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Programming

Part 2 of Ruby on Rails Tutorial Online 187

Posted by Zonk from the productive-coding dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Curt Hibbs has released Part 2 of his tutorial Rolling with Ruby on Rails to the O'Reilly ONLamp site. The first part was published in January. Topics covered are database transactions, callbacks, unit testing and caching." From the article: "In Rolling with Ruby on Rails, I barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Ruby on Rails. I didn't talk about data validation or database transactions, and I did not mention callbacks, unit testing, or caching. There was hardly a mention of the many helpers that Rails includes to make your life easier. I can't really do justice to all of these topics in the space of this article, but I will go into details on some of them and present a brief overview of the rest, with links to more detailed information."
Programming

Rolling With Ruby On Rails 406

Posted by michael from the keep-those-doggies-rolling-rawhide dept.
Bart Braem writes "The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that makes database-backed apps dead simple. What's the fuss? Is it worth the hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails at ONLamp, building a simple application that even non-Rubyists can follow."
The Media

Internet Kills LA Times National Edition 245

Posted by timothy from the there's-a-pop-song-in-here-somewhere dept.
Doc Ruby writes "The LA Times announced that it is folding its national edition on 12/31/04. The Times spokesperson said the paper's mission has been to reach 'key Washington, D.C., and New York audiences,' and that 'other electronic ways of reaching those audiences became more plentiful.' The folding edition will be replaced by "remote printing" by NewspaperDirect, and their email highlights, Top of the Times. Is this the way all our newspapers will be going?"
Programming

RAD with Ruby 162

Posted by Hemos from the i'm-big-in-japan dept.
Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby, an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Programming

Alternative Development Systems for the Mac 128

Posted by Hemos from the alternative-development-lifestyles dept.
Carlos Camacho writes "Programmers new to the Mac platform, as well as newbie Mac coders often ask (or complain) about available development tools. Most often, Apple's Xcode is recommended since it is free, and a pretty slick package. For cross-platform work, Metrowerks CodeWarrior series has been with us since the early PowerPC days, and is very flexible in its support for multi-platforms. But with if you want to work in a language other than Objective-C,C, C++ or Java? Or learn an entirely new language? How does the Macintosh fare? iDevGames, a site devoted to Mac game developers, has put together a list of "alternative" development tools for Mac OS X. A good number of the tools listed are either free, or low-cost. So, if you're interested in playing around with Lua, Ruby, something similar to HyperCard, or one of the many BASICs, check out "Alternative Development Systems for the Mac.""
Biotech

Iraq law Requires Seed Licenses 284

Posted by timothy from the please-don't-confuse-this-with-a-free-market dept.
Doc Ruby writes "The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq's intellectual property law to 'meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection.' The updated law makes saving seeds for next year's harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, newly illegal. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from IP developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, shared freely like agricultural 'open source.' Other IP provisions for technology in the law further integrate Iraq into the American IP economy."

Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor 684

Posted by Roblimo from the this-guy-ought-to-turn-pro dept.
There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done.
Programming

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide 231

Posted by timothy from the who-could-hang-a-name-on-you dept.
James Edward Gray II writes " Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (Second Edition), known as the Pickaxe II to its fans, is an extremely current view of the Ruby programming language. Revised primarily by Dave Thomas, a founding father of the English Ruby community, Programming Ruby is distilled expertise from a reliable source. In the past, quality English documentation of Ruby has been in short supply, but if any one volume could solve that problem, this is it." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.
Privacy

Senate Wants Database Dragnet 249

Posted by samzenpus from the big-brother dept.
Doc Ruby writes "Wired reports that the "Senate could pass a bill as early as Wednesday evening that would let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases that hold billions of records on Americans".
Perl

Parrot 0.1.1 'Poicephalus' Released 224

Posted by timothy from the link-fever dept.
Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.)
Java

Java 1.5 vs C# 790

Posted by Hemos from the battle-rages-on dept.
SexyFingers writes "Sun released Java 1.5. The non-API stuff that they've added made it finally "catch-up" with C# - since both languages are built to support OOP from the ground-up, their constructs become almost identical as additional OOP "features" are supported. So if you're doing C# and your foundations in OOP are rock-solid, there really isn't any difference whether you're coding C# or Java."
Technology

Fluid Logic Chips 250

Posted by timothy from the if-rains-pours dept.
Doc Ruby writes "Colorado researchers 'have constructed microfluidic gates that use the relative flow resistance of liquid to carry out the basic logic operations NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NOR and NAND. The researchers have also combined a pair of gates into a half adder, which carries out half the operation of addition.' All CPUs processing binary logic are made of these types of gates, but usually execute as flows of electrons in wires, not fluids in tubes. Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing? Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"
Security

