Doug Hellman’s svnbackup script tool is a really handy tool for setting up automated backups for a subversion repository.
However, the non-fun time comes when one wants to restore a subversion repository that has way too many dumpfiles parts. The instructions for restoration are basically ‘roll your own’ if you want to try to automate the restore procedure. What would be nicer is if there was the converse tool that made it easier to not have to figure out how to re-order the backup files in the proper manner in order to perform the restore.
I spent a few minutes thinking about it and wrote a small Ruby script to help with this that I call svnbackup-restore.rb. Here is the (hastily written) source code. (Download here)
#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Program Name: Restore the restore
# Purpose: Take all the svn dumpfiles generated from svnbackup
# sort them and try loading them via svnadmin
# Usage: 1. Create the new repo path with svnadmin create
# 2. Set repo_name to the repo backup file names
# 3. Set restore_path to the new path to restore to
# 4. Run it ./svnbackup-restore.rb
# Assumptions: svnrestore-backup.rb is in the same dir as the svn dump files
# CHANGE PARAMETERS HERE
repo_name = 'myrepo'
restore_path = '/path/to/myrepo'
# Print out debugging?
DEBUG = true
# DON'T CHANGE BELOW
# Filename format is 'dumpfile---.bzip2'
svn_dumpfiles = Dir["dumpfile-#{repo_name}*.bzip2"]
sorted_files = svn_dumpfiles.sort do |a, b|
left_rev = a.split(’-')[2].to_i
right_rev = b.split(’-')[2].to_i
left_rev right_rev
end
sorted_files.each do |dump_part|
results = `bzcat #{dump_part} | svnadmin load #{restore_path}; echo $?`
puts results if DEBUG
res = results.split.last.to_i
if res != 0
puts “Error on trying to load up #{dump_part}!”
exit 1
end
end
Lightning talks are one of the more interesting parts of a conference in my opinion since 5 minutes really forces the speaker to get to the point and it becomes painfully obvious if the presentation has no focus or if there has been real work to get across the main message in the shortest amount of time.
So here are some highlights
Kuwata on Java to Ruby
- No, not the book Java to Ruby
- Going from Java to Ruby requires a change in mindset. Not a change of code
- Some historical example: COBOL in Java (ed. That sounds frightening) is like Java in Ruby
- Don’t hold back experts and too many things spend too much time on beginners
- Do not keep beginners as beginners (teach them!)
- Bragging about the largeness of a project size is the wrong type of bragging (suggested large code + many devs == lack of ability
dRuby & Security by Nishiyama
- druby is not built by default to handle the wild Internet
- There is a feature called insecure method list that will help prevent certain methods from being invocated remotely
- Use $SAFE however it won’t save against a DoS. Also don’t forget about rlimit
Ruby + ODE by Sasaki
- Showed a very nice 3D demo walkthrough world controlled with a Wii-mote and looked like the Pitagora Switch world
- Can summon objects pressing one of the buttons
- Can stop time
- The project should be on Code Repos
- (ed. Seeing this in action was far more interesting than reading these notes)
Do Beginners Dream Enumerators? by Imai
- Conclusion first: Sorry they don’t
- Showed some very nice examples of using the Enumerator library for many bad cases (each_slice)
- Beginning Ruby programmers really love each to the point of going overboard
Folk programming with Ruby by mootoh
- Folk Programming was introduced at YAPC Asia 2008 (See my notes)
- Show examples outside of building web applications such as Rich UI exploration
- Showed examples of Plugins to other programs since it’s easier than writing a big app (although with Ruby the apps should be nice and small)
- Some examples: Safari + Hatena bookmark, Quicksilver + Twitter (looks dangerous), Quartz Composer + Gainer, Vim + Refe
- Ruby is a very good glue
Again as a Rubyist… toRuby by Ikezawa
- (ed. I liked this talk a lot since it wasn’t by some uber-Ruby hacker)
- Didn’t use Ruby until 2000
- Background was as a consultant since 1984. Helped found a Wapro Kissaten!
