Here's a short post on getting started with Nokogiri - a Ruby gem that wraps libxml. I'm writing this because well, the docs at http://nokogiri.org/ kind of suck. I wanted to read a simple XML document. My XPath fu was a little rusty, although all I wanted to do was read some attributes from a root element, some element values off of the root, and then a short collection of items (very similar to an Atom document). My main bone of contention with the docs was their use of the `@doc.xpath("//character")` search operator at the very beginning of their parsing tutorial. How about we start from the beginning:

Here's a solution to a problem I was trying to solve in Ruby. I wanted to create a 23 bit data structure, that would hold three values. A 14 bit year, a 4 bit month and a 5 bit day. Each of these bit sizes are the minimum number of bits required to support a maximum value of 9999 for years, 12 for months and 31 for days (with months and days optional - hence the custom data structure). Using the bitwise & operator, you can either mask (protect) or zero out bit values. And then using the bitwise | operator - you can turn bits back on. In Ruby you can create and manipulate binary literals directly using the 0b prefix.

I’ve toyed with a few titles for this post, including - ‘My Kingdom for a Backslash’, or ‘Fish Don’t Know They’re in Water’. In the end I felt ‘The Long Road /home’ was the most fitting. This post is about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.

In The Beginning

I’m a non-CompSci grad, having started my academic life with a college diploma in biology (a Canadian community college is the equivalent to what would have been called a ‘polytechnic’ in the UK). After about four years of working as a laboratory assistant I decided that biology wasn’t for me and moved into IT. I started the hard way – PC support, and slowly worked my way up from there. I had a couple of lucky breaks along the way, which combined with a lot of work meant that I was eventually able to pass for a nearly competent IT professional.

This link to Macworld was sent to me by a colleague - "iPhone 4S: Why no NFC chip?". I think it's another excellent example of editorial polyfiller. How can a market be created for NFC technology - without handsets that support NFC?

I think the decision not to include NFC technology in the iPhone 4S was based on two factors.

I completed my master's degree in information security from Royal Holloway, University of London this May. It took a little while for the results to come out, and to be sure that my thesis had been accepted and graded accordingly. Now that I'm in the clear, I'm able to publish the report online - which can be found here at the following link - 3-D Secure: A critical review of 3-D Secure and its effectiveness in preventing card not present fraud. It can be read as HTML, or downloaded in PDF form (with larger figures and illustrations) from here. 

I think the executive summary, introduction and conclusion read fairly well, and might be of general interest. In another life - I'd love to spend more time on human computer interaction for security related tasks (HCI-Sec). It's a fascinating field and I found some really interesting material on the topic.

I also wanted to say thank you to all of those who participated in the survey; in particular to Paul Stack (@stack72 ) and Craig Murphy (@CAMURPHY) for helping to drum-up participants.

Enjoy....

Having recently joined the 'cult of Apple' - here's what I consider to be the minimum required set of Mac OS X utilities and helper applications for any Mac OS X installation:

1) Quicksilver: Update: 2014-10-11 - One of the features I've relied on in Quicksilver, was the ability to easily set system-wide keyboard shortcust. Thanks to this very cool app - Apptivate which does nothing 'but' set system-wide accelerators (including my prefered keybinding to launch Pathfinder), I'm less reliant on an app launcher now. Spotlight works fine, and Yosemite will finish this off nicely. Original Post: Thanks to This application launcher is the business. It's been around for ages, and does what it says on the tin. It looks a lot like 'Gnome Do', and I love it. A very fast, and very convenient way to launch apps, scripts, open documents and a lot more. It's also free. An alternative to Quicksilver is Alfred - which also looks nice - although I've yet to take it for a spin.