Posts

Apache committer Brian McCallister is taking over distribution of the FastCGI module for Apache 2, and moving it into the core Apache distribution. Given the ever increasing interest in Rails, I expected that at some point someone would take up this challenge, and I think that having a reliable, non-hackish deployment option for Apache will increase interest in Rails even more. I’m very enthusiastic about Rails, but the somewhat shaky deployment story almost put me off of it. I know that LightHTTPD is supposed to work like a charm, but I don’t like the idea of throwing away all of my Apache experience, and I expect that most system administrators don’t either. ...

When you’re assembling a PC and you’re connecting the power supply to the motherboard, all of the power cables must be connected in order for the PC to power on.

I’ve been wondering if there isn’t some value in making predictions as a form of exercise for the brain. I have hypothesized that making predictions and then going back and revisiting those predictions later should improve your ability to think about the future. I think it’s the post mortem that provides the value, and that’s where most prognosticators fail. You see this a lot in sports – people make all sorts of predictions before the season but they never go back and really take a close look at how accurate thos predictions were and why the ones that were busts failed to come to fruition. If nothing else, such analysis should give you an idea whether your biases generally tend to be too pessimistic, optimistic, or otherwise out of line with reality, or if you just tend to say things without really thinking about them. ...

I hit a little milestone with the Ruby on Rails application I’m working on today – our team put the first development release up on a live server and sent out the URL. Until now we had it running on our local development machines, now it’s deployed on a Linux box running Apache 2 (using CGI, not FastCGI) connecting to a real database. One thing’s for sure, an application feels a lot more real when it’s running on a server, even if it’s just in test mode and nobody is supposed to enter real data in it. ...

On the occasion of Bill and Melinda Gates sharing Time Person of the Year honors with Bono, I thought I’d talk a bit about my own attitude toward Microsoft. People who have been reading rc3.org since the beginning know that for a long time one of my major preoccupations was bashing Microsoft for its abuse of its monopoly power. (These days I seem to spend a lot of my time bashing President Bush for his abuse of executive power. What can I say, I fought the law and the law won.) ...

Bruce Schneier: The Security Threat of Unchecked Presidential Power. Yet another must read, including this explanation of why this not a partisan issue: This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans; it’s a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don’t want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michael Moore or Ann Coulter. ...

Bruce Schneier has written one post to rule them all of the wiretapping controversy. Quit wasting time here and go read it. (I’ve been reading everything I can find on this topic for the past couple of days and I still learned a lot from it.) Update: Brendan Nyhan catches President Bush repeatedly asserting that all wiretaps require court orders, right up until this weekend when he admitted that he has reauthorized the program allowing warrantless wiretaps 30 times. ...

Bruce Eckel has a good essay on language wars. He starts out talking about how hyper-enthusiasts from the Java world have migrated to Ruby on Rails and winds up asking whether Ruby is really better than Python or not. From my own perspective, I can say that the days of hyper-enthusiasm are behind me. When it comes to picking tools to get things done, I use one of the XP maxims – use the simplest thing that could possibly work. There are two important attributes of environments for developing Web applications as far as I’m concerned. Simplicity and structure. PHP wins the simplicity fight. If you need to pull stuff out of a database and print it on a Web page, you can do it in PHP with almost no code wasted on structure. Java wins the structure fight. You can make things as structured as you like, to the point of absurdity. Ruby on Rails, right now, represents the best compromise between structure and simplicity for a huge portion of the Web application problem space. ...

The other day I posted about upgrading my mobile phone. I had originally decided to dump Cingular and go with Alltel so that I could get the latest Motorola RAZR, but I’ve had a change in thinking. Currently, there are three RAZR models – the V3, the V3c, and the V3i. The V3 is the current generation GSM phone, offered by Cingular and T-Mobile for $99.99 (with a two year contract). The V3c is CDMA version of the RAZR, with some next generation features. It’s offered by Verizon and Alltel for $199.99 with a two year contract. Verizon installs their own (reportedly bad) software on the phone and cripples the Bluetooth support. The V3i is the next generation GSM RAZR. Neither T-Mobile or Cingular offer the phone yet, but it’s supposed to be released before the end of the year. My hunch, given that the V3c is already available and Cingular and T-Mobile have halved the price on the RAZR V3, is that the phone is ready and Cingular and T-Mobile are trying to clear out their RAZR V3 inventories before offering it. I suspect that after the Christmas rush, they’ll roll out the V3i. I haven’t read anything to this effect, it’s just conjecture on my part. ...

There was much speculation yesterday about what sort of wiretaps the NSA was running, with the most plausible theory being that they were using some kind of wide-ranging filtering technology to spy on people en masse. Way back in 2000 there was much discussion of a system called Carnivore, under which the federal government would install hardware at ISPs to snoop on all of the email that the ISP processed, but general fear of widespread NSA snooping goes back a lot further than that. ...