Tonight I was able to attend NSCoderNight DC in Tysons Corner, VA and finally met Jose Vazquez in person. Unfortunately, turn out is pretty spotty, with Jose being the only continuous attendee. Despite it being just the two of us, I came away energized and started playing around with the new APIs we spoke about: Core Audio/AudioQueues and Quartz Composer.
Whether you realize it or not, there are several companies gathering a tremendous amount of data about you. One such company is Acxiom which maintains consumer information on nearly every household in the U.S. (and has branched out to other countries). Acxiom combines tax records and public census data with transactional data from its clients (the corporations you deal with on a daily basis). Using this data, Acxiom has created a product called PersonicX which is a finely-grained household level segmentation system based on consumer and demographic characteristics.
The idea of such a classification system both interests and appalls me quite a bit, so I’ve done some research into the 70 segments and 21 life-stage groups.
After almost seven years, I was finally awarded a patent: 7,170,862. It’s assigned to my previous employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Until I started this process, I never imagined how long the USP&TO could take to finally assign a patent. Now I’m waiting to see if any of my other patents filed by Cisco will be awarded.
This actually happened back in January, but since I was never notified, I researched it myself after the recent news of Cisco opening up IOS to 3rd party developers.
If you want to distribute your Ruby applications while still protecting your intellectual property you could use an obfuscation tools such as ZenObfuscate or try to write your own. But in this article, I’m going to show a different approach that’s been used by several different companies producing commercial products written in Ruby. The method is not specific to Ruby and should work for any interpreted language in which you need to distribute your source code with the application.
The secret is to encrypt your Ruby source, store it in a database and then modify the Ruby interpreter to look for your code in the database and decrypt it on the fly. I should note that there is no way to completely protect a product which is distributed to your customers–with enough diligence any security measures can be broken.
These instructions are for Unix operating systems (include MacOS X). Unfortunately (or fortunately, for me), I don’t own a Windows machine.
MacSanta is back again this year with some nice savings on great software for Mac OS X! Each day they have 20% off deals on a subset of the software in their extended list (which is all 10% off until December 24th). Just use the coupon code, MACSANTA07, at participating vendors.
Hurry over and scoop up those apps which you’ve always wanted! So far, I’ve purchased MarsEdit and Webnote Happy.
Back in July I attended the Advanced Ruby Studio in Reston, VA. At the time I had wanted to blog about it but my life suddenly became extremely busy and I left my blog to languish for several months. To rectify that, I’ve decided to write up this post providing an overview of the studio and my impressions.
The instructors for the three day course were Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, two elite Ruby programmers (and excellent teachers). While I wouldn’t consider every topic covered during the course advanced, I will say that there was a good mix of intermediate and advanced content (and some of the advanced stuff was really advanced!)
