A Ruby

If you’re a tech head, and you’ve been around Object Orientated languages – then you’ve surely heard of Ruby.

I’ve been around people who are passionate about Ruby, but never caught the bug. What I did do whilst others were programming away, was read about ruby. One day whilst reading I came across the name of an online persona Why the lucky stiff, also known as _why.

_why

Whilst _why was/is considered a prolific and influential programmer of Ruby, what was fascinating was his disappearance. In August 2009, he withdrew from “public” life – specifically all his online presence was deleted. He closed up his blog, twitter account and github account. Plenty of people have ensured his code and writing not only live on but continue, and you can read more of his eccentric writings at his estate.

However, my interest here is his book: Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby

Some have innocuously declared the 19th of August as “Why Day“. What better way to celebrate knowledge than to start reading a book, and why not read the guide book itself?! I’m just a regular old person, so far unaware of Ruby and its intricacies. I may even be able to teach a child what I learn.

I declare that starting from August, and thanks to #whyday, I’ll start reading his guide to Ruby – hence furthering my limited knowledge of Object Orientation in programming. At least once a week I’ll write something I’ve learnt about Ruby, because _why once tweeted “programming is rather thankless. you see your works become replaced by superior works in a year“. Hopefully what I write will be thanks.

I’ll leave you with another quote from _why that used to be at the front of his code repository for Ruby: “If you are just a regular old person unawares, I still believe that great things can come from you, but only if you will just leave this place immediately and begin your quest to invent a machine for turning pure kinetic energy into animals.”

Ruby Icon courtesy the Ruby Visual Identity Team
Photo of _why courtesy of Snowblink

I first saw this video at Eastman’s Genealogy website.

Original research of the figure and facts is by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman.

• 32GB Option
• 3 Megapixel camera with autofocus
• Video Recording capabilities with upload to Youtube function
• Voice Control
• Compass

The other new features coming to the iPhone such as:

• Cut, Copy & Paste (about time!)
• MMS and contact send/receive via SMS
• Bluetooth transfer and A2DP support
• Data tethering to your laptop (USB or Bluetooth)
• Spotlight Search
• Landscape keyboard across all apps
• Voice Memos

will be available on the current iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2G and included oin the new 3GS. A free software upgrade to Version 3.0 of the firmware will be ready for download to the public June the 17th.

For the die-hard Apple fanboys, a Quicktime stream of the keynote speech given by Phil Schiller is now online.

Downloading MySQL and installing on Leopard is a breeze with the native package.

I migrated my database (dump/restore) and recreated my wordpress user, but still kept getting this error:

Error establishing a database connection

The user could log into the database from the console as shown:

lantrix@lexx:~ $ mysql -u wordpress -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 19
Server version: 5.1.34 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> use wordpress;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed
mysql> show tables;
+-----------------------------+
| Tables_in_wordpress         |
+-----------------------------+
| sk2_blacklist               | 

So what is the problem?

Google provides an answer, with a log lived post from My Macinations providing the solution. It’s all to do with correcting your php.ini with the proper MySQL socket location.

Now, back to testing my new version of the Twitter Tags wordpress plugin. #hashtags now work!

I was trying to get OpenBSD bootstrapped using the PXEBoot NIC in a server. I decided to use my Mac which has tftp and bootpd installed. This post is quite in depth and technical so if you are game then read on.

The quick and short of it was I turned it all on, and copied my pxeboot image, like this from the Terminal:

sudo apachectl start
sudo service tftp start
sudo cp /Library/WebServer/Documents/pub/OpenBSD/4.4/i386/pxeboot  /private/tftpboot/

Then I neeed to setup the bootp server which comes with Internet Sharing. The idea was to add the pxeboot filename needed by OpenBSD (the file copied to tftpboot above) to the bootp (AKA dhcp) server options. The important file here is /etc/bootpd.plist. If this file doesn’t exist when Internet Sharing starts then bootpd will create it, removing it when it stops. But courtesy of Jules.FM “if the file already exists when it starts, the Mac will leave it alone and not overwrite or remove it”. So to add new dhcp options you perform these steps:

1. Start Internet Sharing
2. Copy the file somewhere safe: “cp /etc/bootpd.plist /tmp/”
3. Stop Internet Sharing
4. Edit /tmp/bootpd.plist
5. Add your required options
6. Copy the file back in place: “sudo cp /tmp/bootpd.plist /etc/”
7. Start Internet Sharing

Since the Mac bootpd.plist file has no option for “filename” documented and since there appears to be a bug in the bootpd implementation with respect to supplying dhcp_options I added these data options to the bootpd.plist file:

<key>dhcp_option_66</key>
<data>
wKgCAQ==
</data>
<key>dhcp_option_67</key>
<data>
cHhlYm9vdA==
</data>
<key>dhcp_option_93</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

In RFC2132 (Paragraphs 9.4 and 9.5) it specifies that options 66 and 67 are for the tftp server and boot filename. However the bootpd bug meant I had to encode the string “pxeboot” to hexadecimal “0x707865626F6F74” then Base64 encode it being “cHhlYm9vdA==” and that is way too time consuming to stuff around and try something else everytime the tftp file retrieval fails.

