I found some funky URI's for access the internals of Firefox. Most of them well documented at MozillaZine.

The most interesting ones are related to the about:cache URI. If you type this into a Firefox or Mozilla based browser you will get links to cached objects in memory, either in RAM or on disk.

What's interesting about this is thats its a great and simple way of snarfing resources because it gives you a list of URL's recently visited that you can just right click and "Save Link As".

Also check out the unnerving about:mozilla page.

My shiny new MacBook Pro turned up yesterday. I've become a fanboy overnight.

So it's a 2.2ghz dual core, 4gb RAM and 120gb disk with 15" screen. Nicely spec'd!

I now need to find replacements for all my fav Windows/Linux apps. Luckily its not hard. I have replaced Total Commander with muCommander (cross-platform), and most of my favourite pentesting tools are accessible via MacPorts or are Java based such as Burp.

If this works out then I will replace my XP desktop with a Mac in 12 months. The learning curve begins.

Sabayon Business Edition came out in the last week. The installer provides a no-brainer fantastic Anaconda like installation with the ability to choose package groups and thats where the excitement ends.

Business Edition is a big misnomer, there is nothing business like about it. Without the Beryl/Compiz/Kicker eye-candy the OS felt like a red and black version of Knoppix. The Business Edition tag comes from the use of the stable Gentoo package tree instead of the testing tree used by standard Sabayon.

From a package perspective there was a lot of bloat (1.7GB distro disk) with lots of unnecessary apps. I think the real killer though was the poor menus, the programs are poorly categorised with two different HTML editors for example being placed under two different menus.

The developers are young and don't have much commercial experience, which is why I think they totally missed the mark with the Business Edition. This isn't SME worthy let alone corporate or enterprise. Ututo comes a lot closer to being a Gentoo based Business Edition.

All that said, I guess I am disappointed because I had quite high hopes for the BE. Anyway Sabayon 3.4 comes out in the next week and I will be reverting back to the smaller CD based version. I am starting to miss my 3D desktop and wobbly windows.

Well I have now been burnt once too many times by Ruby's shortcomings. After a very frustrating late night coding session with a Ruby standard library bug I have decided that I will no longer be attempting to code applications in Ruby. Ruby isn't an application programming language, its a scripting language and should be treated as such.

1. Ruby is immature for a 12 year old language
   When you compare Ruby and Java which are about the same age, Java is miles in front in every aspect.
   
   
2. Development cycle is SLOW
   Even when a release does come out there are minimal added features, with too much focus of syntactic sugar. Matz has to move more and more of the core development outside of Japan and focus on richer (less buggy) library support.
   
   
3. Lack of documentation
   This is due to most of the development team being Japanese. People are working on this but most of the documentation is made up of auto-generated RDOC with nothing more than method and property names. I don't know where Ruby would be without the PickAxe book. Try finding English documentation for exerb or swin.
   
   
4. Small number of standard libraries
   The standard libraries that come with Ruby are minimal, I would like to see Matz actually commit to a few of the better Rubyforge projects and incorporate them into the language as standard libraries, for example Net::SSH
   
   
5. Libraries on Rubyforge suck
   There are lots of good libraries on Rubyforge (et al) but many are no longer maintained, buggy, forever in beta. Compare this with CPAN or Java libraries.
   
   
6. There are few "true" Ruby gurus to go to for help
   Yes there is the mailing list but again, if you ask for anything too technical you are met with silence.
   
   
7. Matz is a handbrake
   The guy is a genius but I think he is holding back the language from wider adoption for all of the above reasons. I would love to see someone else (like ActiveState maybe) take over the development of the Ruby language with Matz providing input and direction. Then maybe some of the above mentioned issues would go away.

But its not all bad. I will continue to use Ruby for quick and dirty scripts but any application development will be done in Java. I am also dropping standard Ruby for JRuby so that I can use the extensive Java libraries with the sweet syntax of Ruby. Maybe JRuby can save the Ruby language from being another Smalltalk or Lisp.