Yup Dot Com: Category Open Source

Teaching Kids to Hack with Hackety Hack

Daniel Butler — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:42:00 -0400

Ruby’s own Edgar Allen Poe, _why the lucky stiff, mastermind of the continually-evolving Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and Try Ruby!, has done it again with Hackety Hack: The Coder’s Starter Kit. But what exactly has _why done, and why?

In The Little Coder’s Predicament, _why posits that, unlike us first generation hackers who grew up with Vic 20s, C64s, Amigas, and other machines which came with simple, accessible programming environments, kids aren’t learning programming on today’s consoles and desktops because companies are now fearful of placing the power of a programming language in the hands of its users. With Hackety Hack, the expressiveness of Ruby, the power of web-based applications using JavaScript and AJAX, and _why’s own creativity and artistry have converged to produce a quirky, easy-to-use, and, most of all, fun, programming environment that kids will take to faster than you can type FOR X=0 TO 255: POKE 32768+X,X: NEXT.

Brian DeLacey explains, “Hackety Hack is as significant a computer-age innovation as the mouse because it makes computers accessible in wholly new educational and transformational ways.”

Hackety Hack currently comes as a standalone installer for Windows (Version 0.3.1 if you want it), and it works pretty damn well. (Further platform support should be forthcoming, as well as non-English translations.) As you create programs and follow through the self-guided tutorials, you can create, edit, and save files, which are preserved between sessions. Ruby’s expressiveness is encapsulated in a DSL which integrates beautifully with JavaScript. say writes to the output area; ask uses a JavaScript dialog to grab input from the user, and sleep presents an animated JavaScript progress bar. All and all, a very kind and sensible interface for the babies.

I’ve been asked what I would recommend as ways to get kids involved with programming, and in the past I’ve recommended Try Ruby!, but Hackety Hack has taken the self-guided tutorial and freedom of a true, (albeit sandboxed), programming environment to the next level, with a powerful set of methods that make common and modern tasks easy. The simplicity shows through, and as _why explains in The Hackety Manifesto, “Hello world should be one line. In fact, downloading an MP3 should be one line!!.”

Best of all, Hackety Hack is free, and will remain so. Thanks, _why. And thanks to all (the 50+) who contributed to this creation.

Hackety Hack @ Wikipedia

Roxen 4.5.111 Released

Daniel Butler — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 09:48:00 -0400

Roxen Webserver 4.5.111 (r2) has just been released by http://www.roxen.com/ of the 709-year old city of Linköping, Sweden. Roxen, named after a nearby lake, is a full-featured web application server platform, written in Pike and C, and supporting features such as dynamically-generated images and text, a XML-based macro language, a non-forking multi-threaded HTTP/HTTPS engine, proxy and relaying support, database integration. and other advanced features.

Changes since 4.5.78 include several RXML, HTTP, and database-related fixes. In the included version of Pike, they have included several “internal fixes for compiler errors, 2GB+ files, memory handling, asynchronous HTTP queries, etc.” The Image module now supports “CMYK format, EPS variations, little-endian TIFF files, GhostScript timeout, and more”.

We use Roxen and Apache 2/Rails/Mongrel side-by-side to be able to handle various difficult web-hosting situations. Things that are difficult in Apache are quite simple in Roxen, and some of the limitations of Roxen can be easily handled by Apache.

Roxen WebServer changes in 4.5.111 r2
Download Source or Linux, Windows, or Mac Binaries

Simplified Photo Blogging Software: Tanjun'ka

Daniel Butler — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 10:51:00 -0400

Tanjun’ka, Japanese for “simplification”, allows you to quickly post entries to your blog which include photos. The software is open source and is written in C# on the .NET 2.0 framework.

Looks promising!

Tanjun’ka Home Page
Tanjun’ka Download Page
Project Page @ SourceForge

Yet Another Ruby on Rails IDE: RideMe

Daniel Butler — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:23:00 -0400

While nothing can really compare to TextMate on OS X for its simplicity and natural flexibility, Windows users have yet another Ruby on Rails IDE to satiate your need of file drawers, tab completions, and that debilitating syntax-highlighting addiction: RideMe. Jeff Cohen declared version 1.0 as indulging you in the following ways:

100% free, open source, and not built on top of anything else. You just need Ruby 1.8.2 and .NET 2.0 installed.
Mission in life is to be lightweight and very fast. This is not a general purpose Ruby editor, it’s an IDE for getting your Rails work done.
File-system based approach. No messy workspace files or extra RIDE-ME specifics junking up your directory.
Syntax highlighting for Ruby Files, Views, Layouts, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, and HTML.
Familiar Visual Studio-style tabbed document editor.
Model / Member drop downs for easy movability in code. (Think Visual Studio above your code file)
Code folding for Ruby files
script/console built into the IDE (think Visual Studio “Immediate Mode”)
Server Error notification (template errors will actually open the view file and go to the LOC)
Internal web browser (optional)

Project RideMe
Download Installer: RideMe.Setup.msi

Webalizer with Autonomous System Numbers

Daniel Butler — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:01:00 -0400

While researching web site statistics packages, I came across Webalizer-ASN, which identifies the Autonomous System a host belongs to.