- Moving to Ruby hit the OOP barrier. Was not used to OOP methodologies at all
- Stopped however after a long time in June 2007, found a local Ruby guru to help him out and that got the ball rolling again
- Invites others to join in
Ruby 1.9 with Rails 2.1 by matsuda
- Went through the history of web programming (or his version of it)
- Ancient History - PHP
- Recent History - DB Framework with ORM (in Java… lots of these frameworks)
- Current - Rails
- However DB access is a Rails weakness
- Introduced named_scope feature (Is this a Rails 2.1 specific feature? Need to review this myself
- More info on this at blog.dio.jp
Read code with Testing by Endoh
- Rookie Ruby Committed
- His suggestion on learning is by reading real code
- Use TBCR (Test Based Code Reading)
- Run make test-all
- Find code paths that are never executed
- Add tests (requires more code reading)
- Using this method have increased Ruby’s test coverage to 85%
- In contrast Python is 80%, Perl 63%, PHP is 51% (plans to target PHP next)
Okay this is my notes from Matz’s Keynote. I was 5 minutes late since finding lunch took a really long time to find anything around the area unfortunately. Unfortunately, most of the visiting Rubyists decided to do KFC however Charles Nutter decided to stick it through and we finally found a nice Yakiniku restaurant to eat at but that ended up being the reason I was 5 minutes late… okay anyways here are my notes from in the middle of the talk…
Matz was talking about sanctuaries and how some technologies have built their sanctuaries over time. Here are some sanctuaries he mentioned and some of their defining characteristics:
- UNIX
- The filter (wahoo!)
- “Worse is better” aka the New Jersey School of Design (I always ask myself just how much worse though..)
- Convenience over perfection
- Smalltalk
- OOP, deep OOP
- Targeted at children (funny how only greybeards really use this language now discounting eToys)
- Bytecode VM but not the first to have one but one of the more prominent ones
- A dynamic language implementation with decades of hard-earned experience, wisdom and knowledge around it
- java
- Well Java seems to fulfill business and ‘enterprise needs’ (for now)
- Java was originally slow however time has changed that perception. Java’s speed complaints have mostly faded away (But I still complain about a 30 second startup time for the VM)
- Absorbed many other ideas from other languages (VM, Garbage Collection, Exception Handling)
- Java has one of the fastest Garbage Collected VMs now (with the amount of engineering effort thrown at it I’d hope so)
Matz then describes that Sanctuaries tend to go through the following phases
- Hackers gathered
- New technology is born
- The world changed (because of the technology? Missed this…)
Don’t forget about centripetal forces during these stages. The community matters quite a bit. According to Matz, 50% of the types of OSes out there in this world are some type of UNIX.
Finally, he goes on to describe the Ruby Sanctuary and its defining characteristics
- For Rubyists, feeling matters. Focus on the human and the joys programming
- It inherited many things from the past. Lisp metaprogramming, Smalltalk OOP, UNIX text processing
- Productivity matters. Machines are faster but people’s time is much more expensive
- Agility matters. Environments change and embracing the changes is the right thing
At this point a person from Rakuten comes up on stage and talks about some projects that Matz has been collaborating with.
One is called ROMA which is some sort of distributed memory data storage (think memcached with some more ability for data integrity in case of failures)
The other one is called fairy which is supposed to be a lightweight distributed programming framework.
Unfortunately it seems that both projects are rather delayed and it doesn’t seem apparent if these projects will be Open Sourced or not. That is rather disappointing to me but can’t have everything for free now can we?
Evan Phoenix on Rubinius
Evan started off with a quick intro on Rubinius and proceeded to talk about some of the big pieces of Rubinius from a 10,000 feet high view.
- The kernel of the system
- The C Compatibility Layer
- It’s a big project and Evan wants to have a conversation with anyone who wants to have one on it
For the VM nerds here are some feature highlights…
- Accurate generational Garbage Collector
- Bytecode based VM
- Capable of bootstrapping itself
Evan suggested we should think of Rubinius sort of like an OS.
Then he started diving right into a tour of some of the cool internals of Rubinius and explaining some of the internal objects that really are the heart of Rubinius (above the VM layer)
BTW what is the <<? Evan coins it the left chevron.
MethodContext - Lets one see information regarding a method and the context surrounding it
CompiledMethod - Peek at the bytecodes of a method!
