Hiya hackers! I’ve been playing a lot with _why’s Shoes doodad. It’s a funky little UI thingo for making desktop apps that’s really fun to use and all that. There are some really great tool’s coming to life in the ruby universe that I really wish I’d had when I was a kid back playing with Quick/Visual Basic.

So anyway’s, one of the things that used to be so painful was making anything networked! IP sockets are such a pain in the butt. It shouldn’t be so hard, so I’ve done something about it. Legs is my little ruby script a couple hundred lines long. It implements the json-rpc spec for super simple warm gooey peery sort of networking. Because it uses JSON and TCP sockets, it’s compatible with pretty much any language if you can be bothered implementing the json-rpc 1.0 spec in it too. Check it out on my github!

I hope some of you find this useful. I’m really hoping this will get included with Hackety Hack when it gets rebuilt in Shoes. It’s not designed for high load systems or anything where stability is hugely important. You could make server’s that could handle more load by multithreading the requests, but it’s a huge pain in the butt to write servers like that, so Legs doesn’t support it. Legs is for ruby newbies who know enough syntax to make their own class, and know enough about IP to know what an IP address, hostname, and port are. Of course you don’t have to be a newbie to use it! I’m using it for nifty experiments, even thinking about building a little open hackers p2p network on it! It is intentionally designed to blur the lines between client and server, so any idea of a client or server is one the user invents through their own design. :)

She needs a name. :)

Soon _why’s new(ish) UI toolkit Shoes is having a bug day where we’ll all be getting together on irc for a whole day to squish bugs and play with shoes and find problems. It’s starting at mid day GMT time on the 11th, and then again on the 25th, and going till mid day the next day. Come meet _why and all his lunatic friends on freenode in the #shoes channel.

Free oats will be made available to all who attend. We all really want to get shoes ready for a good solid release on the 31st of July. What we need most of all is people and objects resembling people to come along with idea’s and make them in shoes, and give feedback, find crashes, and all that jazz. If you know C, you might be able to help debug any issues that come up, but mostly we want rubyists, even total newbies, to come along and learn shoes with us. Download the latest build of shoes before you come. Oh and you’ll want to go grab the free book Nobody Knows Shoes, which you can get in pdf or printed on lulu. :)

Come complain and make the world a better place!

Today I found out that some laws recently passed in Sweden to allow then to capture and spy on all internet traffic in their country. This is a big deal because of the way the internet works. Your messages are sent between about 20 “Routers” on their way around the world to the place where they are going, and now, if any of those routers are in Sweden, your message will be able to be read by their government, unless you are using something like SSL for the communication. The Pirate Bay, a large, respected digital media sharing platform, is advising ISP’s to block traffic moving via Sweden to protect their user’s from these privacy issues. I contacted my ISP, iiNet, to suggest they implement this. Their response was very disapointing. Seemingly boiling down to ‘you do it, we can’t be bothered’.

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

I am very sorry but we cannot stop all traffic between our country and sweden. We also
cannot advise sweden not to implement these laws.

All trafiic, even in Australia, is monitored to some degree. In order to catch criminals
who use the internet illegal uses we must monitor at least where traffic is going and
how much is going out. No country is completely unmonitored.

The U.S.A is heavily monitored by a system called “Echelon”. If you wish to stop your
traffic going through the United States you will have massive problems with your
internet service.

If you do wish to stop your traffic going through sweden then you can use a command called
“tracert” from the command prompt of your system to check the path to the website you are
intending on going to. If the trace goes through Sweden, do not use the website.

If you have any further inquiries please don’t hesitate to contact us by either replying
to this email or calling our friendly support staff on 13 22 58.

Regards,
Shaun the Shiny Pony
Customer Support Representative

I changed the names for the privacy of the support person. :)

The comparisons aren’t any good. ‘Echelon’ was a system mostly used to spy on the soviets. While it can supposedly intercept emails, it is hardly a system designed from the start to spy on regular citizens. And I’m sure you can all tell the difference between looking at where the messages are going, and opening them up looking at all the text inside, and making a copy just in case you’d like to look again later.

A disapointing result, but maybe your ISP respects your privacy more than mine. Why not email them a support request asking about this issue too? Surely with enough pressure we can get Sweden to behave as a good citizen of earth.