Convalesco

You might know what Facebook is. Another web 2.0 social network. Just another one. Being on line since 2002 almost constantly for the sake of GNU/Linux back then and now for bloging, working and building on line applications for fun. Well facebook goes beyond that. It’s worthy. It has a big enough database for you to find friends and relatives(!) you’ll be surprised if you take a look at how many people took the time to create a profile there. It’s the only web 2.0 application that gave me the impression of a huge potential. I never liked MySpace that much. So if you are into communities and things like that, take a look at it. You may be positively surprised by the result. As for me, I just created my profile after a friends invitation and I liked it!

The famous TOR privacy network was thought to be secure and safe. Well, TOR was meant to hide the routing but not the traffic that goes through. As reported to the article at hackzine there are many ways to expose your self when using technologies like encryption. You see, the implementation with the specific use makes these technologies tricky. If you don’t use them as they should be used you get compromised easily. Another thing that users who make extensive use of cryptography must keep in mind is that most people, don’t use it, so when you do, you attract attention. There are more sophisticated methods of cryptography like steganography that suit better, if you ask me, for message exchange through insecure channels such as the internet.

Another important fact that I didn’t mention in my previous post, but I’m frustrated to find out now is that, compared to PHP, Ruby on Rails applications are really hard to install and set up and the troubleshooting is not always easy. After a few days of messing up with Mephisto I’m still struggling to install a photo gallery that runs was made with ruby on rails. While almost any PHP applications requires a predefined PHP account and a working URL, ruby applications doesn’t come up with a configuration script or GUI, which turns out as a major drawback. I’m dealing with installation of Gullery, a ruby on rails photo publishing program. I’ve lost like 5 hours on troubleshooting and hacking through ruby, gems and rake. If you take a look at Google for “Application error: Rails application failed to start properly” you get about 29.600 results, it’s scary and shows clearly the immature state of Ruby on Rails as a web development platform. However, no one argues about the potential that it has and beauty of the code produced, without mentioning that compared to PHP is far more secure.
Let’s pray that RoR developers will make it a bit more easy to install their applications in the future for us, users.