Say you start the debugger here:

Then you want to take a look at the “xml_obj” variable. If this were (for instance) Python’s pdb, we’d just type “xml_obj” and hit return and be done with it. Not so in ruby-debug:

This is because with default settings, the debugger needs a keyword (’p') to get it to actually evaluate your statement as Ruby and not a command to the debugger itself:

That gets really tedious, really fast. The debugger’s help function (’help p’) will helpfully tell you that this is because the “autoeval” option is not enabled. If you’re thick like me, you won’t see this and you’ll just continue doing “p <whatever>” until you get so frustrated you drop what you’re doing one day and go hunt down a fix.

Here is that fix from inside your code:

You can also do this inside the debugger:

Rails already does it via Rack middleware

You might be wondering why the debugging experience is different in Rails than in Ruby you’ve written elsewhere. I did too — remembering that this ‘p’ business isn’t necessary when I run the debugger as an option when I start up Mongrel in a Rails app. So I went digging for the code that Rails uses to set this stuff up. Those settings come from a piece of Rack middleware that lives in lib/rails/rack/debugger.rb. Here’s the class definition:

For more info on how Rails uses Rack, this is a pretty handy page from the Rails guides.

When I heard the news I was walking through San Antonio’s Hard Rock Cafe looking at Kurt Cobain’s high school photograph. Wow. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook.

I quickly wrote a DM to Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, co-founders and said “call me.” They did, and I got one of the first interviews.

This is poetry. It’s charmingly quotidian at the top (he talks about the Hard Rock Cafe like he’s at Buckingham, and he mentions Cobain’s picture because it’s some kind terrible whitebread muse-talisman to him), but then just after this “oh, me?” scene setting, Scoble is brief and devastating in his establishment of douchey dominance — explicit and unquestionable.

He is the man who will speak about this here internet thing AND tell you the dudes’ names AND tell you that he used to hang with them before this cool thing happened, BACK WHEN THAT OTHER cool thing happened or was happening.

He’ll show you wtf is going on in this world. We should wipe the snot from his camera for the chance to be here. Luckily he lets us listen in for free:

Basically they did not tell me much other than FriendFeed would keep on going on for the indefinite future.

Scoble, no worries. I wasn’t expecting real information and was just glad that you had the opportunity to write this gem. I stand here, in awe, clapping quietly in my dusty corner of the internet. Bra-fucking-vo.

But my favorite part is where he points out that Microsoft lost the computer geeks a few years ago and that’s the PC platform’s biggest problem. I’ve been saying this to friends of mine for awhile–the nerds all went Mac in droves when being on a Mac began to mean being on UNIX instead of the old-school Mac OS that was rather like buying a Mercedes-Benz with the hood welded shut. When Apple decided to be the platform where all flavors of nerdy digital innovator worked (as opposed to just illustrators, filmmakers and musicians), the nerd herd rallied to their flag fast. He pinpoints a subset particularly close to my heart — web developers.

Web developers had to know both the Mac and Windows, at least with passing familiarity, and the truth is that many, if not most, preferred Windows.

Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

This is true in many markets with broad appeal, not just computers. Microsoft is looking ever more so like the digital equivalent of General Motors. Car enthusiasts lost interest in GM’s cars long before regular people did; the same is happening with Windows.

It might be hard to notice if you’re not watching from the techie vantage point, but the trickle-down effect of this nerd migration has been enormous–go into an Apple store on any weekend and you’ll probably have to push your way through a heterogenous crowd of browsing hipsters, grandparents, suburban moms, small children, etc just to get to the middle of the store. Everyone seems to know that a Mac is the thing to buy, and that PCs are cheaper, but they’re cheaper for a reason.

Imagine if this happened with cars

The “Laptop/PC Hunter” ad campaigns that Microsoft is so proud of make no effort to answer Apple’s contention that a Mac is a better computer–Microsoft seems satisfied merely to point out that it is possible to purchase computers for cheaper. This is just stupid. I like Gruber’s car analogy above. So what if someone tried this same ad campaign with cars? What if you saw a commercial in which GMC mocked Honda because a Civic costs more than a Geo Tracker? No one would make that commercial, because anyone who saw it would say “wait a minute–a Civic is a waaay better car than a Tracker. Of course it costs more.”