BlockContext - Tell me all the information about a block. Can capture a compiled block and inspect byte codes
SendSite - One per place where a call is performed. By caching information on this, can speed up method dispatch
With MethodContext and CompiledMethod it’s possible to implement eval in Ruby and follow the principle of Code as Data. Taking advantage of Ryan Davis’s ParseTree (included in Rubinius) one can take something like
"1 + 1".to_sexp
Which will take 1 + 1 and change it into an s-expression, convert it into an AST, and a User Visitor Pattern implementation can walk through this and spit out bytecode. (I might have recollected this wrong.. if so, sorry.. Not a VM implementor)
Some other big features that Evan mentioned were
- Extensions
- Getting close to running Ruby C-extensions
- However they are still 2nd-class citizens (they will take a performance hit but working is better than fast and broken)
- MRI in this case is still faster
- Multi-VM implementation
- stdin and stdout are implemented as pipes
- Functional but still highly experimental (can try calculating Pi across a multi-core machine)
- args = ["-e", "puts", "hello"]
vm = Rubinius::Vm.spawn args
puts vm.stdout.gets
- Channels
- One of the main internal communication channels used in Rubinius
- I/O events use channels for example
Then Evan goes on to showing some cool demo of implementing Binding.of_caller in front of the audience. He also showed one neat thing about rbx. If you run a command it will load irb automatically assuming you want a REPL (cool!)
Q & A
- Q: What are your final goals with Rubinius?
- A: Have an image like SmallTalk? The VM only knows about byte codes not Ruby. Could even write an implementation of SmallTalk on the Rubinius VM however Evan said he has no plans to
- Q: Anything on shared benchmark testing?
- A: (Matz) There has been movements to start collecting code as of last week. Trying to make sure that it is more ‘real world’ code benchmarks. There should be an Infoq article on this.
(Evan) Started on this. Check out GitHub for more info
- Q: How’s the performance?
- A: No really hard numbers on Rubinius’ performance. Some things have gotten faster over time such as the generational part. Awhile ago Evan wrote a bunch of small benchmarks to test things out but seems to have misplaced them somewhere
Here’s a continuation of my scribbled notes from the RubyKaigi. This one from the JRuby implementors. Some of my own thoughts and comments are inserted in parentheses.
Charles Nutter on JRuby
- Quick intro and the impressive live demos of JRuby in action (or as the IRC channel said Nice Live Coding (NLC))
- This summer, work on Ruby 1.9 features (seems there’s an option flag to turn on 1.9 compatibility mode already)
- Current 1.1.3 Progress Report
- A new interpreter that is up to 30% faster
- Compile-time performance enhancements
- Many Rails Bottlenecks fixed
- No new release of JRuby this year but…
- Wanted to show some uses of JRuby
- IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse, INtelliJ use JRuby in their IDEs
- Swing GUI development
- Swing development can be very complex but Ruby helps to simplify it
- Benefits from the ‘Write once, Run everywhere’
- There are a plethora of options to choose from (why does this seem to happen in the Java world all the time?)
- Cheri
- Profligacy (by the infamous Rails Ghetto-man Zed Shaw)
- MonkeyBars (Proceeded to show an impressive demo)
- MonkeyBars leverages existing GUI utils (that’s a major plus)
- MVC-like structure (hey looks like Rails…)
- Graphics (Showed some really sweet demos of ruby-processing in action)
- Processing had a way to interface to audio input devices
- Remember to check out “A Face for Stephen Hawking”. Wow that code looked really clean…
- Rails (the benchmark app that all implementors need to measure implementation readiness by)
- There has been a shift in Java Web frameworks lately (but still happening at a glacial pace)
- Deployment problem is “solved” (I keep hearing this…)
- mongrel is “old school” (at least for JRuby-based deployments)
- Made mention of Phusion/Passenger but it still had the issue of rails process spawning and how to manage that (Seems Jruby doesn’t have these issues)
- Some war deployment demoes
- A warbler demo (A tool to help create war files)
- Will package in Jruby automagically into the war (That’s very nice)
- Just run warble inside the rails application directory (Hopefully it doesn’t package up a gigantic development.log)
- As simple as GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin deploy *.war
- Has Rack supoprt (can handle Merb and anything else with Rack support
- Can be configurable
- From his demo, it seems that warble will make a war of anything (aka be careful what directory you run this command)
- Showed some really nice benchmarks of rails and JRuby (I need to put this through the ringer when I get more time)
- Showed another deployment tool called the glassfish gem
- 3MB gem that had everything needed for JRuby on Rails
- Tries to match the agile process
- JRuby Users (in production): CSI’s Disease Surveillance, Oracle’s Mix website, Sun’s Media Cast, Thoughtworks Mingle
Q & A
- Q: The Parser Implementation seems hard. Any war stories
- A: I hate parsers and refuse to write one. Someone wrote something that used J. I don’t know much about it but Tom’s pains dealing with it seem very hard. No plans to change parsers anytime in the near future.
