As a note, this isn’t about these specific flaws: It’s that these kinds of flaws are endemic in ruby and particularly rails.

Set Processing

devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets1.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'set'
require 'pp'
large = Set.new(Range.new(1,10000000))
small = Set.new(Range.new(1,10))
pp small.intersection(large)

real 0m35.421s
user 0m23.900s
sys 0m9.910s



devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets2.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'set'
require 'pp'
large = Set.new(Range.new(1,10000000))
small = Set.new(Range.new(1,10))
pp large.intersection(small)

real 0m16.917s
user 0m12.720s
sys 0m3.430s


So the order that I intersect the sets drastically impacts the speed of the algorithm (2x). Let’s take a look at python to see whether a language in the same class behaves similarly.


devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets1.py
#!/usr/bin/env python

real 0m2.583s
user 0m1.850s
sys 0m0.670s



devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets2.py
#!/usr/bin/env python

real 0m2.598s
user 0m1.760s
sys 0m0.710s


So no, python handles the choice of which set to intersect with the other gracefully. This is a good example of how the ruby set api is immature. I’m ignoring that it’s taking between 13.7 and 6.5 times as long to execute, because I think that it’s reasonable for people to do code in something that is easier for them to work in and then optimize. My problem here is that based on the direction you do the intersection, it can take 2x longer in ruby. This is shoddy engineering and is the kind of thing that gets solved in a language as it matures. The problem is that the language was immature when it exploded into widespread use, and no one seems to be doing anything to make it ready for prime time.

So what about 1.9? 1.9 is supposed to be where the energy is going to make the language faster and more mature.

devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets1.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby1.9
require 'set'
require 'pp'
large = Set.new(Range.new(1,10000000))
small = Set.new(Range.new(1,10))
pp small.intersection(large)

real 0m13.310s
user 0m11.240s
sys 0m0.680s



devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ cat sets2.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby1.9
require 'set'
require 'pp'
large = Set.new(Range.new(1,10000000))
small = Set.new(Range.new(1,10))
pp large.intersection(small)

real 0m9.181s
user 0m8.280s
sys 0m0.480s


While it’s faster (which wasn’t really my complaint anyway), it still is very different based on which direction you do your intersection from. I see evidence of speed work being done on ruby, but not on maturing the language so that it meets tried and true engineering principals like the rule of least surprise. (Yes, code is a user interface for coders, so the rule of least surprise applies) (1)

Nil as an object
How about this one that has actually done damage to our database:


devon@chronos ~/Projects/sets $ irb
irb(main):001:0> nil.id
(irb):1: warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id
=> 4


It certainly explains why we have a bizarrely large number of items in our database with foreign keys set to 4. This conflicts directly with the rails standard for naming a database primary key as ‘id’, which you assess on a model at obj.id. Yes, code should have lots of null checks, but real world code has flaws. Sure it throws a warning, but since it doesn’t break on nil when you call .id, you get data corruption. Gee, thanks, ruby.

Ruby in general
These are just a few examples, but ruby is rife with happy path coding. The language needed another 5 years of development before going into widespread use. Instead, I think it’s getting worse because a set of rails engineers who don’t know anything about languages are at the helm, adding lots of syntactic sugar but with a distinct lack of substance behind that candied shell.

_{1. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare ruby to the unix philosophy, because the ruby design philosophy violates the 17 rules in ways that are clearly intentional. Specifically, ruby and rails egregiously violate the rules of clarity and transparency, and rails in particular violates the rules of separation, composition and representation.}

Using ssh as a proxy server (to avoid your company’s/country’s anal probeware)
SSH has a built in SOCKS proxy that you can use in any program that can run over a SOCKS proxy. This includes Firefox (really, all browsers), Thunderbird, Pidgin/Adium (as well as almost all other IM clients like Google Talk, AIM, etc) and a ton of other networking programs we all use. Using SSH with the -D flag lets you create a dynamic ssh tunnel that acts as a SOCKS proxy, and sends all your traffic from the endpoint of your ssh connection.

