AJ Morris

I found this to be pretty funny. Hope you guys like it as much as I did.

An Apple Product Security technician has identified multiple vulnerabilities with Ruby, which if exploited could be used in denial of service attacks. It does not have to be just Mac OS X that this afects. It looks like it’s all versions based on the official post from the Ruby development team.  To find out what version of Ruby you are using open up Terminal or your command-line prompt client and type

ruby –version

You should get something like this

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-06-20 patchlevel 230) [i686-darwin9.3.0]

Now you can see that’s I’ve already went ahead and updated my version, so yours might have patch 110 if there was a patch level. To update your Ruby version all you need to do is visit the link above and choose which patch you need to install.  For us Ruby on Rails developers you’ll need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 patch 230. You can download it here and type the following in your command-line prompt.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6-p230
./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
make
sudo make install
cd ..

You can then check your version by typing.

ruby –version

If you have any problems, feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: After posting this I was having a hard time keeping an instance of monrel running.  I did some searching and found out that the option they have offered us does have a bug still in it.  So what that means is that we either update and have issues or stay at what we’re currently at and deal with the possibility of denial of service attacks.  Keep your eyes posted to the Ruby on Rails blog for an update. I’ll post another update here as well once things are figured out.

Dan over at Hivelogic released an updated guide for installing Ruby, Rails Gems, Rails, and MySQL. Check out the article here. If there’s anything else that you need to install (like RSpec, Capistrano, SVN) you can do that with the following commands.

To install RSpec just type:

$ gem install rspec

To install Capistrano, type:

$ gem install capistrano

To install SVN it’s a little different, so you’ll have to install with the following command:

$ curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.4.3
./configure –prefix=/usr/local –with-openssl –with-ssl with-zlib
make
sudo make install
Once you have everything is done you should be all set. If you want to check out any other gems, check out this site http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/.

It’s that time of year again!!! That’s right, it’s MacHeist Bundle time!! You can get 10 great apps for a very small amount of money. This year’s lineup includes some programs that are worth getting, like CSSEdit and Pixelmator! Last year’s bundle sold 16,000 in one week and made a wave in the Mac community. This year they hope to “shatter” last year’s numbers ($200,000). Some other programs include 1password, Cha-Ching, TaskPaper, Awaken, and more! So go on over to MacHeist and order you bundle today!!

This time of year there always seems to be a slew of people asking me about what Mac software I’m using, if there’s some quality open source apps to use, etc. Since it’s Christmas/New Years time, I figured I’d put together a list software I use for a variety of tasks. So without further ado, here’s my list.

Productivity

• iWork - A suite similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, from Apple. This includes three programs: Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. Keynote is a presentation software, Numbers is a spreadsheet application, and Pages is a Word Processor. It retails for about $79 USD directly from Apple.
• Office 2008 - While this isn’t released to the public till after the New year, those of us that are fortunate to have a copy of the BETA (or know some people that will give you a free copy before it’s publicly released) are in “like” with it since it’s the first native intel app from Microsoft. It hits store shelves January 15, 2008 (opening day of MacWorld 2008).
• Anxiety - This is a great ToDo application. If you’re like me, you are always creating todo lists and either saving them on stickies (use Spotlight and type in stickies to see what I’m talking about) or writing them down. Anxiety takes these ToDo lists further. Using Leopard’s technology, Anxiety is able to sync tasks between iCal, Mail, and Anxiety. Best of all, Anxiety is free, so go get it when you’ve finished reading this article!

Imaging

• Pixelmator - If you need a lighter-weight easier to use than Photoshop application, this one is for you. With Pixelmator, you are able to make photo enhancements and design logos, images, etc. with ease. It’s still relatively new, and I’ve actually stopped using it due to having Photoshop CS3, but while I was using it during their BETA stage, it was definitely something you should check out. They offer a 30-day trial and costs about $50 USD.
• Skitch - A quality screen capturing tool that’s currently free, however,sounds like it’s going to cost something down the road. It allows for you to take screen shots and pics using your iSight. You can then add text, drawings, point out things, and then upload to your FTP server, .Mac, or Skitch.com. Skitch is from Plasq and is invite only during its private beta stage.
• Photoshop CS3 - An image editor with a lot of power. It is the best editor in the World, and if you’re okay with spending in upwords for $649 USD for it, great! Photoshop is created by Adobe.

Screen Recording

• Jing - A light-weight screen capturing/recording client from the good folks at TechSmith, makers of Camtasia Studio, (the people I work for). There are several limitations with Jing, such as saving images as .png’s and videos as .swf’s but for a quick sharing tool, it’s perfect!! It allows you to upload to Screencast.com (their hosting service), your FTP server, and FLickr (images only).
• iShowU - The godfather of screen recorders (or at least till TechSmith makes Camtasia Studio for Mac! :P)!!! This has it all! It costs $20 USD and can do just about everything you’ll ever need in a screen recorder. You’re able to record your mic and even your application audio! You can check it out here.

Web Development

• Cyberduck - An open-source FTP client. Simple to use, and FREE!! We all like free stuff, so go out and get this!
• TextMate - The king of all text editors! For code editing, specifically Ruby on Rails development, it’s perfect. TextMate provides a lot of features the average code editor doesn’t. TextMate is created by Macromates and costs $59 USD.
• CSSEdit - By the title you would assume that it’s for CSS editing. And guess what, you’re right!! The best part of it is that it allows you to extract any CSS file from any website and preview what the site would look like with your own custom CSS styles. It is available from MacRabbit and costs $29.99.
• iTerm - An open-source Terminal replacement. Allows for tabbed-instances (although the new Terminal does the same). It’s free, so if you’d like to try it out, go here.
• svnX - For those of us who work with groups developing applications. It provides a nice UI so that you can see what changes have been made and what files are going to be uploaded to the SVN.

These are the programs I use pretty much on a daily basis. I thought I’d include a few more “odd-ball” applications that I use for a few different things. I couldn’t think of a heading for them, so I’ll call them:

Miscellaneous

• Burn - A simple to use burning application that allows you to burn three kinds of images, normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images. It also allows you to copy data disks, audio disks, and video disks. This is a great little utility that works better than Mac OS X’s built-in burning utility.
• VLC Player - A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast in IP4v or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
• Handbrake - A GPL’d multi-platform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.
• MacTheRipper - Another DVD ripper, but this time rips the VOB files.
• Visual Hub - Yes another DVD ripper, AVI converter to DVD, do-it all type application. It is the one stop program for converting video to various formats for various devices.
• Flip4Mac - a codec needed to play WMV files on the Mac. Get it here.
• TechSmith EnSharpen - A lossless screen recording codec for the QuickTime format. Does cost $149, but is worth it if you want the lossless quality that this codec offers.
• Adium - An open-source Instant Message Client
• Colloquy - An open-source IRC client
• Transmission - An open-source bittorrent client
• VMWare Fusion - Virtual Machine application that allows you to run Windows or other OSes on your Mac.

If you have any other applications that you use, please feel free to add them as a comment below! Keep a look out after the new year for some tutorials on installing Ruby on Rails, MySQL, SVN, and some other development goodies. I’ll be getting a list together here in the coming weeks what what I’m gonna be working on. If you have ideas of something you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can’t pull together.

Today I thought I would talk about agile web development with ruby on rails and how we implemented it during Startup Weekend. This past weekend I went to my first Startup Weekends (hope it’s not the last) and had a group of about 10-20 developers work together for a weekend to create a product in a weekend. I found that when working with developers it helps to use an agile approach. It also helps to work in pairs (just in case anyone leaves early).

The agile approach to web development is defined as a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project. While there are many methods to agile development, most that I have experienced have been in place to minimize the risk by developing in short amounts of time. This model of agile web development following planning, requirements analysis, designing, coding, testing, and documentation developing stages.

I think that we (for the first time working all together) implemented the agile web development method. The following is a list of what I think we did well and what we didn’t.

What I think worked well for us at DC Startup Weekend was that:

• We had a small timeline to get things done.
• We had our group of developers that were working the entire time on building features, and others that were testing.
• We had a go to person that worked on communicating to our design/UX teams.
• For the most part we worked in pairs, which helped ensure the success of the feature they were working on.

We also had some things that didn’t go so well:

• No real documentation, although we did try to do a little inline with the code.
• Not everyone was working in pairs.
• We didn’t have set goals for certain times.
• Features were only half added.
• No real time to test with a working site that would go through scripts and usability tests.

Over all I would say that we did a good job in the time that we had. There is always going to be things we did good and things that we did bad. I think that if we were to work another straight weekend there would be a list of things that we would change and I think that after experiencing what we did our first weekend we would have some better understanding as what we need to do to get everything done, and would have a list of bugs, design implementation, and some new features to add.

Anyone that is thinking about hosting or attending a Startup Weekend, I think you should really look into this. It was a great experience, and if the opportunity were to present itself again, I would attend. After checking out some of the other developers blogs, I thought I would include them here so that you can read some of what they say as well; Chris Selmer, Matthew VB.