• humble little ruby book [PDF] (from humblelittlerubybook.com)
• WikiBooks: Ruby Programming – WikiBooks is a WikiMedia project and is similar to WikiPedia; however, content is organized under specific topics and meant to be treated somewhat like a book. I created a collection of all the Ruby Programming pages I could file and added in the print version of the Ruby on Rails topic as well. I then used the book creator to export the collection as a PDF. I am hosting a snapshot of this collection from 4/9/2010 here [PDF].
• The Little Book of Ruby [PDF] (from SapphireSteel Software)

I am looking at solutions for cleanly converting the RDoc documentation for ruby core, Rails, and a variety of gems. I will update this post or make a new post if I figure that out.

For over a month all was well and Palm Pre owners who used iTunes could sync their music with the Palm Pre seamlessly. Then, on July 15th, 2009, Apple did what many had feared. Version 8.2.1 of iTunes included an update that appeared to specifically block the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes. Although many people were outraged and saddened by this, the response I saw was surprisingly small. It appears as though most Palm Pre owners who weren’t already using iTunes used other media managers to sync with their Pre. I myself use Winamp, RhythmBox, and manual syncing.

Today Palm released version 1.1.0 of their WebOS software to Palm Pre owners. Along with many new features this update included a return volley in the battle over iTunes compatibility by restoring the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with Apple’s iTunes. To accomplish this it appears Palm took more steps to disguise the Palm Pre as an iPod. This time not only does the device identify itself as an iPod, it also identifies itself as being manufactured by Apple.

A shallow examination of the methods used by Apple to block the Palm Pre from syncing and the methods used by Palm to re-enable it seem to indicate there are still a few more ways Apple could easily block the Palm Pre. However, it also appears that Palm’s ability to disguise the Pre as an iPod is virtually limitless. If Apple chooses to fight this battle further they may find themselves stuck with the decision of forcing firmware updates on iPod users in order to prevent the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes, a move that will surely upset many long-term iPod users who have never even heard of the Pre. Even in that scenario it’s possible Palm could yet again re-enable iTunes syncing, meaning Apple could alienate its own faithful customers and still fail to block the Pre from iTunes.

This fight by Apple is not surprising when put in the perspective of Apple’s history with third party hardware and software. Apple has actively fought its own customers on the ability to use third party media managers for iPods/iPhones by constantly breaking compatibility through firmware updates and even threatening those who share information on how to load/unload media from their devices. In the past Apple may have had a valid argument for preventing third party media managers from managing content on iPods due to the DRM present on many tracks purchased through iTunes. Apple no longer sells music with DRM and has not done so for a while, so the argument that they must fight third party software to prevent piracy is outlandish. This stance of Apple makes it extremely difficult for legitimate iPod and iPhone users from using anything else but iTunes to load content onto their devices. For some using iTunes isn’t even an option as iTunes is not available (and does not have any plans to be made available) on Linux, meaning those of us who use Linux cannot use an iPod or iPhone at all.

Palm Pre’s Media Sync capability is different story though. In this case Apple isn’t forcing their hardware users to use their software, they are forcing software users to use their hardware. At first this seemed to me to be slightly less anti-consumer than the previous scenario until I thought about who actually uses iTunes to sync with their Palm Pre. Most people who use iTunes own an iPod or iPhone. iTunes is a decent media player but there is very little incentive for those who don’t own an iPod to use it. Both iPod owners and non-owners are encouraged by Apple to use iTunes for all their music needs and it is the only way to purchase music from Apple’s music store. Many users have invested large sums of money to build a collection of music through the iTunes Music Store, and those users believe they “own” that music. Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine you have purcahse ~$500 worth of DRM-free music over the past couple years and you have stored that music on your trusty iPod. Now, imagine you are shopping for a new phone and for whatever reason you decide to purchase a Palm Pre (maybe AT&T isn’t an option, or maybe Sprint is your current carrier, or maybe even though you are an iPod user you just don’t like or want the iPhone). In the process of purchasing your Pre you discover it actually makes a great media player that allows you to lower the number of devices in your pocket. Sure, you still use your iPod for certain things like jogging, but on a daily basis you don’t want both devices in your pocket so you want to use the Pre for music as well. Now, how do you go about getting your music onto your device? Well, without an iTunes syncing capability there are ways to get your MP3s out of iTunes and onto your device, but doing this manually or migrating to another media manager may be difficult and cumbersome. Plus, you still have to use iTunes for your iPod. Wouldn’t it be great if the Pre “just worked” with iTunes? Yeah, Palm thought so too so they made it happen. Apple’s response to this is to punish their own customers by putting up road blocks to this kind of interoperability.

