2005-12-11
Lisp vs Python vs Ruby for Web apps
The founders of Reddit, a poster-child for web app development with Lisp, decided to rewrite their site using Python. The collective cries from the Lisp community are deafening. And the Ruby on Rails followers are wondering, “Why not Ruby?”
Aaron Swartz provides some insight into the Reddit move and why his web.py project was selected over Django. Web.py will be used by two of the startups ...
2005-11-14
Audible Wordcast: Hijacking Podcasts?
Last weekend, Audible unveiled their Wordcast system for tracking spoken word downloads. It’s an innovative system that packages hosting, support, and most importantly, a system that supplies a number of tools and metrics necessary to advertisers—dynamic ad insertion, measuring how many people actually heard the ads, relaying where they stop listening, etc. It’s a system that’s technically not possible with MP3 because it requires ...
2005-11-10
Cracking passwords using 500GB tables
Most web sites are protected by passwords that have been transformed into long hashes using presumably one-way functions. You enter a password like “cat” and the hashing function translates this into a unique and long string of characters like “FEAFjelaKFJAOWI0382lFKEFKJ…” If you store only the hash (the transformed password) into the database, crackers who read the hash strings still can’t generate the original password because the reverse ...
2005-10-04
Eclipse as a Ruby on Rails IDE
After using jEdit for a few months, I'm switching to Eclipse 3.1. The IDE is more future-proof (i.e., can handle everything from Laszlo to DB design) and the Ruby Development Tool (RDT) plug-in just hit version 0.6.
A great Rails on Eclipse (Windows) tutorial by Brian Hogan can be found here. And some enterprising Rails folks have started RadRails, a customized IDE that builds ...
2005-09-15
The Cornucopia of Javascript toolkits
It seems like every week I'm discovering a new javascript toolkit for building your next "Web 2.0" application. I'm knee-deep into developing a Rails-based Writertopia, so I'm trying not to spend too much time looking at these nice open source frameworks, but it's hard -- real hard.
Here's a quick list of some of the more promising systems that you can google:
