One of the things I forgot to talk about in my “A look in to nodeJS” posting was what originally got me looking at nodejs. I had been seeing nodejs pop up here and there and I kind of wanted to learn more about it, but it wasn’t really on the top of my list. I always check www.thriftebook.com to see if there are any new deals for ebooks. Sometimes, O’Reilly has deals that you can get videos too.

NodeJS is a new take on a way to build scalable network services. Note that I didn’t say web applications as nodeJS can do far more then just web apps. I’ve heard of people making IRC chats servers and DNS servers. So the capabilities of nodeJS go beyond just making web apps, but for myself this is my primary interests in nodeJS, but more precisely being able to make real time web apps.

Haven’t blogged in some time so I wanted to give a quick update on the things I’m looking at for myself and work. Right now my group is coming to the end of a big project at work so a lot of my time has been going into that, but I’ve still been looking at some new things that I hope to later write postings about. Right now the first item on the top of my list is NodeJS, node is a way to build scaleable web applications by using just JavaScript.

I did some postings last year about SSH and making keys and how to move them to systems you are working with. What if you need to do this in reverse? You are the person setting up a system for others to work with and you want to pass the private key to the users. An example of this is Amazon’s EC2 setup where you get the private key to be able to log in to the VMs you make.

Same idea as the Groovy and Grails posting, most of the steps are the same but here they are. Download JRuby from http://www.jruby.org/, as of writing this the latest release is 1.6.0. I’m downloading the tar file, I believe it the same as the zip file just different format used to compress the files. $ cd Downloads $ tar -xzf jruby-bin-1.6.0.tar.gz Now lets move it to our /usr/share folder and make the needed symbolic link.

I been trying to use Git more and more to help me learn it. My first step was using it for the pre on this blog but I have also been using it on some small projects I been work on for myself. Git works just fine locally and still is able to use all the features it has but to really take advantage of Git you need to setup a remote repository and here is how to do it.

Just some steps to get people up and running with Groovy/Grails on Mac OS. Hopefully with this steps you will be able to easily upgrade to any new version that comes out. Keep in mind you will need to replace the version number that is part of the file names as they upgrade. Download the newest releases of Groovy and Grails, Groovy can be found at http://groovy.codehaus.org/, and as I’m writing this the Stable Release is 1.

It goes without saying that there is TONS of data on Twitter, luckily there is a nice API to be able to read some of that data. There are a good number of apps annd sites that are using this data and making some great services that help with analyzing, sorting, and parsing content from other social networks. So I wanted to take a quick look at what it takes to read some data from the Twitter API from Ruby and write a little fun code that also does some Geolocation based on your friends location they enter on Twitter.

I have always heard good things about Git, how its solves a lot of problem other version control system have along with being very fast. Sadly, at my past jobs, we only used SVN and never really had good workflow as the developers would all work on separate projects. I started looking into Git on and off, it’s hard to fully learn something you know that you are not going to be able to use in your group.

Hopping around from languages to languages, its easy to forget how to do something, nothing that a quick Google search can’t help with but I wanted to make this posting for myself to save some time. MD5 is used all over the place, its a one way hash that can be used for checking the integrity of files, storing passwords in databases and checking text being passed around. I do want to add a note here about using MD5 hashes for storing passwords in a database, I would start by looking at SHA-1 along with using salt this will help ensure if anyone gets a hold of your database they can just use rainbow table to workout the plain text of the password.