Mathish

To be completely honest, I’m not much of a reader. My reading speed lies somewhere between “painfully slow” and “potentially illiterate,” so reading fiction, in particular, is more chore than hobby. I love works of reference when they have well constructed indices or, better yet, hyperlinks between related topics — my bookshelves and wikipedia usage can attest to this. I’m also fascinated with “meta-reading” fiction, where I read summaries, critiques and so forth of some work to gain insights into what it’s all about, but without reading the actual source material. This fascination is probably the only reason I didn’t fail every high school English class. The point of this, which I’m dangerously close to completely losing, is that my thoughts on a book are generally not of much use to anyone else.

While lurking on the #ruby-lang channel on freenode.net, oddmund suggested creating a method_missing handler that would “auto-correct” misspelled method. His suggestion was of course a joke, but it was a pretty good one, so he implemented it. I provided my own implementation, along with some other terrible ideas.

After using the classifier I originally laid out in this post, I discovered that my method of calculating $P(D)$ was very flawed. I have made the appropriate revisions.

I’ve written the first follow-up to Properties of Code: Functional Complexity about 3 times now and have scrapped it 3 times. Every attempt has been less “mathy” than the start of the series; each has contained an interesting point or two, but those nuggets get buried under a mountain of meandering.

A follow up to Properties of Code: Functional Complexity is coming. It’s much less “mathy” than its predecessor but serves as a jumping off point for the next in the series. However, there is something that has been nagging at me after watching some of the talks at this year’s RailsConf. It’s a ubiquitous and seemingly trivial thing, but it bothers the hell out of me: ActiveSupport::Concern.

About a year ago, I began giving some serious thought to an article named Functional Complexity Modulo a Test Suite by Reg Braithwaite. Today, I think I have something to say on the matter.

The following code assumes that there is a subdirectory named certs containing known certificates in PEM format, and a subdir keys containing the client’s private RSA key. Further, there are lots of comments specific to my actual needs, namely exporting keys generated in Java using keytool for an Apache ActiveMQ message broker. Lastly, to use the ca_path method, the certs directory needs to be properly indexed using c_rehash (make sure the underlying version of openssl matches the version Ruby’s OpenSSL extension was built against, otherwise the hash algorithm may not be the same.)