Apple can try to spin this however it wants, but its hard to deny that they are punishing their own customers. If they continue this fight it may also be tough for organizations like the Department of Justice to ignore these actions in the context of the current digital music market, where roughly 70% of all music sold online occurs through iTunes. Even in the greater music market Apple is now the number one seller of music in the USA. Apple’s position in the market gives them a lot of power, and they appear to be using that power to dictate significantly the terms with which customers shall have access to content. This matches accepted definitions of “monopoly” almost verbatim. Apple can avoid that label by not strong-arming their customers, but if this battle continues that is exactly what they will be doing.

In conclusion, I strongly disagree with critics who claim Palm is wrong for trying to be interoperable with iTunes. The Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes is just one of the many ways Palm allows users to load media onto the Pre. Palm is not attempting to “rely” on iTunes or any single sync method, and is instead taking the approach of giving users as many options as possible. I think this is the right approach and in most cases this allows users, who have already amassed huge media collections, to sync that media with the Pre using their current setup, whatever that may be. I believe Apple is wrong here for trying to punish their own customers who have added a non-Apple device to their collection of devices. Apple’s actions are anti-competitive and, possibly more importantly, anti-customer. They aren’t hurting Palm much by playing cat and mouse, they are hurting their own paying customers.

I decided to use this as a chance to learn much more about building secure web applications and I spent a few hours diagramming the concept. Then, I spoke with my friend again. I explained the design to her and she agreed the design would keep her journal secure enough that she would feel comfortable testing it and using it.

The basic design of ExaNotes is that the a user’s password is used to encrypt each user’s notes using the very strong AES-256 cipher. This password is only available to ExaNotes during the duration of the user’s browsing session. Once a logout or timeout has occurred the session data is destroyed and there is no longer any information left on the server which could be used to decrypt a user’s notes. The only thing stored on the server are the salted SHA-256 cryptographic hashes of the user’s username and password. Even the username is anonymized!

In reality there is no way to completely secure any web application from someone who has all the keys and the knowledge. A sufficiently skilled developer or administrator could modify ExaNotes in such a way that user credentials were captured at the time of login and stored somewhere, allowing them the ability to decrypt the notes of users whose logins they have captured. As it currently stands ExaNotes only retains the login credentials for the duration of the user’s session and the session data is not easily accessible. More than just my good nature allows me to promise ExaNotes will remain this way as long as I am administrating it. My own self interest is to thank as well. If I had access to the content of ExaNotes’ users I would assume a level of liability I do not want. Building a way to gain access to user content could force me to reveal content to a 3rd party. If the 3rd party was a good intentioned police officer wanting access to content to solve or prevent a murder there is very little ethical dilemma from my perspective. However, if an agent of an oppressive political organization attempted to coerce or force me into providing access to a user’s notes in an attempt to track and suppress political dessent it would be nice if I could avoid the ethical quandary by being able to truthfully respond that I simply have no way to provide access. I feel preventing myself from assuming that liability and building a truly secure and anonymous system is even more important than providing any mechanism for 3rd party investigation.

For some my promise is understandably not enough. To allow for independent validation of ExaNote’s design and security and to allow people to run ExaNotes on their own server I am offering the source code to anyone who requests it. For now anyone interested can send me an email and I will send you the source. Eventually I plan to start an open source project and release the source code under an open source license. I simply have not found the time and have not yet had requests from other developers to do so. For those interested ExaNotes is built using PHP,MySQL,HTML,CSS, and JavaScript. ExaNotes makes use of the prototype javascript library and tinyMCE rich text editor for its web interface. ExaNotes also contains a small API which could be used for desktop or “native” clients. If there is interest the API will be published with documentation.

The user interface of ExaNotes is clean, simple, and easy to learn. I generally follow the KISS principle in my interface design, which stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” I’m sure you will agree that I have done that with ExaNotes. While the interface is simple I do not believe it is boring. ExaNotes provides a slick, even elegant interface for writing and managing your notes. This interface is lightweight yet modern, making use of modern web development tools like Ajax and Rich Text Editing while running fast on even the slowest computers and the smallest screens. ExaNotes even runs well on some mobile devices and is particularly optimized for use with the Palm Pre.

ExaNotes has been functional for a few months now and has been my primary note taking tool for roughly as long. I have been developing ExaNotes to fit my needs and those of a few of my friends and colleagues. I now feel this application is mature enough that it is ready for a larger audience and hopefully there is a large audience out there who will find it as useful as I do.