Init Seven AG has developed an extension of The Webalizer called ‘webalizer-asn’, that supports AS number (Autonomous System Number) lookups to generate additional statistics based on the origin of the hosts that have visited a website.

The AS number identifies the AS (Autonomous System) a host is belonging to. An Autonomous System is a group of IP networks operated by one or more network operator/s which has a single and clearly defined external routing policy. (See RFC1930 for more information about AS numbers.)

It is useful for high-traffic sites and ISPs when they know from which networks the visitors are coming from. For example they can plan future peerings or other things based on this information.

Another interesting Webalizer derivative is AWFFull - A Webalizer Fork, Full o’ Features!, which adds, among other features, more than 12 months of history and CSS-styling for the reports.

Webalizer-ASN Home Page
Webalizer-ASN Demo Page
Gentoo Portage ebuild

Typo 4.0.0 Released

Daniel Butler — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 15:35:00 -0400

Scott Laird writes:

I’d like to announce the release of Typo 4.0.0, the latest version of the most widely-used Ruby-based blogging software. This is the first official release of Typo 4.0, and the product of almost a year’s work by the Typo team. This is a huge upgrade over the previous Typo release, version 2.6.0. You can download it from Rubyforge, or you can use the new Typo .gem and installer.

Typo 4.0.0 Announcement

bsSvnBrowser 0.1.0 Released

Daniel Butler — Fri, 12 May 2006 06:26:00 -0400

Bounty Source has released a Ruby on Rails Subversion Browser which uses Ajax “to give it that live application-like feel.” Features include:

Revision Tree View
Source View
“Blame”
Revision History
File Diff

Future work to the open source tool will include the following features:

Code highlighting
Directory Diff
MIME Type Detection

Looks like a promising tool for your development projects.

Bounty Source bsSvnBrowser Home Page
bsSvnBrowser Example Page

Transparent Background Spinners for Ajax

Daniel Butler — Thu, 04 May 2006 07:32:00 -0400

Gael Pourriel posted the following Ajax spinners with transparent, neutral color backgrounds to the Rails mailing list. Thank you, Gael; these are exactly what I needed.

Mac Spinner →

Moz Spinner →

It looks like you have to wait just a bit faster with the Mac spinner than with the Moz spinner. Right click each image above and select ‘Save As’ to have them for your very own web dynamo.

Update: Create your own custom spinners with whatever backgrounds you need at ajaxload.info.

Update 2: Here’s another eyeful of various AJAX Activity Indicators, a veritable hamster dance of wait-for-it-ness. My favorite:

Moz Orange →

Radiant CMS: Ruby on Rails Content Managment System

Daniel Butler — Tue, 02 May 2006 13:23:00 -0400

RadiantCMS Page Management Interface

John W. Long at Wiseheart Design has announced a new content management system written in Ruby on Rails. Radiant CMS is a “no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams. It is similar to Textpattern or MovableType, but is a general purpose content management system (not a blogging engine).” Notable features include:

An elegant user interface
Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language (Radius)
Development and Production modes, depending on URL used to access the application
Extensible with special page-oriented plugins called behaviors
Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML, with support for other filters
A Simple user management/rights system

John also writes that Radiant CMS will be used to power ruby-lang.org when it has been adequately tested.

Radiant CMS Home Page
Radiant CMS Trac
RadiantC MS Public Demo

Economic Development Committee Recommends Open Source

Daniel Butler — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 06:59:00 -0400

The Committee for Economic Development released a 72-page report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness. The report recommends open standards, open source, and open innovation in government to promote growth of the U.S. and other world economies. One choice quote:

“Open-source software development is providing a testing ground for the organization of massive, distribute collaboration by volunteers who are subject to neither authority from within a hierarchical firm nor to the market’s price signals.”

The extensive list of references in the full report (144 of them!) is a What’s-What of open-source, Web 2.0-type literature and articles and well worth the click.

Summary Report - PDF
Full Report - PDF