But to a lot of the people you see in these commercials — the people that Microsoft is actually targetting in a pretty savvy way — you’ll see that these are people who aren’t real comfortable with their ability to discern what’s what between computers. They don’t know too much about how they work, and actually not that much about what you can do with them. Computers make them feel uneasy. But they are comfortable with shopping for a bargain. They’ve made a religion about it, which is how there got to be things like Best Buy and Walmart in the first place.

And Microsoft is telling these people that there is equivalence between the Mac and the PC — that it’s OK to shop for this like you’d shop for a toilet brush and laugh at people who don’t. It’s ludicrous. But people have no other real basis for comparison, because if they think about it at all, they see Apple vs. PC as a tribal thing like Ford/Chevy.

But the reality is that people have settled for Windows machines for years without really knowing any better — no basis for comparison. They thought that Windows was it and computers were Windows.

I mean if you see a commercial hollering that ShitSandwiches™ are 75% off, are you going to get excited? No. Because you were never in the market for a ShitSandwich™ in the first place, thank you very much. Not even if they decide to call it Active ShitSandwich Live 2009™ But what if you don’t know it’s a ShitSandwich™?

Apple is cleaning up

As Gruber points out, MS execs believe that the PC Hunter ads work because… they answered Apple somehow. Well Gruber kicked off his post by referencing an NPD report showing that Apple now owns 91% of the $1,000+ retail computer market. Not a huge portion of the computer market by any means, but MS would do well to pay more attention to that number as an indicator.

Windows 7 isn’t going to be awesome. The Bing/Yahoo whatever isn’t going to do anything more than help out Google by keeping the US Justice Department off their back. The Wii is going to keep kicking the XBOX down the street. Exchange’s market share will get eroded by things like Zimbra (even if perhaps not Zimbra itself) over time. Office 2010 will be a laughing stock for its schizo attempt to mimic Google Docs and its bewildering interface (prediction: MS will fall on its face with something douchey for their web-based document sharing monstrosity inside the next Office). And no one is going to care about Windows Mobile I mean Windows Phone with the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and new stuff from RIM.

Long, slow decline indeed. Bring it.

His central premise is that while super-violent video games are fun, watching increasingly realistic depictions of human murder is probably not all that great for the human psyche. By the time that complete photorealism is possible in games (he pegs this to be about a decade away), the average gamer will be involved in tens of thousands of acts of simulated murder, torture, etc.

Eventually, he says:

If the video and computer game industry doesn’t begin to show concern over widespread and flippant depictions of realistic human violence, game publishers will soon be asking players to regularly murder scores of astoundingly realistic virtual people, enjoy it, and defend the practice from critics of the art form. (Actually, they already do, but I digress.)

But the industry shouldn’t be asking this of its loyal fans and customers. This is not just a financial issue between publishers and their wallets; it’s an ethical issue that will increasingly affect our laws, culture, and society on a deep level.

I agree. But I also agree that censorship isn’t the answer. I think what the industry really needs is a healthy combination of shame and aspiration.

Murder isn’t the point – evolution is.

Blowing things (and people) up in video games is just super fun. That’s why there’s so many FPS games out there. But let’s face it — lots of them suck. You have to ask yourself if the designers could possibly be doing other, more interesting things with their creative/programming prowess. Perhaps if there were a more permeating ethos of pride in the variety and quality of things tried in games, if game designers looked at their medium as a method for creating societal commentary and art as well as entertainment, the way filmmakers do, we’d start to see something different.

Edwards focusses on murder in this article, but for me it’s less about the psychic damage of playing violent games than it is about it being simply boring as shit to have most blockbuster titles revolve around killing. As far as I’m concerned, the game industry is guilty less of promulgating psycopathy than they are of simple lazy thinking. Edwards touches on this slightly:

I can’t help but feel that such a profound and tragic event as human murder or even “justified” human killing should be a rare and powerful statement in games, not a common theme. With the ever-increasing power developers have in their hands to rip apart virtual lives, I think it’s time to re-examine the use of death and killing as a core game mechanic.

Perhaps the public is already beginning to tire of wantonly violent gameplay with its enthusiastic embrace of both casual games and the Nintendo Wii’s lighter fare. Many players are flocking to innovative, less intense games that make the “hardcore” (read: “mostly violent and/or realistic”) gaming world shudder.