To run ssh as a proxy, you need to run it like this:
ssh -D 127.0.0.1:3128 someserver.com

This command says you want to run a dynamic port forward, and it should be available on your local computer on port 3128 (default for SOCKS). All traffic that runs through this will appear to be coming from someserver.com (where you need to have an ssh account). Further, all traffic that you send through this tunnel will enter the tunnel without ever leaving your box, travel over that tunnel using ssh’s crypto, then exit at it’s endpoint where it can connect to whatever you want it to connect to. Return traffic follows the same path but in reverse. This is a great trick not only for avoiding firewalls (so long as your firewall does allow port 22 traffic), but also for surfing the web on any network that you don’t trust. Instead you can browse the web/read your email from a server you control and trust by doing all your networking via an encrypted ssh proxy.

To configure Firefox to use this crypted tunnel, click on Edit->Preferences, and select Advanced. From there, under Connection, click on Settings. You will want to select Manual proxy configuraion. Leave everything blank except SOCKS Host: localhost and Port: 3128. Check SOCKS v5. If you want to be able to access any resources that are on your local network without using the proxy, enter the local addresses or networks into the No Proxy For: box.

Using a single connection (and only having to enter in the password once)
If you want to be able to make connections to a box, and are sick of typing in the password multiple times for multiple connections, you can use ControlMaster. This allows you to have multiple ssh terminal sessions shared over one connection. This means that you only establish one connection, and one consequence of that is you also only need to do auth once when you establish the connection. You can enable this by editing ~/.ssh/config and adding *:

Host *
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p

One nice side effect of this is that you can do an ls ~/.ssh and see exactly which boxes you are connected to presently.

Using multiple ssh keys transparently
When I started at my present job, everyone was using keychain to manage the large number of ssh keys they had to deal with from our various servers. You don’t need a key manager to transparently utilize multiple ssh keys. Once again pop open ~/.ssh/config, and now instead of workign with the Host * section, you can create sections for each class of server you access (or individual servers). If you have multiple ssh keys that need to be used on multiple servers, you can avoid using -i and instead add a section for a class of server, and declare the ssh key inside of that via IdentityFile. Example:

Host *.production.somedomain.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_production

Host *.staging.somedomain.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_staging

Now, whenever you ssh to any box in the staging subdomain, it will use the staging key, and when you ssh to any box in the production subdomain, it will use the production key.

Keepalive
Some firewalls regularly snip idle connections. If you regularly find ssh sessions that you have left idle for a while to be unresponsive when you come back to them you are suffering from this. Not only is it irritating to lose your connection, but you may even find the whole terminal unresponsive, forcing you to close the terminal as well. Well, ssh config has an answer for you for this as well.

Host *
ServerAliveInterval 15

ServerAliveInterval is normally off, but when you turn it on, ssh will start sending a packet every n seconds to try to keep the connection open. Even better, now that it’s testing, if the connection truly did go away without being closed, SSH will automatically close the session if 3 of these keep alive packets go unresponded to. (you can set that to a different number by setting ServerAliveCountMax). This means that even when connections get snipped, you won’t come back to find an unresponsive terminal. Either the connection will be alive, or the connection will have closed, none of these unresponsive zombie connections.

Defaulting your remote user
Few people are lucky enough to have the same username on all the servers they regularly visit. Just as you can set the identity file on a per domain basis, you can also set username:

Host somedomain.com
User foo

Host someotherdimain.com
User bar

Now when you ssh to somedomain.com, unless you specify the username at the prompt (baz@somedomain.com) it will use foo. This overrides the default of using your logged in username.

Server aliases
Do you have a lot of domains you ssh to that you wish you had shorter names for? Do you have some things that you ssh only to via IP address? Both of these can be solved with the HostName directive. For example, if your gateway accepts ssh traffic, and your internal domain doesn’t use dns, you can use ssh config to give in an alias for ssh.

Host router
HostName 192.168.1.1

Now it’s as simple as typing ssh router to get to the gateway. This trick works with ip addresses or dns names.

Executing remote commands with ssh
Sometimes you only need to get a small piece of information from a server, and don’t want to bother with a full ssh session. Sometimes you may want to have a process that goes out to a server and runs a command as a part of a bigger script. Either way, you can use ssh to run individual commands on other boxes, and get the results on stdout and stderr. Give this a try:

devon@chronos ~ $ ssh evilsoft.org "uptime"
14:00:23 up 7:38, 1 user, load average: 0.84, 0.34, 0.22


Others
SSH is a powerful toolkit, and I have only scratched the surface of it’s possibilities. Spend some time reading man ssh_config and you’ll be amazed at some of the incredibly cool stuff in there for you to find.
* note, you only need one Host * section in your ssh config. All the variables I am discussing can be consolidated into one Host * section.

1. Conservatives would be more comfortable with a browser delivered by a major corporation that has faced antitrust charges over that browser then liberals would.
2. Liberals anecdotally are more prone to counter-cultural choices, and thus would be more likely to seek out an alternative to the default browser.

The Google interviews made me realize one other thing. In testing for this kind of effect, you would need to eliminate people who didn’t know what a browser was. Clearly, a person who doesn’t even know what a browser is is highly unlikely to proactively switch from their system’s default browser. Further, if a person’s political views are correlated at all with their likelihood of understanding what a browser is, not eliminating people who don’t understand could hide real results.

The company I work for, Knewton Inc, is becoming known in certain circles of its clever usage for the vastly underused (IMHO) Amazon Mechanical Turk service. When I mentioned my contention to our guy who’s been pioneering our MTurk usage, Dahn Tamir, he suggested that we build an MTurk task and get some real data to find out whether my hypothesis had any basis in reality. The rest of this post represents my findings.

The Experiment
We posted the following poll to MTurk, allowing users the ability to do the task only once (making it a lot harder to stuff the ballot box, or, at the very least, require a hell of a lot more effort on the part of the users):

The options for political affiliation were:

• Republican
• Independant
• Democrat

The options for political philosophy were:

• Strongly Liberal
• Liberal
• Moderately Liberal
• Moderate
• Moderately Conservative
• Conservative
• Strongly Conservative
• Socialist
• Libertarian

For the web browser, we considered a person to have passed the test if he or she answered Internet Explorer or Firefox, but no others. We considered them to have failed if they answered Yahoo, Google or MSN. It was pointed out that AOL did have a browser that could be reasonably referred to as AOL, so we ignored this field. Finally, we recorded the workers’ User Agent, letting us see what browser/os they were using.

Raw Results
Observations:

• Clearly, MTurkers are going to be more likely to know what a browser is, and it shows in the data. Google found that 8% of people in Times Square knew what a browser was, but 86% of respondents here did.
• We appear to have more Democrats/Liberals than Republicans/Conservatives one would expect in the normal population.
• I only added Socialist on a lark, and I was pretty amazed to see that it still got 2.24% in a poll of Americans
• Firefox polled a lot higher here than one would expect in the wild. This should make it a lot easier to see any effects, along with the high pass rate of the test.

Party Affiliation
Total % Republican 244 23.71% Independent 397 38.58% Democrat 388 37.71%

Political Philosophy
Total % Strongly Liberal 92 8.94% Liberal 188 18.27% Moderately Liberal 169 16.42% Moderate 197 19.14% Moderately Conservative 157 15.26% Conservative 105 10.20% Strongly Conservative 34 3.30% Socialist 23 2.24% Libertarian 64 6.22%

Browsers
Total % Firefox 479 46.55% Internet Explorer 439 42.66% Safari 63 6.12% Chrome 41 3.98% Opera 7 0.68%

Browser Test Results
Total % Pass 886 86.10% Fail 143 13.90%

Test Results
Next, after pulling in the raw results, we compared browser, affiliation and philosophy to the test results.

Observations:

• Unsurprisingly, IE fared better amongst people who failed the test. Firefox did substantially better amongst people who passed the test. Safari also did better amongst people who passed the test, which was a little surprising, because we expected all default browsers to do better with people who failed. The sample, however, is small enough that the Safari factor could just be noise. It has been mentioned that this could have been caused by Safari for windows. That supposition can potentially be answered in the data.
• Democrats did worse on the test, while Republicans and Independents did basically the same. We see the likely reason why in the political philosophy section. The further left you go, the worse you tend to do on the browser test, until you hit strongly liberal. Strong Liberals reversed the trend entirely and tested better than any other group.

Test Results by Party Affiliation
Pass % Fail % Republican 87.70% 12.30% Independent 88.16% 11.84% Democrat 82.99% 17.01%

Test Results By Political Philosophy
Pass % Fail % Strongly Liberal 91.30% 8.70% Liberal 81.91% 18.09% Moderately Liberal 84.62% 15.38% Moderate 86.29% 13.71% Moderately Conservative 86.62% 13.38% Conservative 87.62% 12.38% Strongly Conservative 88.24% 11.76% Socialist 86.96% 13.04% Libertarian 89.06% 10.94%

Browser by Test Results
Pass % Fail % Internet Explorer 39.16% 64.34% Firefox 49.89% 25.87% Safari 6.21% 5.59% Chrome 4.06% 3.50% Opera 0.68% 0.70%

Browser choice by political opinion
Here we have the final analysis. Looking at how browser choice changes across the political spectrum.

Observations:

• My initial hypothesis appears to be supported by this data set. IE falls off sharply the further left you go on the spectrum from Moderate. Strong liberals use IE at half the rate of strong conservatives.
• Both Libertarians and Socialists appear to fit in on the left end of the spectrum at least where browser choice is concerned. Libertarians appear to loath IE and are nuts for Firefox. They have the highest Firefox rating of anyone with an astounding 70.18%
• Firefox’s fall as you go to the right is less pronounced as IE’s fall as you go to the left. This is probably caused by the generally higher likelyhood of picking Safari as you go leftward.
• Opera appears to have its ’stronghold’ with Socialists, who were as likely to pick it as Chrome or Safari.
• Libertarians also appear to have an exaggerated preference for Opera, Safari and Chrome. Basically, Libertarians really don’t like IE.

Browser by Party Affiliation
IE % Firefox % Safari % Chrome % Opera % Republican 45.33% 45.79% 5.14% 3.27% 0.47% Independent 36.00% 52.86% 6.57% 3.71% 0.86% Democrat 38.51% 49.38% 6.52% 4.97% 0.62%

Browser By Political Philosophy
IE % Firefox % Safari % Chrome % Opera % Strongly Liberal 25.00% 63.10% 8.33% 3.57% 0.00% Liberal 35.71% 50.65% 9.74% 2.60% 1.30% Moderately Liberal 41.96% 48.25% 4.20% 5.59% 0.00% Moderate 45.88% 44.12% 4.12% 5.88% 0.00% Moderately Conservative 47.06% 43.38% 7.35% 2.21% 0.00% Conservative 44.57% 46.74% 4.35% 3.26% 1.09% Strongly Conservative 50.00% 46.67% 0.00% 3.33% 0.00% Socalist 30.00% 55.00% 5.00% 5.00% 5.00% Libertarian 12.28% 70.18% 8.77% 5.26% 3.51%

Edit
Some have found the graph confusing, so here are two other versions. Both horizontal, showing the data in one by browser, and in the other by political philosophy. Click on them to enlarge

(enlarge)

(enlarge)

Conclusion
There appear to be a few strong correlations in data between a person’s political thinking and his or her browser choice. Still, this data is not representative of the population as a whole. It is, instead, a sample of people who are web savvy enough to use MTurk and who are motivated to take polls like this for small amounts of money. Also, the strong bias of the tech and open source communities toward libertarianism is probably causing the strong bias of libertarianism toward Firefox in this sample. Still, I thought these results were too interesting to keep to myself. Enjoy.

Notes
If you want to toy with the raw data and get access to the source I used for experimenting with the data, as well as my analysis spreadsheets, those are available here. We did this in 3 separate data gatherings, and those samples are still separated into 3 data files the raw data.

You can see some more pics in my flickr photostream. The part I’m most proud of is turning the pipe into a bushing to create a pretty good bearing at the top.

Here’s some video of it in action: (and a second video here)

Materials:

• 2 pipe flanges (1/2″)
• 4 pipe elbows (1/2″)
• 3 pipe tees (1/2″)
• 2 pipe bushing2 (1/2″)
• 4 pipe nipples of various sizes (1/2″) from close to 6″
• 1 solarbotics gm3 motor
• 1 zip tie
• some shapelock (this stuff rocks)
• a couple laser cut parts (the big plastic wheel and the box that holds the watch)
• a power supply for the motor (I used what I had on hand, a uChobby breadboard power supply)

Biotech

1. Your Brain Boots Up Like a Computer

Culture

1. We Can Detect Liquid Explosives
2. Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans
3. New Cell Can Tell If You’re Drunk

Robotics

1. No sex please, robot, just clean the floor

Science

1. Satellite Data Reveals Gravity Change From Sumatran Earthquake
2. Has string theory tied up better ideas in physics?

Space

1. Earth’s Moon Could Become a Planet
2. Nine Planets Become 12 with Controversial New Definition
3. Pluto: Is It a Planet?
4. Universe Might be Bigger and Older than Expected
5. Moon`s Strange Bulge Finally Explained
6. Crack found in Discovery external tank insulation
7. NASA revives main Hubble telescope camera
8. Enigmatic object baffles supernova team
9. Earth Surrounded by Giant Fizzy Bubbles

Tech

1. Speedy silicon sets world record
2. Man on a Mission – The Skin Sensing Saw
3. Tracking Your Cell Phone for Traffic Reports
4. Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars
5. Pigment formulated 225 years ago could be key in emerging technologies
6. Talking Mirror Not Just for Fairy Tales Anymore
7. Plasma needle could replace the dentist’s drill
8. New System Blocks Unwanted Video & Still Photography

1. A Dose Of Genius
2. Researchers grow human heart tissue from stem cells

Culture

1. Proposal to Implant RFID Chips in Immigrants
2. When Escape Seems Just a Mouse-Click Away: Online gaming addiction in Korea
3. Simon Caulkin: Pull the other one … how iPods took over the world

Energy

1. Scientists Resolve 60-Year-Old Plutonium Questions
2. Laser enrichment could cut cost of nuclear power

Environment

1. Good News and a Puzzle

Military

1. Special forces to use strap-on Batwings
2. Numbers Stations Move From Shortwave To VoIP

Robotics

1. Beer pouring robot

Space

1. Jupiter’s Huge Storms Converge
2. Orbiting gas stations key to interplanetary exploration
3. One small breath for man

Tech

1. A Cleaner, Cheaper Route to Titanium
2. Super Battery
3. Ultrawideband Signal Passes Data Through Walls
4. Fuel cells in laptops edge closer
5. Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future(Watch the videos, it’s well worth it)

1. Dolphins, like humans, recognize names
2. New animal resembles furry lobster

Biotech

1. A hangover cure that works
2. Pill reverses vegetative state
3. Drug Discovery Team To Explore Newly Discovered Deep-sea Reefs
4. This robot keeps the doctor away
5. Immune System Gone Bad
6. Cure for cancers ‘in five years’

Culture

1. Chicken and egg debate unscrambled
2. The Rise of Crowdsourcing!Dad, read this one!
3. Wired Releases Full Text of AT&T NSA Document
4. Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists For Publishing Leaks Are Possible

Energy

1. Fusion reactor work gets go-ahead
2. Better Fuel Cells Using Bacteria
3. Nuclear fusion plasma problem tackled
4. Hydrogen Fuel Balls
5. Microbes Convert Wastewater into Useable Electricity
6. Algae to rescue on warming, fuel source?

Robotics

1. Honda says brain waves control robot
2. Soldiers bond with battlefield robots
3. Robotic tentacles get to grips with tricky objects

Science

1. Is evolution predictable?

Space

1. Planet shine to aid life search
2. Voyager II detects solar system’s edge
3. Astronomers Use Innovative Technique to Find Extrasolar Planett
4. Unique wide-field telescope will make ’sky movies’
5. NASA hopes shuttle’s next move won’t be its last
6. Smokeless rockets launching soon?
7. Distant ‘Earths’ will only be seen from space
8. Back to the Moon: Uniting Science and Exploration
9. Big Meteorite Creates Big Mysteries
10. Three new planets found around sun-like star
11. Planets Found in Potentially Habitable Setup

Tech

1. The Digital Ink billboard
2. Interactive display system knows users by touch
3. Plan for cloaking device unveiled
4. NASA Wants Your Innovative Ideas
5. The M1 Battery
6. Charge!

