed specifically for web-connected devices, will allow you to use widgets (if you have an igoogle account, you’re probably quite familiar with widgets) and still view television as normal – something WebTV could not do. I could see this actually catching on, depending on initial price, etc. How many people do you know who watch television with their lap-top on the coffee table? I can think of five off the top of my head. One thing that is not mentioned, is if the ability to harness the internet outside of the widget capability will be included. The picture-in-picture functionality could be quite fun; one screen playing the new season of Heroes, while the other is posting “OMG did you see that” in the fan-boy forums. It could just be what WebTV was trying to do.
Perl on Linux – Greedy Regular Expressions and the Question Marks that Tame Them
In 1986, Larry Wall invented a scripting language to solve the problems of generating reports for system administrators on unix. He called it the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language since that was its function. And it does do that. In a Unix based OS where everything is output in text, Perl has dominated somewhat because it so easy to use but mostly because of its powerful and easily used regular expression capabilities.
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BREAKING NEWS, INDEED!
There’s been a flood of emails around the net today pretending to be from MSNBC. According to MXlab, the “Subject starts with msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS and can contain the following: ‘Google launches free music downloads in China’, ‘Plane crashes into prep school, hundreds of kids killed’, ‘Please give your opinions for change’, ‘US Dollar hits 6-year high, further gains expected'” and more. The URL does appear to be legit but the site it leads you to is not. Upon arrival you’ll be asked to download a spoof adobe flash update that is, in reality, a trojan horse.
Perl on Linux – Anonymous Hashes, Hash References, and Passing Them to Subroutines.
There comes a time in every perl programmers life when they have to master the hash. Anyone who has programmed in Perl for very long has run into problems such as subroutine arguments getting confusing, lagging programs due to hash tables being copied over and over, and searched for a simpler way to maintain and access data. All this and more can be achieved by the simple use of anonymous hash tables and the passing of hash table references to subroutines for processing.
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Windows .NET in C# Major – Web Interaction With Self Signed SSL Certs. Part 2
Last week, we started making the web interaction class and did the self-signed compatibility functions as well as some setup ones. You can see all that here. Today we get into the meat and potatoes and get started on the functions that will actually send and receive the data we care about. So here we go!
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FCC, CC, NN.
Net Neutrality is a pretty basic concept – keep the net open, and unrestricted to any content. Google does a pretty nice job of summing this up a little more in depth: “Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days… Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet.”
Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin seemed to share this thought by “moving to prohibit ComCast from throttling BitTorrent traffic”. In fact, he is also wanting to reprimand ComCast for choking down on the BitTorrent protocol – a blow that would leave any NN enthusiast pretty happy. Not so fast, though: the rest of the FCC still needs to decide, which could still take a few weeks. This is definitely something to pay attention to.