I ran across a bug in Date::Format today, and after spending a few hours hacking away at a fix (the date/format.rb code is uuuuugly and sloooow…someone should really rewrite that. Better yet, rewrite it in C), I thought I’d submit a patch. So I grabbed the ruby_1_8 branch and lo and behold, my issue had already been fixed!
So the question now was how to monkeypatch the entire Date::Format module? Simply require-ing it as a plugin doesn’t work, since Date::Format is already loaded at that point. The trick then is to use load instead of require.
First, I tried this:
load'date/format.rb'
(note: load needs the actual filename; it doesn’t have the magic that require does) but that gave me an error:
in `load': wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) (ArgumentError)
Turns out Rails::Plugin::Loader defines its own load, so:
It took me a bit of digging to find this, so I thought I may as well spread the word here. I’ve started using Adobe Lightroom for managing my photos, but every time I connect my camera or card reader to import photos, iPhoto would launch, and I couldn’t figure out where I could change that. I finally discovered that the setting is in the Image Capture application. Run that, then go to Preferences and you’ll find it there. Why they wouldn’t also put it in iPhoto, Lightroom, or even on a preferences panel is beyond me.
Marc and I presented our Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers talk again yesterday at Web 2.0 (we also did it at ETech last month), and it seemed well received. I still need to work on my presentation skills; I’m not an old hand at this like Marc is.
I’m working on a follow-up to my privacy wall post which will describe a much better way to go about keeping a user’s private data private, using an encrypted “Locker”. I’ll also go into detail about how we deal with password recovery.
Hopefully by preannouncing this, I’ll force myself to get off my duff and finish the post. So stay tuned, and bug me if I don’t have it up soon.
Google recently announced that it will soon start anonymizing search logs older than 18-24 months. Full details can be found in their Log Retention Policy FAQ (PDF). This is a heartening step back towards their “Don’t Be Evil” corporate philosophy, which some think has been largely abandoned.
I’ve just recently started using Scroogle as a way of defeating their tracking of my every search (their site is awful; Wikipedia has more readable information about the project), although the motives of the man behind it, Daniel Brandt, who also runs the Google Watch site, may be questionable. Still, he doesn’t have much incentive for keeping a log of queries and IP addresses, and if he did, since he’s not giving me a cookie, he can’t tie all my searches together.
My colleague Coda Hale just released a sweet bcrypt-ruby gem that does password hashing right. It also provides for future-proofing by enabling you to assign a computational cost for generating a password hash and letting you version your password hashes. You have no more excuses.
