Your 30 Before 30

One thing that I see a lot of these days is all sorts of things like this blog or this book telling you to do your own thing, do your own projects, branch out on your own, take initiative, etc. Whenever I read these things, I can't help but find myself inspired by them: I enjoy doing my own projects, and I would love to be able to just work on them all day and maybe someday be able to live off them.

So here is my first try. I'm launching a project (it's too small for me to consider it a startup) called Your 30 Before 30 that might be a little fun to do. The idea behind it is to create a "30 before 30" list (similar to a bucket list), where you write down 30 things you want to do before you're 30. They don't have to be anything special, but they can be. Then at some point when you accomplish what you want to accomplish, you mark it off and tell people what you did.

I'm putting it here to invite any of my readers to check it out and "beta" test it. Let me know what you think. What's cool, what's not? Do you have any suggestions/constructive criticisms? Any feedback is welcome.

Second Thoughts on IronRuby

Unfortunately after using IronRuby at work a bit, I've found that there are still a few too many bugs with the thing for me to want to depend on it for production software. The bugs are already reported, however they are tagged as low priority and will not likely be fixed any time soon. Rather than spending lots of time fixing the bugs myself (I get paid to make profit, not to work on open-source pet projects), I'll just continue doing things the way that I have been!

Hopefully someone else will find IronRuby useful!

In case you're wondering, the bug that really killed it for me was the inability to use gems with RVM under Linux. The following command fails with issues installing RubyGems:

rvm install ironruby

No Rubygems drastically reduces the usefulness of Ruby, enough that I'm not really wanting to use it anymore.

Getting Your Files

I suppose I'm talking to the wrong group of people here, but I decided to write a quick post about how to access anybody's files without needing their username/password for their computer.

It's quite simple:
1) Put in an Ubuntu LiveCD/LiveUSB
2) Boot off it
3) Access their files by going to Places -> X GB/TB Volume

This doesn't work if they have any sort of encryption on their drives or a BIOS password, but otherwise you can do whatever you feel like! So if you have a laptop or a machine that is easily reachable by random people, then you should probably secure your files from something like this if there are things on there that you don't really want people getting to.

Embedding a Ruby REPL in a .NET App

I've finally gotten fed up with using VB.NET as a scripting language at work, so I decided to try dropping an IronRuby interpreter into the system. It's fairly simple to do, I'll describe here how to build a REPL within your app.

Step 1: Make a window for the REPL. Give it a box for your input and a box for your output. How you do all this is up to you, the interesting part is how to use Ruby within it.

Step 2: Initialize the scripting engine. You need a config file, I call it ironruby.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
 <configSections>
   <section name="microsoft.scripting" type="Microsoft.Scripting.Hosting.Configuration.Section, Microsoft.Scripting,
     Version=1.0.0.5000, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" />
 </configSections>

 <microsoft.scripting>
   <languages>
     <language names="IronRuby;Ruby;rb" extensions=".rb" displayName="IronRuby 1.0" type="IronRuby.Runtime.RubyContext, IronRuby,
       Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
   </languages>
 </microsoft.scripting>
</configuration>

You need to make sure you have the DLLs available that IronRuby comes with. Just put them in the same folder as your app.

Now the code to load in your Ruby stuff. Initialize a few objects:

var runtime = new ScriptRuntime(ScriptRuntimeSetup.ReadConfiguration("ironruby.config"));
var engine = runtime.GetEngine("Ruby");

// create a scope - you need to do this in order to preserve variables declared across executions
var globalScope = engine.CreateScope();

// I'm assuming you have a textbox or something named command, just adjust
// this to what you want if you have something else
var result = engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString("(" + command.Text + ").inspect").Execute(globalScope);

And, jackpot! The result variable is a string that is the result of whatever is in the command.Text variable.

This code could be a little bit more robust, so make sure to handle exceptions nicely. An exception will be thrown if say the syntax is invalid, or there are other problems.

The nice thing about this is that you can tinker with the classes within your own application. In the REPL if you put:

# replace MyApp.exe with the .exe or .dll file that your app uses
require "MyApp.exe"

You can then access your namespaces and classes within your own app, and fiddle with them while the app is running!