I’m not sure I want to have to wait for the public to get there though. I want the video game industry to develop a sense of pride that says “when we make any game (even FPS games), they will be works of art. And we will look for ways to push the limits of creativity, wonder, and fun as well as artificially induced adrenaline rushes.”

I guess what I’m saying is that if I were on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare team and I went out and played Little Big Planet, I’d probably want to sit down and cry 15 minutes later, wondering why the hell I’d made yet another borderline-shameful simulation of the pain and death of real soldiers instead of something profoundly cool, beautiful, artistic, and novel.

In other words, gore won’t ever feed the soul. And it’s becoming time that game developers look upon that objective as, at least in part, their job.

There’s a new report out on US cyber security(PDF)

It’s a big-ass problem:

a growing array of state and non-state actors are compromising, stealing, changing, or destroying information and could cause critical disruptions to U.S. systems. At the same time, traditional telecommunications and Internet networks continue to converge, and other infrastructure sectors are adopting the Internet as a primary means of interconnectivity. The United States faces the dual challenge of maintaining an environment that promotes efficiency, innovation, economic prosperity, and free trade while also promoting safety, security, civil liberties, and privacy rights.

Yikes. So how does the government feel about this?

Leadership should be elevated and strongly anchored within the White House to provide direction, coordinate action, and achieve results. In addition, federal leadership and accountability for cybersecurity should be strengthened.

OK, good. I’m glad to hear that, because the last guy wasn’t really up on this stuff. He had this guy named Richard Clarke, remember? Right before 9/11 he got politely demoted for making a nuisance of himself by whining about a group called Al Qaeda. He asked to go to cyber-security, but wasn’t in the National Security Council anymore because oldster politicians think computers suck and wish they’d just go away.

So cool — glad that we’ve got someone in the White House who cares about keeping computers safe so that it’s easier for computers to Run All the Things of Man. Now that we’re down with cybersecurity, what are we going to do about it?

Well here’s an action plan from p. 8:

• Appoint a cybersecurity policy official responsible for coordinating the Nation’s cybersecurity policies and activities; establish a strong NSC directorate, under the direction of the cybersecurity policy official dual-hatted to the NSC and the NEC, to coordinate interagency development of cybersecurity-related strategy and policy.
• Prepare for the President’s approval an updated national strategy to secure the information and communications infrastructure. This strategy should include continued evaluation of CNCI activities and, where appropriate, build on its successes.
• Designate cybersecurity as one of the President’s key management priorities and establish performance metrics.
• Designate a privacy and civil liberties official to the NSC cybersecurity directorate.
• Convene appropriate interagency mechanisms to conduct interagency-cleared legal analyses of priority cybersecurity-related issues identified during the policy-development process and formulate coherent unified policy guidance that clarifies roles, responsibilities, and the application of agency authorities for cybersecurity-related activities across the Federal government.
• Initiate a national public awareness and education campaign to promote cybersecurity.
• Develop U.S. Government positions for an international cybersecurity policy framework and strengthen our international partnerships to create initiatives that address the full range of activities, policies, and opportunities associated with cybersecurity.
• Prepare a cybersecurity incident response plan; initiate a dialog to enhance public-private partnerships with an eye toward streamlining, aligning, and providing resources to optimize their contribution and engagement
• In collaboration with other EOP entities, develop a framework for research and development strategies that focus on game-changing technologies that have the potential to enhance the security, reliability, resilience, and trustworthiness of digital infrastructure; provide the research community access to event data to facilitate developing tools, testing theories, and identifying workable solutions.
• Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Ambitious — especially the public awareness campaign. How should they go about doing that? My vote is for a public viewing of the movie Hackers in every city.

Because I am a loser, I have no access to Arrington’s clandestine sources, so I’ll content myself with doing a plebian version of trying to break down the reasons why it might make sense for Apple to do this.

Why would they do this?

People cry wolf on the Apple tablet thing almost every year:

• 2007
• 2008

Why would 2009 be any different?