- Q: Object Space & Binding
- A: On Jruby, this will incur an automatic performance penalty. binding & caller will be required each time which incurs a heavy cost
- Q: Non-local break performance?
- A: Implemented as a Java Exception. By doing this, the JVM can optimize that as a Jump. JRuby tries to use this as much as possible behind the scenes for performance
Ruby Kaigi 2008 is happening. I’m sure there other posts on the Ruby Kaigi happening however here are some of my own hasty scribbles for anyone that cares…
Introduction Speech
- This is the 3rd year of the conference
- One theme of this year is multiple implementatios
- More people coming into the Ruby community and we need to greet the (Dave Thomas’ speech from last year)
- Two tracks this year (I mostly followed the main track)
The first set of presentations from the main track were from the Ruby implementors.
Koichi SASADA - Ruby VM Development
- 1.9.0-2 released as of 6/20/2008 (mainly bug fixes)
- A little discussion of 1.9.1 Roadmap (Something about 1.9.1 being the more stable release?)
- A plethora of interpreters available now (lists all of them)
- Sasada-san felt a little sheepish over Matz mentioning taking only about technology is ‘boring’ since his talk focused on mainly technology
- University of Tokyo has become a haven for since Sasada-san now has a laboratory (wahoo!) which means…
- Ruby related research-projects
- Student Research Projects on Ruby
- Parallel Thread Execution
- Better multi-core support
- Memory resource usage (or was that resource contention?) can be a problem
- Multiple-VMs
- Run Multiple VMs in same Ruby process
- Jruby + Nakada-san are the primary drivers
- The JRuby guys are ready to implement it (waiting on API) and Rubinius seems to have one already
- API done
- bootstrap done
- Creation of interpreter mostly done (seems to have some small issues?)
- Still needs documentation (What project doesn’t?)
High Performance Computing (HPC) on Ruby
- Ruby implementations needs FP optimization for HPC
- Ruby 1.9.x quite fast compared to other implementations (according to the Benchmarks Sasada-san showed)
Atomic Ruby (aka Customizeable Ruby)
- Create an Optimal interpreter for “you”
- Make it easier for Ruby to be used in embedded environments
- Make it easier for Ruby customized for specific environments (iPhone anyone?)
- Make it possible to plug in and out the core pieces
- Byte code serialization and embedded
- Make the GC customizeable
More work memory optimizations (Sounded like there was the need for more profiling)
Before there was Rails, there existed other Web Frameworks for Ruby. One of the promising ones is Nitro however it fell into realm of ignorance. On some random surfing I ran across this blog post from one of the main authors of the Nitro Web Framework.
It’s an interesting read since the author laments how Nitro could have been a contender but it never took off. The comments are enlightening since it seems there were project (mis)management issues that prevented a community from really forming around Nitro. Anyways, by now, Rails has the lion’s share of the attention so any hopes now would rest on it being so much better that people will switch. My understanding is that it has some things that are better but not such a big enough jump to make people interested, unfortunately.
Read more
I’ve been trying out Firefox 3 and one strategy I do is to copy my Mozilla Firefox folder with me to whatever machine I go to so I don’t have to reinstall plugins, re-enter all my passwords, and configure everything about Firefox until I’m happy.
However, it seems due to some reason or another I lost the ability to install extensions. After Googling around I dug up a nice hint on Ubuntu’s Launchpad site.
Basically delete the file named extensions.rdf in your Mozilla directory
- Windows: C:\Documents And Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Mozilla Firefox\
- Linux (Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 7.10): $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profile/MY_PROFILE/
Read the Ubuntu fix
A quite from this article I pulled up from Planet Sysadmin
Unbound was written by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei. Unbound will support DNSSEC, a version of DNS that uses public-key cryptography to protect DNS results, from begriming. Unbound and BIND are the only open-source recursive DNS servers that support DNSSEC.
Seems interesting. If they can make sure to make the transition from BIND as painless as possible I’m sure it will start getting some traction. Although, if you don’t need DNSSEC and lots of fancy features djbdns handles things not so badly (in my experience).
