Forest for the Trees

» Moving to a safer password solution

Speaking of bcrypt, here’s a dead-simple way to migrate your Rails application passwords to bcrypt from an existing hashing solution without users noticing a thing.

» How To Safely Store A Password

Use bcrypt

» The state of Ruby job ads.

Mid range Ruby developer required

I guess that’s the same as mediocre.

This role would suit a Ruby developer who has approximately 4+ years commercial experience.

Wonder how many Ruby developers that have “approximately 4+” years of commercial Ruby experience consider themselves mediocre.

Brandon Grotesque is a stunning new sans serif typeface designed by Hannes von Döhren. The regular weight is free until April 15th.

(via Zeldman)

» US Fed Judge invalidates gene patent

Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were “improperly granted” because they involved a “law of nature.” He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”

Somehow this sounds to me even more absurd than the recent software patents. ACLU:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has granted thousands of patents on human genes – in fact, about 20 percent of our genes are patented. A gene patent holder has the right to prevent anyone from studying, testing or even looking at a gene. As a result, scientific research and genetic testing has been delayed, limited or even shut down due to concerns about gene patents.

Glad to get some of my genes back.

“ It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.

—

Philip Pullman, on whether his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was offensive.

(via Boing Boing)

“

In every sentence that you write, ask yourself,

What am I trying to say?

What words will express it?

What image or idiom will make it clearer?

Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Could I put it more shortly?

Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

— Orwell’s 6 questions in The art of great writing: 60 writing tips from 6 all-time great writers

» Smashwords to support self-published ebooks on iPad

This could be a huge boon in liberating the publishing process.

» Backstage at 37signals

Jared spools chats with Jason Fried about the UI process at 37signals.

“ pwnat, pronounced “poe-nat”, is a tool that allows any number of clients behind NATs to communicate with a server behind a separate NAT with no port forwarding and no DMZ setup on any routers in order to directly communicate with each other. The server does not need to know anything about the clients trying to connect.

—

pwnat - NAT to NAT client-server communication

Hell yeah.