Well for starters, netbook sales numbers are getting pretty huge. Apple hasn’t made a netbook yet, but why not? Well one reason is that Tim Cook thinks that netbooks suck. But a better one is that Apple has to know it could just do something a hell of a lot cooler if they made a device with the functionality of a netbook but the form factor of a a giant iPhone.

Why do I think this? Because Apple hasn’t entered the netbook market yet even though they have the expertise to own it. The iTunes Store is a juggernaut engine of adoption, and Apple’s also sitting on some badass multi-touch patents that they’ve hardly begun to make use of yet, not to mention supply chain prowess that is the envy of the industry and the cash/demand to ensure they can get whatever they need from overseas suppliers. I think they’re going to enter the netbook space in a major way, and that when they do, it will be a tablet.

What would it look like?

I’m thinking something like Amazon’s Kindle, but with the capabilities of an iPhone, and most of the look — big, flat tabula rasa touch screen. The size would be really important, because you would want this thing to be able to be a book or a control panel for your home media center, but also have a netbook-like capability set.

It’d probably have to have a better version of OS X on it than the iPhone does — more bells and whistles. This could be why OS X Snow Leopard has support for 3G. (I don’t think that the Air sells enough to be the reason. If that’s why, then they’re going to severely lower the price of that badboy).

What it would do

In general, I’m envisioning an on-the-go “instead of the laptop” option for when you’re travelling light but the iPhone isn’t enough. Here’s a list of the potential use cases that get me excited:

• Touch-screen notebook/sketchpad/eisel (a bigger space for Brushes!)
• E-media reader a la the Kindle
• Home media remote control
• iPod with awesome capacity
• iPhone with magnetically-attached, Ive-designed earpiece (we can dream, right?)

OMG! When can I have it?

Supposedly this fall, but who knows? The intensity of the buzz has been building for awhile. Most people think that an announcement would come at WWDC next month. Let’s hope so — I’d definitely be first in line for this one.

what really needs to be emphasized here is that IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game. IE7 was a catch-up release, there’s no question about that. However, with IE8, which is bigger leap from IE7 than IE7 was from IE6, Microsoft is pulling out the big guns and offering features which other browsers have yet to adopt. It’s good to see Microsoft fight back with a vengeance, but the company has more competition than ever before, from the likes of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

At SxSW interactive last week, the Microsoft panelist in the talk on CSS 3 mentioned that IE 8 is more compliant with Acid2 than any other browser out there. Apparently, Acid 3 support is still pretty crappy, which is kind of annoying since Acid3 support isn’t that great yet in any browser with significant market share. One would assume that support for Acid3 in IE 8 would drive more rapid adoption of the cool stuff you can do with the standards tested by Acid3, but it’s apparently not part of their plans for the browser. As far as I’m concerned, this is yet more BrowserFail from MS – W3C standards should be followed by any browser. If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple (and therefore Google’s Chrome) can see this, why the hell can’t Microsoft?

Still, as someone who has to get cross-browser support going for IE, I’m happy to see the improvements that version 8 brings. And if I were inclined to ever use a Windows PC, I’d probably be pretty excited about this feature:

A Web Slice grabs specific information from a website (like the top stories from Digg or the weather forecast) and puts it in a drop-down menu, eliminating the need to browse to the actual website. “It’s about making it as easy for sites to extend and blur into the browser,” Hachamovitch told Ars. This is a brilliant feature but it is completely lost if developers ignore it.

This certainly sounds more interesting than the hideous RSS reader thing in Safari, and of a similar but more flexible functionality. Good to see MS doing this kind of stuff, but I agree with the assessment from Ars that unless devs support it, it’ll be useless. And given devs’ well-known affinity (sarcasm) for doing IE-specific work, I’m not seeing this being as big as it should be, given the quality of the innovation.

While I like the science of quantum cryptography — my undergraduate degree was in physics — I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.

I guess I’d basically been thinking that quantum crypto would kick off a privacy battle that would make the controversy over Diffie-Hellman look tame.

But I have to ask — does it make me into a conspiracy theorist to think the stuff about quantum computing is just optimism?

Pretty serious stuff, but years away from being practical. I think the best quantum computer today can factor the number 15.

I have a hard time believing that the boys at the NSA don’t have something like this that they just haven’t told anyone about. But maybe that’s just me buying into the mystique of the USA’s premiere spook agency.