What a load of crap.

Working life is the fucking best thing. I have never enjoyed myself more.

A typical day for me would be hard at work coding for (hopefully) eight hours straight. Yes, that is actually true. Open the door, get continuous tests going and start smashing the key board. I like this. So that right there is a fun day for me, something I can do day after day after day.

And it gets even better.

I am lucky enough to share an office with a dude who likes electronic dance music. So often always we will have something like Frisky Radio on, pretty loud, actually drowning out conversation. Give me progressive beats for eight hours straight and I am a happy man. An espresso machine is five steps away. We are in the middle of Amsterdam (and I do mean in the actual city center). Organic lunch.

Before this I shared a big office in a vacant property. That was also amazing. Before that I worked in a loft. Before that, at home. And always I am having so much fun I can just giggle all the time. So every time I hear “thank God it’s Friday/weekend” or whatever that mystifies me. To me there is no drop in life quality during the week. It’s the same, just with other people and other music.

If you dread going to work, really think hard and try to change that. Because really, every day of your life can be the best fucking day ever.

Say you want to change the last three commit messages.

git rebase -i HEAD~3

Then change ‘pick’ to ‘reword’ and save the file. What you are saving is actually a script which will run your $EDITOR for every commit message. Nothing else is changed, just the commit message. Your repo is automatically rebased and updated.

As always when changing history, you will likely run into trouble if you have already pushed to a remote repository.

Imagine this: you wish to store a bunch of social media URLs in your every day relational database. You nor I nor your visitors particularly care that these URLs are reusable elsewhere. Solution: serialize those bad boys into a text column and call it a day!

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  store :social, accessors: [:twitter, :facebook, :youtube]
end

Now you can just store those URLs as if they were attributes on your model. It’s not important if you store zero, one or more. You can even store URLs you have no accessors for! Just like those NoSQL kids.

If even works great in the view since you usually wish to hide some markup in case there is nothing social happening:

- unless @person.social.empty?
  %section.social
    ... render those social links

* actually once, just then.

if starts_at < starts_at.at_beginning_of_day + 6.hours
  # do something
end

do this:

if starts_at.hour < 6
  # do something easier to understand
end

Here’s my use case: I need to fetch child models but only those that have certain flags set on the parent. Here’s how you would do this using a simple boolean:

class Child
  scope :visible, include(:parent).where(visible: true)
end

However, this does not work immediately since FlagShihTzu stores any number of fields inside one column. After a little digging around in the source code I discovered that the conditions are exposed, allowing me to use them:

class Child
  scope :visible, include(:parent).where(Parent.visible_condition)
end

So easy.

The idea behind the app is simple: provide a safe environment for young children (age 2-6) to play, watch, learn and discover. It features content from television, games such as memory, a drawing tool and sing-a-long songs. The app mostly follows the website, but is adapted for touch screens.

I have young children and they keep coming back to this app again and again. We can also see this in the visitor stats. In fact the Z@ppelin team, including myself, was quite surprised when we received a call from the hosting team that we were causing a massive load on their servers. Since then I added a huge amount of caching and CDN speedups and now we’re fine.

Some numbers:

• 100.000+ downloads in 10 months time
• 60.000 children use the app every month
• 6 million pageviews per month on average

I did the back end in Ruby on Rails using JSON. The app itself was coded by Noodlewerk.

They want to enable all citizens to have free access to education and all other publicly-funded institutions, both online and offline, by pushing for a mandatory use of Open Standards and a guaranteed platform-independent access to all online environments. This allows students and parents to use Free Software, and in that way being able to tap into their potential for growth and personal development.

To me it’s a no-brainer but apparently the minister is not supportive of the idea. This is the same minister that is telling us parents to ‘spend more time with our children, discussing, tutoring, helping out at school’ while she spent zero time on her own children, and had a fucking nanny doing that. I have to wonder how lying thugs like that can come to rule us. Oh wait, politics.

A few sane members of parliament are pushing back, but I think that’s not enough. A to-do list has been published, and I will cross off a few items of my own. If you can help, please consider it!

First the technical background. This website was created by me and I both wrote articles and programmed the website. Back in 2000 I did this in plain HTML, then jumped on J2EE. Looking back that was a nightmare. When Rails hit the scene in 2005 (I think) I ported everything to Rails and have been using that ever since.

In fact GO Magazine has been running every Rails version from 0.9-something until now. In recent years the website has been defunct and completely stagnant. Until now!

After a quick website design contest using freelancer.com, which was eventually won by Webdeezine from Serbia, I had SliceCraft do the HTML5 front-end. This all went very smoothly.

I coded the back-end in Rails 3.1 using the awesome asset pipeline. What does that mean? Well, it’s the Rails solution for all the CSS and javascript files that make up a modern web site. The asset pipeline makes sure all these little files are grouped together, so they can be pushed into your browser in the least amount of time possible. And when you visit www.gomagazine.nl you can see exactly that. There is only one CSS file and only one Javascript file visible to you, but actually there are lots of different files in the back end. Last but not least SliceCraft did their magic and made sure the HTML is squeeky clean. Check the source to see what I mean, it’s beautiful.

With this massive refresh, GO Magazine can continue showing all the articles written by me and my friends, when we were heavily into electronic music and DJ culture. Enjoy!

How did this happen?

Dutch security firm Fox-IT investigated and the results are shocking. Since this news is mostly in Dutch I might do you a favor by translating:

• DigiNotar noticed “something wrong” on 19 July 2011 but did nothing
• DigiNotar detected actual use of hacked certificates on 28 July 2011 but did nothing
• They saw this traffic coming mostly from Iran. And did nothing.
• The certificate signing infrastructure was accessible from the network (!)
• Anyone, yes even regular users without security clearance, had access to the signing infrastructure (!!)
• Our government’s SSL infrastructure was also available in this fashion (contrary to every agreement made)
• No anti-virus software anywhere. And of course they’re a Windows shop
• No intrusion detection at all
• No paper-trail logging in place
• Easy to guess passwords were used by administrators
• Copies of certificates were stored. Copies! Were stored! By DigiNotar!! On a non-secure LAN! OMFG