I’m Not Dead Yet

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 . . . → Read More: I’m Not Dead Yet

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It’s Been a Crazy Couple of Weeks

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 . . . → Read More: It’s Been a Crazy Couple of Weeks

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Updates since June 29th

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).

actionmailer-rb: new package (for Ruby on Rails) actionpack-rb: new package (for Ruby on Rails) actionwebservice-rb: new package (for Ruby on Rails) activerecord-rb: new package (for Ruby on Rails) activesupport-rb: new package (for Ruby on Rails) amarok: updated to 1.4.1 (still no GStreamer engine…) boo: updated to 0.7.6.2237-4 cairo: updated to 1.2.0 cocoa-sharp: updated to 0.9.1 fastercsv-rb: new package (fast CSV parsing for Ruby) ferret-rb: new package (a port of the Lucene search engine to Ruby) gecko-sharp: updated to use firefox1.5 instead of firefox (1.0.x) gnupg and gnupg-idea: updated to 1.4.5 glitz: updated to 0.5.6 gst-plugins-bad-0.10: dependency fixes gst-plugins-base-0.10: updated to 0.10.9 gst-plugins-good-0.10: updated to a 0.10.4 snapshot (for updated OSX drivers) gst-plugins: dependcy fixes gstreamer-0.10: . . . → Read More: Updates since June 29th

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Fink on Rails

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 . . . → Read More: Fink on Rails

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