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Archive for August, 2009

LDAP Pass-through Authentication with Authlogic and ActiveLdap

(Programming)

Today, I pushed a branch to my fork of authlogic_example: with-activeldap.

This branch shows a way of implementing pass-through authentication to an LDAP server using ActiveLdap and Authlogic, with just some small changes to the User and UserSession models.

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Don’t Be Sad, Be Awesome Instead

(Personal Development)

When I get sad, I stop being sad and be AWESOME instead. True story.”
— Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother

I think that this is an incredibly inspirational line. While it seems kind of silly to take advice from a television show, I think it makes an excellent point: it is the times when you are at your lowest that you must put in your absolute best. Energy spent being worried and sad can and should be reallocated to taking action and facing the very things that are bringing you down.

And really, all else being equal, being awesome is much more, well, awesome than being sad.

Where is why?

(Programming)

“Why The Lucky Stiff”, one of the most influential characters in the Ruby community, has simply vanished. His Twitter account, GitHub account, and most of his websites are gone without a trace.

Why The Lucky Stiff’s contributions to the Ruby community include “Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby”, a book which many state was the reason they got into Ruby, Shoes, an easy-to-use cross-platform GUI toolkit with innovative online distribution features, and Hpricot, a very slick HTML parser that is also a joy to use.

Some believe that he has decided to move on from software development because his last tweet reads “programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.” Some believe that his accounts were all hacked. A few others believe that his anonymity has been compromised and that he has decided the destroy the pseudonym.

Wherever Why The Lucky Stiff goes from here, I hope he knows that there are so many of us who looked up to him and have him to thank for knowing the joy that is programming in Ruby. He will be sorely missed.

The True Spirit of Open Source

(Programming)

Very rarely does something completely disconnected from my day-to-day existence annoy me so much that I feel the need to say something, but this is something I feel very strongly about.

Robert Fischer wrote a post titled “Dear User of My Open Source Project” and many of the proggit comments were quite vicious. I noticed that some of these commentators seemed to have the same understanding of “open source”: that an open source project is a product, like any other product, that is simply distributed with its source code. Therefore, Robert is clearly creating and releasing “inferior” products and this behaviour should be punished. Being open source is not an excuse.

If this is your understanding of open source, you have missed the point. Entirely.

Yes, there are open source projects out there that are very well-documented, quite reliable, and have attracted large communities of contributors that tirelessly work to improve every aspect of the software. But by my count, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Most open source projects out there are maintained by just one person who scratched an itch and thought the solution might be useful to others. Some of these projects might be lucky enough to have a few passionate contributors. These projects may have some rough edges in their code or their documentation, and perhaps the contributors might be too busy to put on the appropriate polish.

You might think that irresponsible, or even reprehensible. How dare this person release this garbage and pollute the open source community!

News flash: it is these people who drive open source software. Those large, reliable open source projects with all of the sparkle and polish? They became that way because large groups of people found them useful enough that they decided to invest their time in making the project even better. But in all cases, for open source software to progress, people have to be willing to give up their time and energy for free and with no expectation of reward. Open source is driven by pure altruism.

And yes, as a programmer using open source software, you may sometimes have to roll up your sleeves, get into the code, and make the changes that you need. Or perhaps you can find other ways to contribute. But complaining like a petulant child that it doesn’t serve your particular purpose is, frankly, incredibly rude considering that you were given this software entirely for free and given the power to inspect its source code and change it to suit your needs. If that is the way that you’re going to approach these projects, go use something else.

Like Christmas, the true spirit of open source is giving.

Edit: Some one on proggit rightly pointed out that I’ve made a common mistake of grouping “open source” software with “free” software, a subtle distinction that this pagefrom the FSF makes very clear. However, I believe that Robert Fischer’s post and his complaints also referred more to “free” software than “open source” software. Consider, for example, that he prefers to use the WTFPL for his projects, the spirit of which is “I’ve decided to put this out here, and you guys can do whatever you’d like with it.”

This is not to say that all “open source” software doesn’t adhere to the values of “free” software or that all “open source” software necessarily follows the values of “free” software.