One thing that is interesting that wasn’t mentioned in the news announcement is that Unbound ONLY handles recursive requests while its cousin nsd is an authoritative only nameserver which is similar to how the djbdns suite works. In some cases, I DO like how BIND can handle both authoritative and recursive in one binary but I guess it always depends on the situation…
Read the announcement on eweek
Unbound’s website
Okay first day at YAPC…
Missed most of the opening speeches and Larry Wall’s Keynote.. d’oh. Then again trying to handle the incoming rush of attendees was quite the experience. I’d say jumbled is a good word for how we handled it but at least it got handled. It’s pretty hard handling the Japanese Incoming Rush that seems such a common phenomenon in Japan.
Perl as a Second Language Notes
Sat in on the Perl as a Second Language Talk. Here are some of my messy notes
- There is one than one way to say it
- Some languages pay more attention to certain details than others (Lots of ways to say cousin in Chinese vs Japanese and English)
- Showed some examples of Hello World in other languages
- The Ruby example hung! D’oh! No that isn’t because Ruby is slow….
- Showed the ever popular Y-Combinator example in Scheme then showed a Perl version
- One beneficial thing about expresstivity languages is the ability to skip saying the obvious
- What makes Perl different?
- Perl does not have OOP built-in (Yes… I know)
- Shows an example using autobox
- Perl can be a good language for learning OOP (because you can learn to make your own OO system)
- Dan defines an Object to be data that knows what to do (I welcome our self-aware Object overlords)
- Perl objects are references! (D’oh, I need to understand what a reference is… I’ll just assume pointer…)
- Shows an example of objects with the Mom class and Daughter class
- our @ISA defines parent-child class relationship in Perl
- Implementing is…
- References - for storing data
- bless - teach data how to find it? (Sorta spaces out here)
- More than one way to implement OO (no kidding, look at CLOS)
- “1″ + “1″ is not “11″ because Perl is a context-oriented language
- However 1 . 1 IS 2 (Operators tell you a lot about what to do I guess)
- perl -MO=Deparse is handy…
- DWIM - Context is important for this (Somehow I don’t think I’ll ever get a computer to DWIM)
The other talks
After that… somehow I missed most of the others.. oh yeah I was busy trying to volunteer but I did manage to catch
mizzy’s - Easy system administration programming with a framework - フレームワークでシステム管理プログラミングをもっと簡単に
Easy system administration programming with a framework
- It’s called Punc (Perl Unified Network Controller)
- I learned about CodeRepos which seems to be a popular SourceForge-like area for Japanese (Perl) hackers…
- Punc looks like a clone of puppet except it uses JSON instead of XML-RPC for the data format to transfer
- Looks like it’s still bleeding edge software (checkout from trunk and play with it)
- Uses a Facter clone called PFacter (Are these two interchangeable? That would be realllly nice… otherwise you suck for making yet another clone that does the same thing but can’t be interchangeable…)
- Dude where’s your test cases?
- I somehow missed the reasons for writing Punc (Although because I can seems like a good enough reason for many….)
- I guess if you REALLY want Perl for a Config Management system and don’t mind getting your hands dirty with sending patches this might work but I’m not wedded to any particular language but I am wedded to a more mature implementation
- I’m sticking with Puppet
Afterwards came Lightning Talks which were really good. Here’s my blurry recollection of them (wish I took notes…)
- One presenter seemed to have gotten close to written a Perl OS (Perl Machine)… whoah…
- One presenter showed an interesting aggregator named Plagger (or was that Fastladder) that supposedly could aggregate anything on the web (supported authenticated sites yaaay) including one IRC commentors suggestion that it could be a perfect tool to aggregator pr0n pics
- TT-something template looked nifty… wish Ruby had that
- Text::MicroMason looked also nifty since it seemed like an ERB-clone so that’s less learning
- Vroom::Vroom is quite impressive (VIM as your presentation tool)
- Developing Amazon’s Dynamo in POE and Erlang showed some interesting contrasts between how the messaging would work if implemented in POE versus Erlang
Lightning Talks are probably one of my favorite events in a conference since 5 minutes really forces you to get to the point. There was also the dinner party which is what I guess you could expect from large amounts of geeks with large amounts of food and booze. Okay last day coming up! I need sleep…
I’m at YAPC Asia this year working as a volunteer. It’s interesting mingling with the Perl folk especially since I’m not a Perl person but am curious to know more about the Perl community.
