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I'm Not Dead Yet

By Benjamin Reed on April 23, 2008 10:50 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

So I've been slack in posting to my blog, for any number of reasons, but I've been busy busy with lots of crazy stuff.

First, I've been spearheading the OpenNMS involvement in Summer of Code. Aside from one unfortunate incident things have been going well. I'm really looking forward to getting to know our students and seeing what they can come up with. It will be a learning experience for all of us. =)

We're also starting to gear up towards another beta on the road to OpenNMS 1.6. We've already got a bunch more bugs finished off, but also plenty to do still.

If you haven't noticed, my blog looks a little bit different. I'd been limping along with pretty much unchanged templates from upgrade after upgrade of Movable Type since version 3.1 or so. It's a testament to their software that everything's worked swimmingly without any major surgery for all of that time, but I've been itching to take advantage to the much cleaner HTML and CSS they're using in newer default templates, and other spiffy features which I have not been able to use without a ton of work. So I finally took the plunge and exported all of my existing data, and started over, making a CSS theme and only very small changes to the default templates. There's a bit more to do, but in all, I'm very happy with how it's gone. I should be future-proofed for another 6 years of blogging now. ;)

What's next? More OpenNMS bugfixing, to start with. I also have some Fink packages to update, as well as a few Rails-related packages to release (Mongrel and it's supporting cast of characters). It's also time to pick up my on-again off-again work on KDE/Mac, they're working towards and alpha of 4.1 and I still have a number of things I'd like to do before releasing somewhat stable packages.

Ah, well, a geek's work is never done. ;)

It's Been a Crazy Couple of Weeks

By Benjamin Reed on December 12, 2007 5:16 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks

Figured it'd been a while since I did a general "status" post about what's been going on.

First and foremost, as I mentioned before, much of my spare time has gone into fixing up the Fink package database. It's now much easier on our web server, and uses a combination of PHP and a really spiffy Lucene-based full-text search engine called "Solr."

Also, I did some work on making Fink play nicer with the new Xquartz releases. It's still in testing, but in the meantime, their 2.1.1 release provides a workaround to allow Fink users on Leopard to run without issue.

I've also been wearing my OpenNMS.com hat recently, and am working on some spiffy customer-management tools for keeping track of our support work better. I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails, and am mocking it up in that -- on top of JRuby, of course.

In the process, of getting my development system set up to do rails development, I updated all of the Fink packages for rails 2.0 and related stuff, as well as taking over rubygems from the previous maintainer. They're now all up-to-date, and I've been doing my rails development with a purely fink-based ruby/rails install, which is nice.

Plenty of other stuff got updated or added as well:

Updates Since Um... A Long Time Ago

By Benjamin Reed on December 4, 2006 11:01 PM | No Comments

I've been working on packages and catching up on quite a bit of stuff for a while now, but hadn't gotten around to posting about it, so I guess it's time to do so. :)

I've got some more coming down the line -- a big reworking of the PostgreSQL packages (including 8.2) as well as a few other things. At that point, I should actually be reasonably caught up.

Big Updates:

  • KDE: finally got 3.5.5 out the door. Mostly just version bumps, although I did add some code to allow you to easily disable quartz-wm for clipboard synchronization (in some cases, folks were seeing quartz-wm hog memory with a huge leak). You can do so by adding export DISABLE_PROXY=1 in your .xinitrc before you run startkde.
  • Mono: various Mono updates, including a number of compile fixes and stuff. Everything (but MonoDevelop, as always) works now on OSX. Yay!

Other Stuff:

Updates since June 29th

By Benjamin Reed on August 5, 2006 9:43 PM | 3 Comments

There are quite a few updates since my last big post. Most notable are getting mono up-to-date (although monodevelop still doesn't work), Ruby on Rails, and kde 3.5.4 (as of this post, it's 10.4-only, my 10.3 build machine is still chugging through doing a final verification build, but it should be out in the next day or two).

Fink on Rails

By Benjamin Reed on July 31, 2006 12:16 AM | No Comments

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.

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