Thanks to my job at Xerox, I had the fun and interesting experience the other day of answering some questions emailed to me by Amanda Morin, half of the Ruby team at About.com. This is new stuff to me. Some of the questions made me feel like I was doing a midterm in grad school! But the end result is not too bad, though she (probably wisely) cut my comment about scaling Java in comparison to Ruby (anyone who knows me, knows I’m other than a fan of Java).

The basic questions were about Ruby and about Cloud Computing. What do you know but 2 days after answering all those questions, I run across an article that states the obvious but little thought of idea that cloud computing may be a new thing for business but it’s old news for cyber criminals. What do you think a botnet is but a resource cloud? Wish I had seen it before! Oh well, check out the article Botnets and illicit file swapping: the original “cloud computing” and an older take at Cloud Computing: Invented By Criminals, Secured By ???

In addition to interviewing me, Amanda interviewed Hampton Catlin, who (unlike me) really knows what he’s talking about. There’s a series of articles on the subject. Go see the articles. Learn something and make it look like someone out there has an interest in what I have to say (It’s okay to pretend).

Interviews with me

• Cloud Computing and Ruby: Interviewing Dave Vandervort
• What is Cloud Computing? Interviewing Dave Vandervort of Xerox Innovation Group

Other bits of the series (also interesting, though not as much):

• What is Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing and Ruby: Interviewing Hampton Catlin

updates

3/25/2009: Fixed bad link on “What is Cloud Computing” That was mistakenly pointing to the Hampton Catlin interview.

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.