Cybersecurity Chief Resigns 367

Posted by michael from the told-he-had-to-install-all-patches-personally dept.
Doc Ruby writes "AP is reporting that 'The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency. Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., informed the White House about his plans to quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division and made his resignation effective at the end of Thursday, effectively giving a single's day notice of his intentions to leave.' Yoran is the third cybersecurity chief in a row, after Richard Clarke and Howard Schmidt, to quit the Bush administration citing organizational inability to do his job. Maybe the job can't be done." In a possibly related story, individuals take cybersecurity lightly: Ant writes "This story says that consumers have a casual approach toward cybersecurity and fail to grasp the pervasiveness of online threats, according to a study released Thursday. More than a third of the 493 PC users surveyed by the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) said they had a greater chance of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning than of being hit by malicious code."
Programming

Korundum Brings eXtreme RAD to Linux 53

Posted by timothy from the precious dept.
anonymous writes "The Free Software community is on a quest for the next generation development environment. Is it .Net, is it Java? Many (including Havoc) are quick to dismiss some of the gems invented by the Free Software community itself. Yes, Ruby is an incredibly consistent and clean language designed specifically to incorporate many of the best features and ideas of predecessors. Absolutely everything in Ruby is an object and practically everything can be redefined or extended on the fly. The effects and resulting power of such flexibility can be quite astounding to those who have adapted to contemporary language limitations. Now, the Ruby environment has been seamlessly integrated into KDE through Korundum, meaning that well-integrated and first-class desktop citizens for Linux can be sketched and developed in an extremely short time. Caveat: No explicit compilation is required and programming seems so easy it feels like cheating."
Graphics

Irrlicht - Fast Realtime 3D Engine 221

Posted by michael from the do-it-yourself dept.
Surye writes "Though a few days late on the release, Irrlicht has released version 0.7 of its engine. The site describes it as 'an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.' Bindings for java, perl, ruby, and python, and it is platform independent (only implemented currently on Windows and Linux, but when it moves to other platforms, the code will be completely portable). The feature list is simply amazing, and since it's still being quite actively developed, I can see this becoming a major player soon."
Security

Vote Tabulator Security Hole Exposed 530

Posted by timothy from the poke-poke dept.
Doc Ruby writes "Black Box Voting has exposed a security hole in Diebold machines that tabulate votes collected from electronic voting machines. A code entered into the tabulator's user interface duplicates the "secure" counts into an insecure count which can be changed, and counted instead. The "double books" vulnerability and exploit were reported to the manufacturer over a year ago, and confirmed, while major customers (California and Washington states) were notified shortly thereafter. In spite of some revisions, the latest version of the software remains insecure. Diebold voting machines running GEMS version 1.18.x are vulnerable, running in about three dozen states. Although the software is widely deployed, and scheduled for use in shortly upcoming elections, risk mitigations are available, mostly protocols restricting physical or network access to the machines. Other auditing/accountability measures for ensuring only trusted access to the system are recommended."
Spam

CAN-SPAM Is A Bust 305

Posted by timothy from the hundreds-per-day-here dept.
Doc Ruby writes "The Congressional chatter about 'canning spam', in the CAN-SPAM law since January, has turned out to really mean 'they can still spam'. TechWeb News reports that 'In July, compliance fell for the first time under one percent to a measly 0.54 percent', from its 3% max. The researchers claim the ball has been dropped by 'law enforcement'. Those police are probably too busy deleting the 80% spam from their email, like everyone else."
Programming

How to Embed Linux 25

Posted by CowboyNeal from the tiny-penguins dept.
Doc Ruby writes "LinuxJournal has an intro to uCLinux by David McCullough, one of the project developers. Specific techniques are discussed for Linux programming on this version, that runs on devices without the MMU that the Linux VM usually requires. Developers can make Linux apps run on uCLinux devices, including PDAs like a Palm IIIx, routers, DVD players, and even a FPGA."
Security

Verified Voting Techwatch Recruits Geeks 3

Posted by simoniker from the make-a-difference dept.
Doc Ruby writes "At Verified Voting, TechWatch is recruiting technology professionals interested in election integrity 'By applying technical expertise to mind the polls, TechWatch volunteers can chronicle election problems at this upcoming election and future elections, as well as for follow-on litigation and policymaking, in a way that most poll watchers cannot'. Here's your chance to weigh in on an HCI that really matters."
Slashback

Slashback: Civilians, Rubyx, Restrictions 225

Posted by timothy from the slashdot-readers-in-el-paso? dept.
Slashback this evening brings you a dose of updates and clarifications to previous stories about Yahoo!'s block on third-party messaging products, the Ruby-based Linux distro called Rubyx, and a few notes of caution on "unlimited" wireless internet service.

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