Xavier Defrang

If you are looking for a lightweight and elegant single sign-on solution for your Rails applications, you may want to have a look at the rubycas-server project.

As the name implies, it's a Ruby implementation of the Yale University CAS protocol which is open, standard-based (HTTP, SSL and a pinch of down-to-earth XML) and already available for a wide assortment of other platforms (Java, PHP, Python, ...). The setup of rubycas-server is straightforward, it supports several authentication back-ends out of the box (SQL, ActiveDirectory, LDAP) and writing a custom authentication handler is a breeze.

If you look at the client-side, it's at least as good: the rubycas-client plugin for Rails is simply amazing. The code is clean and ut just handles everything for you. I basically added 2 lines of configuration, changed 5 lines of code in a base controller and the whole authentication layer of my application was delegated to the CAS server.

Those two projects are definitely worth checking before you start rolling out yet another proprietary SSO architecture...

The beauty of Ruby on Rails never cease to amaze me:

# Oneliner split for layout purpose 
now = Time.now
qc = QueryCounter.find_or_create_by_date_and_hour(now, now.hour)
qc.increase!("count_#{query_type}")

Yes, this snippet does exactly what it reads: no more no less. It just works.

I am a huge fan of the infamous kozak.mpg clip. For years, it has been my personal landmark in the viciously funny video department.

The King has just lost his crown to this absolutely incredible backflip goodness:

It's not like I'm a big fan of all the works of the late Jeff Buckley but this song is dangerously close to what I'd call the perfect contained rage melancholic folk song...

That manic depressive chorus is nothing short of amazing...

This Joost Swarte exhibition seems worth a trip down to the Kingdom of Structural Unemployment...

I thought that the anticlimax of the current campaign for the federal elections would be a Celebrity Jeopardy! between rival news anchors turned voice magnets politicians.

But once again the PS has just beaten everyone in the communication department, this time with an absolutely pathetic viral website.

This FUD inducing piece go as far as to ask us, poor voters, if this is really what we expect from politics. The short answer is: no, it's not.

But what else can you expect when the average french speaking belgian politician is barely able to speak with complete and intelligible sentences?

The recent abundance of audio and video podcasts on the blogs of many professional hobbyists makes me wonder if they really understand their medium.

If you have something to say but nothing worth to show, then why don't you simply write it?

There simply is no point sitting in front of a microphone and/or a camera just to tell us what you are too lazy to write. Let's face it, most of those little clips have nothing to do with the original idea of the podcast which was to have some fresh content to listen on the go.

I find most audio and video posts not only embarrassing for their authors but actually very disrespectful for the audience. Well, at least for the part of the audience who cares about its precious time.

First, this content is not scannable which is the golden rule of web authoring. A nice counter-example is the pretty cool video interviews at InfoQ which allow you to skim through the questions. But that doesn't solve the other problem: speech is an inherently slow medium.
An average person can read between 250 to 300 words per minute (much more with proper training) while a casual conversation (which is what most podcast sound like) has an average of 200wpm.

Those two drawbacks are enough to make sure I don't even care to click play when I encounter such an thing.

Just “because you can” or because its “new” is not argument to bloat the web with unusable content.

All the folks who are pushing audio or video content thinking that they contributed to any kind of worldwide knowledge or discussion are actually impoverishing the web as a whole. They are just spreading noise that no search engine or aggregator can make a sense of (yet, I know).

While I'm in a sarcastic mood: has anyone heard about the latest development of the semantic web lately?