Don’t try using the dhcp_option_66 I had either as it is an encoded IP of my tftp server, not yours.

I got it all going, and the MacBookPro worked as planned, but the bootp server offered a filename of “pxeboot” and the silly Intel 10/100 card decided to fail due to missing files on the tftp server. Many hours later and I figured I should use a network sniffer instead of trying to turn on tftpd logging.

A packet dump showed \377 or 0xff being appended to the filename by the boot client (intel Nic on remote server) when using tftp to request the file. This made the filename “pxeboot” look like “pxeboot\377” in Wireshark’s view of the packet, as discussed here by other pioneers in netbooting.

If I get a full working implementation of dhcpd/tftp/pxe using the Mac – and actually working independent of the intel nic problem on the server, I’ll update this entry or write a complete run down.

Don’t hold your breath though. I rebuilt the OpenBSD server using bsd.rd (being a ramdisk installation) so my need is no longer a driver.

A Podiobook is an Audiobook delivered via a podcast. Evo Terra coined the phrase back in 2005 when podcasting was in its infancy. 2005 you say? Well sometimes I take a bit of time to come around to something good.

I’ve started listening to my first one. Descent – Book one of the 7th Son series by J.C. Hutchins (click through on that link to start listening to it as well).

The cool thing about this is when you sign up (instead of just subscribing to the feed I linked above) you can actually set how often the audio chapters get released to you. One a day or longer – and best of all it is Free!!! Well if you like the book you can and should donate an amount to podiobooks, and the author will get 75% of your donation.

Stuck on a train 3 hours a day? Run out of podcasts? Sick of your Music? Try a Podiobook.

Additionally the Age have reported on the pricing Telstra will offer on their bundles:

The cheapest monthly plan will be $30, paying either $279 upfront for an eight-gigabyte iPhone or $399 for a 16Gb model. Customers who do not want to pay upfront could sign up to an $80 plan for the 8Gb model or a $100 plan for the 16Gb model.

I’ll still opting Vodafone for now, but lets see what the Vodafone pricing and data usage policy will be compare to Telstra’s. If they are almost the same (and I doubt it) it could prompt me to jump carrier. The coverage that NextG have is unrivalled in this country – but has been pricey to use for data so far. SMH Blogger Adam Turner correctly speculates that even though the pricing is out, there is no mention of data usage. Don’t get too hyped about Telstra’s offering just yet. Despite the fantastic infrastructure they are usually the most expensive.

Just to show I’m not entirely biased, Telstra are taking pre-registrations at their website. Thanks to @IdleThoughts for the heads up on this.

My preference is Vodafone so I clicked through and pre-registered with them. You can do so too at their pre-registration page – and apparently a sales rep will call you back. I’m currently with them on the $79 cap, so I should be able to carry right on and hopefully get the best data plan possible. More details after a Sales person calls me.

If you follow through and read their referenced article at Electronista then the story changes slightly. They state that the iPhone will allegedly support up to 42Mbps by the end of 2008 in Australia (on NextG is inferred) “according to a senior offical“.

One more click through to the claim at ITNews and the referenced senior official is actually Sol Trujilo the Telstra CEO; and the article doesn’t mention anything about the iPhone. It is about Telstra offering a HSDPA+ service via their NextG by end of 2008.

The 3G iPhone does actually support the NextG frequencies which operate on 850 Mhz. The technical specifications on Apples iPhone page show that the 3G unit works on UMTS/HSDPA frequencies of 850, 1900 and 2100 MHz. This doesn’t mean the 3G chipset actually supports these NextG speeds.

Telstra have not yet announced the iPhone to be available through them despite Optus and Vodafone issuing press releases intending to carry the phone.

And now we come to the price. Stevie J announced in his Keynote Speech that the price of the 8GB model would not exceed USD$199 even in other countries. That comes in at about AUD$210 for an iPhone 3G 8GB at todays exchange rate. Historically there is a severe markup of 30% or more on products sole in Australia out of the USA, made by Apple.

We will see where there goes in the near future when pricing is actually announced. I’ll see you all with your new iPhone in July!

It is all fixed now, and probably time to rebuilt the DNS server up to the latest OpenBSD (Version 4.3).