The public beta begins today. Simply visit ExaNotes to participate.

Please send me questions, criticism, suggestions, bugs, or any other feedback you have regarding ExaNotes. Leave a comment here, send me an email, message me on twitter, even find me on AIM or Facebook.

Midori

A small and simple WebKit browser. I have been looking for a good WebKit browser to use in linux… unfortunately this isn’t it. The performance is pretty decent when loading and using the page itself, but the actual program UI is clunky, slow, and buggy. This one needs some serious GTK+ work before it can expect to be a real choice for Ubuntu users. It hasn’t crashed on me or anything, but the fact that the toolbar can get resized if you switch tabs or use the back/forward buttons should not happen, but it does and it happens slowly.

Epiphany

Uses the Gecko layout engine, like Firefox, and seems to do it a little slower than Firefox. Some of the tab behaviors are odd and difficult to configure. When I click on a link that should open in a new window I generally don’t want it to appear in a new window, I want it in a new tab. Back and forward history seem to be shared among tabs in the same window? I guess I could see how that would be useful, but it is very odd behavior. Double clicking in the empty area of the tab bar doesn’t spawn a new tab? Also odd. All-in-all this isn’t a bad browser, it just doesn’t seem to do anything better than Firefox, which I was really hoping for.

Galeon

This is another browser using the Gecko layout engine. This browser actually feels pretty fast. I have enjoyed using it. However, it is not without issues. On a netbook it is very frustrating that I cannot seem to configure the browser’s UI to take up a minimal amount of screen space. The stock back and forward buttons are huge, and the height of the toolbar they are on is way to large. Even in full screen, the UI takes up too much vertical screen real estate.

These are the only alternative browsers I have tried so far. None of these browsers offer a good alternative to Firefox on a screen-space-constrained netbook. Not a single browser here had a windowed or full screen mode that offered as much screen real-estate dedicated to displaying the web page as Firefox (when properly configured). Even after exploring the various configuration options there appears to be no way to make ANY of these browsers use less or even similar amounts of screen-space for their UI compared to Firefox (not counting the options to remove the toolbar entirely, which is not realistic) . On a screen this small page real-estate becomes very important. There should at least be OPTIONS to make the UI as minimal as possible, but the options provided are simply inadequate. This compounds the fact that Midori and Epiphany both feel slower than Firefox. Galeon, which generally feels as fast or faster than Firefox, is crippled for me by the fact that the minimum usable UI configuration is the largest of the group. Also, not a single one of these browsers offers the ability have a FULL full-screen browser, like Firefox, where the UI auto-hides and the web page is given nearly 100% of the screen. I hope with the growing number of netbook users and the growing number of them running linux this will have to be a form factor each brower’s community will develop for and offer more customizable/minimizable user interfaces.

First I noticed that the US increased its dominance at the top of the list. The nine fastest super computing sites are all in the United States. You must go all the way to the tenth fastest to find a computing site outside of the United States. In the previous list (June 2008) the US still dominated, but Germany, France, and India all had computing sites in the top ten. With just six of ten fastest computing sites located in the US only six months ago, the nine out of ten score this time around is a significant improvement. The TOP500 list has been published twice a year since 1993 and looking through all the previous lists this is the most dominant the US has ever been in the top ten, and possibly overall.

The second interesting thing I noticed was that the tenth place site is located in China. This is only China’s second time being listed in the top ten (the last time was in June 2004), and they have yet to reach any higher on the list than tenth place.

However, what really caught my eye was the choice of operating systems in the top ten systems. All nine of the systems located in the US are using some flavor of Linux as their operating system. Linux is built by a community of volunteer programmers around the world and is often considered antithetical to commercial software. By association, some people believe Linux and the Open Source software movement are in direct opposition to capitalism. I found it both ironic and gratifying to see that the most commercial and capitalistic nation on earth is dominating the rankings of the world’s fastest computing sites using a product assumed to be at odds with both commercialism and capitalism. In an even more ironic twist of fate, The People’s Repulbic of China, whose communist leaders often insist on home grown solutions for many industries, are using a foreign commercial software stack to run their fastest computing site: Microsoft Windows HPC 2008.

Beyond being interesting, does this list offer any real economic, scientific, or political insight? Probably not. However, if it did, it appears the list would be saying that the United States is not loosing its relevance as the center of the information technology revolution as quickly as many have suggested. It might also be telling us that the United States is embracing “socialist”, “grassroots”, or “community” tools (when it comes to software) to a greater degree than many realize, and that China may be embracing capitalism and commercialism more quickly than we are often led to believe.