July 2006 Archives

So this last week I was at OSCON. I met a lot of awesome people, some of whom I'd met online and finally got to see in person. I also learned a ton about a lot of things, but really, The Buzz® was Rails, Rails, Rails.

I've played with Ruby on Rails off and on for a few months, and I was very impressed, but I learned a new appreciation for it at OSCON. There were a ton of good training classes and experts able to explain the stuff that up until now I'd been using without really knowing what it means... (which is common if you've just picked up the 15-minute demo and thought "man, that's cool, I want to try it!")

Of course, I hate having anything installed on my system without it being package-managed, so I went ahead and packaged up everything up to Rails as well as a few extras -- Streamlined (a featureful replacement for the scaffold that was just announced at OSCON), and ferret (a port of the excellent Lucene search engine to Ruby).

It's dead easy to package up gems in Fink, so if there's anything that makes Rails easier for you that's missing, please let me know and I'll try packaging it.

So I'm rather surprised by GNOME's response to a recent bug on symbol visibility on Mac OS X. One of the things GNOME has done very well in the past is to always preserve backwards-compatibility, and they've generally stuck to it (and when they haven't, it's been an accident, and has been remedied).

But given the comments on the bug, apparently ELF linking with indirect symbols is now the only officially supported way to compile GNOME libraries, and breaking ABI compatibility is OK as long as it doesn't break any important platforms. (ahem)

I'm in favor of refactoring code to the proper places as much as the next guy, but this is breaking ABI, and should wait for gnome-vfs3. That's the way it works, you're making a compact with the user that as long as this major number doesn't change, your old binaries should still work. It's a shame that they'll break that covenant for the purposes of the convenience of framework developers. It's not like there aren't ways to consolidate the code that doesn't break binary-compatibility.

And here I was going to help Daniel Macks work on getting GNOME modernized in Fink (using my experimental modular x.org Fink packages, and GNOME 2.15/2.16), but suddenly I've got a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm here in Portland at OSCON until Friday night. If you're here, send me an e-mail and we can try to find each other and say "hi". I've gone ahead and set up a "Birds of a Feather" meet-up, at 8:30pm Wednesday night, in room F150. If you're interested in Fink, give us a visit.

If you're not at OSCON, well, you're missing out. ;)

So I'm going to veer away from Mac stuff for a sec.

I went to a Carolina Hurricanes game late in the regular season with my fianceé, mom, and aunt, and I got totally hooked (we've already got season tickets for the next season). The Hurricanes made it to the playoffs, and I heard about the tradition of not shaving until you win (or you're eliminated).

Now, I've had facial hair in some form pretty much continuously since junior high, I'm all about not having to shave. Not to pass up yet another excuse not to shave, I thought "what the heck, I can grow a playoff beard!"

The Hurricanes went right to the end, and won the Stanley Cup this year! In the process, I managed to grow a nice substantial amount of facial hair. Of course, I couldn't let that much hair just pass without having a little fun with it...

So I present to you: Operation: Playoff Beard!

I've updated my universal packages for Qt and kdesupport to handle the latest that's going on in kdelibs trunk (the move to Qt 4.2 snapshots, D-Bus moving from kdesupport to Qt, etc.) You should be able to build kdelibs trunk with these packages, until things change again. ;)

So one of the regulars in #fink on irc just got a new kitten. He named it...

Fink!

Apparently they have a tradition of naming their cats something that starts with "F" (or "Ph").

Say hello to Fink the Cat! (awwwwww)

And totally unrelated, I'm really curious now. I wonder what linkie winkie is. I saw it in my feedburner logs and wonder what the secret is. Do *you* know?