June is just around the corner and my current Vodafone contract runs out this month. Perfect timing.
The reason I was hoping for Vodafone is this: with a $79 cap, the $500 credit (currently) covers 3G data usage. You pay $1 per 5 minute block out of your cap. Its totally different how Telstra charge: $60 per month on top for data and $0.25 per MB.

Since I make about $100 of calls in a month, that’s $400 of included data in my cap; or 33 constant hours of 3G data. But wouldn’t it be nice if Vodafone shifted to an untimed/uncounted data plan for the iPhone. That is the ultimate Geek Nirvana.

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
#prevent slashdot effect
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogspot\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} reddit\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} news\.slashdot\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} slashdot\.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
#Rewrite images to allow CDN to serve them
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*\.(gif|png|jpe?g))$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1/$2 [R,L]
#Wordpress rewites
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</ifmodule>

People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading

After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006. This entry added information about Baron Cohen working for investment bank Goldman Sachs prior to becoming famous as an actor.

Three days later, on November the 17th 2006 an article appeared in the Independent with the same information. The article included Baron Cohen’s career information almost as a footnote, at the end of the article – possibly using Wikipedia as the source of his “Goldman Sachs” career and other family information.

On November the 21st 2006 a second anonymous user added information to the Wikipedia entry on Baron Cohen that his early career included work at not only Goldman Sachs, but JP Morgan. Doing a lookup on this users IP address shows that it belongs to an address block allocated to JP Morgan Chase & Co! Someone at the company either new it to be true – or didn’t like the fact that he had been listed as working at a rival company; showing this addition as a potential one-upmanship entry.

A number of months later, a wikipedian actually did his homework, and on the 23rd February 2007 removed the bogus career information stating:

remove Goldman Sacks career as it is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone interview or anywhere else I can find

But it was too late. From 2007 onwards the Wikipedia entry detailing his career has been modified in an on again off again fashion. As of April 2008, the Independent and the Guardian are now used where still used (but have since been removed and discussed) as the source of the information – external references that exist outside Wikipedia – albeit written after the initial entry to Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia references used to referenced these articles as the source for this career move from investment banking to acting; it’s deemed permanent information.

The anonymous Wikipedia entries appear to have been “jokes”, or methods of associating famous people with a company – by financial industry insiders. Not only in the case of the initial change on 14 November, but also in the additional change by someone at JP Morgan on the 21st November, and subsequent additions, removals and swapping of big-time rival company names from Wikipedia.

The bottom line is that NO verifiable information existed anywhere on the internet that Baron Cohen worked for any investment banks (Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan) prior to the 14th November 2006. The only person that can tell us the truth now is Sacha Baron Cohen himself.

In February I wrote on the user talk page of the first “prankster” about this issue, but only recently has an another anonymous user commented over at SlashDot on this exact information of the same article – It could even be the same person who started this as they say:

It is now down to the rest of the world to prove that Sacha Baron Cohen DID NOT work for Goldman Sachs.

All of these thing show how easy is this to do. But how many other times has this been done? Is it the corporations, insiders or just people who work in related industries having a laugh. I’ll leave you with this (long) quote from anonymous@slashdot…

The real Wiki-vandals are the companies, governments and lobby groups of all sorts that flood Wikipedia with their squeaky clean corporate profiles (yes, corporate governments), whipped straight from their websites … These entities are the true threat to the laudable goal of Wikipedia to provide a freely accessible forum for the production and storage of (hopefully well-referenced) articles for the masses and a forum that does not restrict the privilege of contribution to those that have jumped through the all the right hoops. … The printed word is no more reliable than the plasma. Lies may be propagated on Wikipedia, but not without debate. Politicians spouting their sludge find their propaganda sitting side-by-side with those that mock them… If knowing that anything in a Wikipedia article is as likely to be crap as correct, the average reader becomes more vigilant in clicking through to the supporting sources; then Wikipedia has served the purpose of bringing to the masses the healthy skepticism that is, after all, the cornerstone of all academic pursuits.
Dark eyes look down from ivory towers. Do they cheer or do they fear?

Update 20 April: since I wrote about this, and got slash-dotted, Wikipedian editors (and numerous slash-dotters) have discussed this entire issue; and the general consensus of the editors is that these two external sources are no longer valid. I think my point was understood. This may only be the tip of the iceberg and it is up to people checking their Wikipedia information to verify first, or remove – and be conscious of timelines!

But at least unlike some countries, we do seem to have decent peering links to EU and the US. I have actually achieved 3 MBytes/sec (24Mbps) transfer on a regional transfer and about 1MBytes/sec (8Mbps) using international servers.