Telephony

1. MIT Plans to Convert Cell Phone Users into Podcasters
2. Linksys Launches Wireless-G Phones

1. Mind Control by Parasites
2. Stanford neuroscientist wants to implant an electrode in his brain
3. NIH-Created Ebola Vaccine Passes 1st Test
4. Sleeping on it best for complex decisions
5. Alzheimer’s Progresses Faster in Educated People

Culture

1. Egypt offers first look at newly discovered tomb, first saince the tomb of Tutankhamun
2. Love is the drug
3. The Future of Science: A Conversation with Alan Lightman
4. The Politically Incorrect Science Fair

Environment

1. Underwater Ocean Currents Used to Power Bermuda
2. Mazda Plans Dual-Fuel Car in Japan
3. Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak?
4. Segway Inventor Turns To Environment
5. Greenland’s glaciers losing ice at faster rate
6. The World Oceans Now 70% Shark Free

Physics

1. NY team confirms UCLA tabletop fusion
2. Physicist to Present New Exact Solution of Einstein’s Gravitational Field Equation
3. Quantum computer works best switched off

Space

1. Continued Success for Space Elevator Tests
2. Human spaceflight must come first, argues NASA
3. New group to develop passenger spaceship
4. Astronomers get shortlist of possible ET addresses
5. Solar Sail News and Upcoming JPL Missions
6. NASA plans to park space shuttle Atlantis in 2008
7. Draft Rules for X Prize Lunar Lander Challenge
8. Spaceport Singapore
9. NASA Detects Totally New Mystery Explosion Nearby

Tech

1. New High-Speed Nano Imaging Device
2. US and Canadian skiers get smart armour
3. Moore’s Law Staying Strong Through 30nm
4. Stronger Future for Nuclear Power

1. Innovative Hand-Held Insulin Device Effectively Controls Diabetes and Provides Reliable and Easy to Use Insulin Dosing
2. Babies` Cells Linger, May Protect Mothers
3. Skin Stem Cells Made into Bone and Muscle
4. Printable Skin: `Inkjet` Breakthrough Makes Human Tissue
5. Cow-free Beef Proposed
6. Sperm Cells Turned into Eggs
7. Has BYU prof found AIDS cure?
8. New pill increases dreaming sleep

Culture

1. 3 billion people seek basic financial services is Microfinance the answer?
2. NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness
3. NASA Public-Affairs Appointee Resigns in Disgrace
4. A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA

Entertainment

1. Physics students, duct tape extend faded couch’s mileage

Environment

1. Flying Electric Generator (FEG) technology
2. World at its warmest of past 1,200 years, researchers show

Military

1. C-130H Laser Gunship Program begins

Physics

1. Dark matter comes out of the cold
2. SLAC Physicists Develop Test For String Theory
3. No Time Travel, Sorry

Space

1. The solar system no longer has nine planets
2. NASA to divert cash from science into shuttle
3. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: Searching For A ‘New Moon’
4. Experts poles apart over Moon landing sites
5. Seeing `Strange` Stars
6. Should We Land on the Moon’s Poles or Equator?

Tech

1. Power Plastics to provide electrical power to packaging and intelligent clothing
2. Reclaiming all that space in the attic – EZ Attic
3. Web 2.0 new tools, amazing functionality, vast opportunities
4. VW and Google team to explore future vehicle navigation systems
5. Stiletto Experimental ship with carbon fiber M-hull design tops 50 knots (60mph)
6. The three-key mini-keyboard with OLED screen on each key
7. Buying, paying bills and transfering money with your mobile phone
8. Nano Technology may make cleaning Toilets a thing of the Past
9. Chip prototype gets under the skin
10. Don’t Bring Home the Bacon, Print It

Check it out.