Chaos Program

Interesting headlines the last few days about a new patent for Microsoft on what they refer to as pay-as-you-go computing (See: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/29/microsoft.metered.computing/index.html). The basic idea is that you rent time on an application such as Word, rather than having to spend much more money for the whole package. Sounds like a great idea when you just need it to get a particular job done and lack either the money or the inclination to buy the software.

On its face, this may sound like a good idea. Hey, you mean I can go to the library and do my work without needing a lot of expensive stuff?

I hate to tell you this but you probably don’t need the expensive software anyway. OpenOffice includes an excellent word processor, a fine spreadsheet and other goodies like the ones MS charges a lot of money for. If you don’t like that, try Google docs. Or even something else. This doesn’t apply just to office-type applications. There are lots of tools out there that can be used for free or very little.

But that’s not the big problem. read more »

Today I uploaded my first public open source code, the has_log plugin. This is a Ruby on Rails plugin that allows events that take place in one model to automatically (or on demand) be logged to another model. Arbitrary text can be inserted, as well as extra data fields. This makes it possible to log when a product is purchased, or when its price is updated, or even when two people become friends (though that one is slightly more complicated).

I wrote this plug in only after searching for similar ones and finding nothing that was this simple and this well suited for multiple tasks.

As is always the case with any programming project, development is not done. Really, the plug in is now in beta. New features will be added after I have a chance to deploy it in one of the several projects I think I can use it for.

The code and such documentation as there is can be found on github at http://github.com/irving/has_log/tree/master

I’m happy to be putting something out there like this. Who knows? Maybe it will even be useful …

UPDATE 2/4/2009

Pushed a major update that now has support for polymorphic event tables. IOW, the model events are logged to can be associated with multiple other models. Many objects, each with its own unique events, logging to one table. It’s a beautiful thing.

I’ve read a couple of year end pieces recently (sorry, I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of collecting links for pseudo-interesting stuff as I read) claiming that information security type jobs will be protected from the current economic downturn. The logic seems to go that companies understand that, in order to compete on the Internet, they have to protect themselves more than ever before. So, though they’ll be laying people off in all other sections of the business, they will actually expand their staff in protecting their digital assets.

This is some of the stupidest wishful thinking I have ever seen. Not THE stupidest, but it’s truly dumb. read more »