Why do I mention this? I just watched Walt Mossberg talk about the bad state of Broadband and the lack of integration of the online world with big TVs (watch below, 8 mins).

Lastly Australia gets, as no doubt does the rest of the world, a time lag factor of everything latest and greatest. No iPhone yet, no iTMS TV/Movie store, no local Amazon style service (some come close), up to 1 year delay on airing TV series (though it is improving recently); and so on.

The tyranny of distance, and small population on a great land mass, is at play.

Oh yes, and the iPhone rumour gets another bump – woot 3G iPhone in June, well in the US. No doubt another 6 months will pass before Australia gets it. Lets hope it is not locked to Telstra. I don’t want to have to pay for my 3G data on top of the expensive plan AND the phone. I want it bundled, and not a pitiful 5 Megabytes worth. I have a $500 cap on Vodafone for now, including all my 3G data usage at $1 per 5 mins (part of the $500 cap).

If the iPhone ends up locked to Telstra, I’ll be singing Elvis.

A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need. You either work with the (often times) limited and expensive tool, or you extend the functions using your own coding and software.

You can keep up with 90kts and his Open Source load testing efforts on his blog.

Everyone likes free stuff.

Make a couple of good backups, at least one being an external FIREWIRE (not USB people, FIREWIRE) HDD that is a clone of your existing tiger boot partition.

Note: If you have filevault turned on for any of your accounts you should turn OFF filevault before the upgrade.

The steps then are as simple as this:

1. Confirm your clone backup works by booting off the external firewire drive – I can’t stress this enough. Plug in your firewire HDD, power it on, turn on your mac and hold cmd-option-shift-delete just after the gong sound. This will boot off your backup.
2. The backup is OK? Good… shutdown, power off the firewire HDD and unplug it. Power on, holding the C key with your install DVD inserted. This will boot off the DVD (C key is for cdrom booting. A legacy shortcut key, but now commonly known)
3. Choose the install option – Erase and Install
4. After the installation is done – DO NOT use the migration tool to migrate at this time.
5. Ensure your username you choose is not the same as any of the old ones. This is OK, as it can be removed later
6. Log into your new Leopard, and commence to download and install the combo update to 10.5.2 (or whatever the latest patch level is)
7. Once the update is complete and the computer restarted, login, plug in and turn on your Firewire external HDD
8. Run the migration assistant as documented by Apple. It will successfully migrate all the chosen accounts, applications and data from your old system that was cloned to the external HDD.

If you have any problems with this all, or need help, you can ask for help in the official Leopard installation forums.
As a bonus, if you no longer want to clone to the new HDD – you may format it ONCE you have Leopard working OK, then plug it in and use it as your time-machine backup drive. Bonus.

Initially I made sure I had two full cloned and boot-able backups that I made with CCC. After this I actually tried booting off them just to make sure. Having backups before such a major upgrade is a mandatory step for all people whom undertake any OS upgrade.

Secondly I decided on the upgrade path. I plopped in the 10.5 DVD (Family pack!) and kicked off the upgrade.
At this point all looked fine, but this is where the initial problem occurred. People had said 10.5.0 was unstable, but I had thought I could at least login and kick off the 10.5.2 combo update. How wrong I was.

The combination of a Powerbook G4, and and upgrade from 10.4.11 -> 10.5.0 rendered the OS unusable.
I had heard rumours of this sort of thing, but I had not expected it. Finder would lock up on login and no amount of coaxing, safe mode, or anything else worked.

So I tested my external clone once more to make sure I could boot off it, and took the plunge. ERASE AND INSTALL.

Today I looked and – USD$725.65 PER SHARE!. They have gone up 2% in one day. That gives Google a market capitalisation of 226.5 BILLION US Dollars. Microsoft still holds the lead (in the Tech Sector) on USD$343.63B.

Where will this madness stop? Will it be when we see economic collapse of the Western countries as we know them? Will it be 2012? There are changes afoot for sure.

As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two.

Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader. Thats blogs and news covered. Google is storing a lot of our data, so for now thats a good thing.

I’m lucky my iPod has all my music still, so tunes and pod casts are covered

The judicious use of Del.icio.us means all my bookmarks are already online.

This online decentralisation of my data should hold me out till I get the laptop repaired. Looks like with minimal effort, I am able to function without the laptop as an IT worker bee. It just goes to show how web2.0 is no longer a buzz word, but standard practice. Data out there, in communities.

On the theme of iTunes recovery, I had purchased iPodRip to get my music to the laptop. It didn’t work as advertised for me – The iPod Recover feature imported the songs to some temp folder, but never put them into iTunes. 2 hours later I had finished manually importing my missing 257 songs from the iPod into the CCC backup drive. A waste of $20? I will wait till the support team get back to me before I conclude that.