Back in the old days (pre-2000), the various flavors of UNIX had very little security other than the “baked-in” stuff such as encrypted passwords, root vs normal users, the standard file permissions, etc. Later, things like SELinux and firewalls were added. I still get tripped up on that occasionally. I recently moved my Rails apps from the mongrel-based server model to Phusion Passenger (documented in a previous post). This worked fine, but it was time to let all the machines on my home network see the web sites, if only to see what they look like on Windows PCs. A Google search shows that a lot of people have trouble… Read More
Continue ReadingFun With Regular Expressions
If I wrote code all day, every day, I’m sure I could become really good at manipulating regular expressions. The obscure syntax is sort of Zen-like with a large dose of Perl obfuscation-fu. A one-liner that does a lot of cool text parsing appeals to the Nerd part of my DNA string. In reality, I have to grab my books when it’s regex time. The classic is Jeff Friedl’s “Mastering Regular Expressions”, published by O’Reilly, but this week I ran across a copy of O’Reilly’s “Regular Expressions Cookbook” by Goyvaerts and Levithan (Amazon link for both here), It covers 8 different languages, including Ruby. Worth a look. The Cookbook also… Read More
Continue ReadingWatir on Windows XP – Installation
Watir – Web Application Testing in Ruby – I’m thinking about adding this as part of my standard Rails integration tests. I like the idea of capturing keystokes that a user might actually run. Plus, it makes for a dandy demo tool. Here’s the summary of installation steps. I’m assuming you’re Rails-aware enough to have an application in place, and you know how to install Ruby gems: Rails Side – gem install watir gem install tg4rb Firefox Side – Install the TestGen4Web add-on Install the JSSH extension – start here to determine which version, and follow all the instructions on the page. Once you restart Firefox, the TestGen4Web icon should… Read More
Continue ReadingTweetDeck on Linux and KDE
Summarizing all I learned in one place…. I use the KDE window manager on Linux mainly because it’s been the de facto standard for the semiconductor industry since the Dark Ages, and I don’t want to burn the time switching to GNOME right now. TweetDeck seems to be GNOME-centric, BTW. On Fedora Core 8, 32-bit Linux, with KDE: You need these RPMs installed on your machine: adobeair1.0-1.5.1-8210, adobe-certs-1.0-8210, flash-plugin-10.0.22.87-release. You can get the AIR package at http://get.adobe.com/air/ and the Flash 10 RPM at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. The adobe certs RPM should be available through the Yum channel, if it’s not already installed on your system. Download and install the TweetDeck AIR file:… Read More
Continue ReadingOS Installs Under VMware Server 2.0
My Linux server is running Fedora Core 8 – pretty old by Internet standards (the bleeding edge is FC 11). But now that the kernel patches have died off, my VMware Server 2.0 installation is stable, so I wanted to create a few Linux OS images of interest. Here’s a summary of the results: Ubuntu 8.10 – I’m really starting to like this OS. One disk, twenty minutes, no gotchas to trip up a rookie. It’s clean, and updates are easy. Ubuntu blurs the distinction between the root user and a normal user, which concerns me from a security standpoint, but it’s ideal for a single desktop or a laptop… Read More
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