Programming

Today was the first time I had TextMate open for 2 weeks or so, what a relief. We just bought a place and have spent a long time painting and doing other annoying things that were necessary. I’m really exhausted by all of it. I only have a few rewiring things todo by next weekend and I should be finished.

TDC the Danish telecoms monopoly messed me about with the ADSL line. It was installed last Friday but didn’t work because of a dead phone line. It would take them 2 weeks to send a technician to get it working. So I quit my subscription and opened a Cable Modem account, also with TDC (Unfortunately). In Denmark you still have to have a analog phone subscription to have ADSL, so at least I’m saving the DKK 119 pm ($20) I’m paying for nothing. I have never made a call from that line anyway. The Cable Modem deal was cool. I picked the modem up in the local TDC shop and my account was setup the next day.

Now to battle TDC for the moving costs. They charged me DKK 450 ($75) for the move (which never worked). This includes DKK 49 for postage. I’m not quite sure what it was they posted. I fully expect an hours worth of battle with TDC about this. I’ve fought isp’s before and won, so I’m not going to lie down.

Annoyances aside. It is great to finally be back at work. I’m trying to finish the last bug fixes in the next StakeItOut release. No ETA at the moment except for real soon now.

I have written about it here in my other blog First release of EzCrypto library.

In upcoming release I will be adding support for digital signatures and rails integration.

It turns out that Sean Treadway lives a block or two away from me, so we met up for a couple of beers last night.

Great getting to know a fellow Rails coder and Entrepreneur .

So when I bought my powerbook in March I decided to stick with the base 512mb. I figured how bad could it be? It’s not like I’m running any Java IDE’s or anything that normally sucks up memory.

Besides there is a magic tax write off limit I would hit here in Denmark if I didn’t upgrade the memory.

Well, when you have textmate, safari, firefox, newsfire, marsedit, yoursql, itunes as well as a webrick dev session open at the time on a 512 meg powerbook you find yourself doing a lot of swapping. It was a pain in the ass (I’m the boss here I do not need to insert **). Even the cool instant startup from sleep was taking ages.

So I did the right thing and ordered 512mb from Crucial so I could have it as part of this quarters VAT return. Finally got it yesterday and what a difference. I know everyone probably already knew this, but it is so much faster. The memory also was nearly 20 euro cheaper than it was when I looked at it in March. Actually my own memory might be wrong, but thats what I think anyway.

Nick asked on ruby-talk how to do simple encryption using ruby and it’s built in OpenSSL module.

I’ve just registred an ezcrypto module at rubyforge, which should make it a lot easier to use. There currently is no code there, but I will be uploading something shortly.

However to get started here is a little starter:

require 'openssl'
require 'digest/sha2'
cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-192-cbc')  
cipher.encrypt
cipher.key=Digest::SHA256.digest("super secret password")
encrypted= cipher<<"data to be encrypted..." # Note this needs to be padded to be the block size of the cipher.

To do decrypt just use cipher.decrypt instead.