Anyways here are my scribbling notes that I’ve taken
SoozyConf
- This is the nickname for Perl’s RejectConf
- Should bother to look up why it’s called that
scaffoldなんてもう古い、HTMLからコードを自動生成するページ駆動開発とは - ひがやすをさん
- I missed most of this talk
- Seems to be like Amrita for Ruby but for Java?
- Not so interesting for me so maybe lucky I did miss out most of this
liftで日本で10本の指にはいる方法(what’s lift) - Yoshiori
- Talks about the Lift Web Framework (for Scala)
- Pretty humorous intro to Scala and Lift
- Goes through a Rails-like demo in getting started
- Getting started seems to require svn, maven, java 1.5
- That’s one big ugly maven command you have to run to get bootstrapped… this due to it being in development?
- It’s mostly just ‘read the code and examples’ if you want learn at this state
トランプ・スキャナβ(playing card scanner beta) - kuboon
- This one was very cool
- kuboon was also the MC for SoozyConf
- Geek Magician or Magician Geek
- Wifi-enabled scanning device? (Looked like a mouse pad to me…)
- Either way some really interesting twists on card tricks with that ‘playing card scanner’
- Fingerprinting identification used in a very amusing way
Nanto素敵な平城京(Nanto, yet another waf) - tokuhirom
- Write your own web framework in 3 hours
- Got lost in the details… sorry
HTTP::Engine Yappo
- This is sort of like Ruby’s Rack framework but for Perl
- From code examples, the simple seemed simple. (But so is Webrick)
- Doesn’t have a plugin architecture it seems
- I got lost seeing these application stacks…
Rubyへの愛憎(Tusndere at Ruby) - gunyaraway
- I thought this was going to be about Ruby
- Was a very amusing music video with some jamming pachinko techno to all the things that could drive you nuts about Perl
- The idea of Perl aggravations to a dance beat sounds very amusing and probably easier in remembering those gotchas
Paul Bakaus (pbakaus) - The inner works of jQuery
- Was really excited to listen to this
- My Javascript suckiness caught up to me and I was mostly lost after the first few slides
- Need to do more JavaScript hacking to see what was interesting about what I saw
- Showed off helpers, custom events, namespaced events and why these are helpful
- The helpers are actually things used in jQuery core itself
Faiz Kazi (fuzz) - The Little Javascripter: Higher-Order Javascript
- Title sounded cool and I wanted to like this but… the content was not as interesting for me
- Lots of talk about Lisp and Scheme. That’s fine but I knew most of what he was talking about, unfortunately so I spaced out around here
- Pointed out Douglas Crockford wrote The Little JavaScripter which is a JS version of the Little Schemer
- Had some examples showing how to insert into different parts of a list in Lisp and the JS equivalents
- Mentioned Higher Order Perl
- Most interesting comparison was Common Lisp is to Perl as Scheme is to Javascript
- Ran out of time at this point and it started getting interesting at this point… d’oh
Futoshi Koresawa (SaK) - Devel::DFire
- Name confounded me
- A Dtrace wrapper for Perl… neato
- Seemed easy to wrap around a web framework and help profile
- He also mentioned Devel::DTrace and mod_dtrace (grrr competing implementations???)
UPDATE:
Just found a link to Ero Geek Conference on the Soozy website. Neato. Also there were a lot more females than I expected at this SoozyConf/RejectConf/Perl Conference. Guess that’s just a sign of Perl being more mainstream than Ruby!
After glancing at the Slashdot post on the forking of pidgin and wasting far too much time slogging through the ticket that caused a bit of strife, I’m pretty sure I will move away from Pidgin until the developers stop being dorks (highly unlikely since they seem to develop only for themselves).
Quick quick summary of the whole issue. The pidgin developers decided to make the input text box very small and auto-resizing (up to a certain point) based on some fancy heuristic. Quite a few users have jumped up and down and requested to make this optional however the pidgin developers basically said, ‘Go take a hike’. There has been quite a bit of reaction to it, including the creation of a plugin to bring back old functionality to a full on fork of the whole project.
In general, forks are a bit of wasted effort to the Open Source community as a whole but one will never get the idea situation where all developers will just ‘get along’ and combine their energies into the One True Implementation. So, from a pragmatic standpoint, forking seems to get the job done although with a lot of burnt cycles.
I believe migrating to something like Funpidgin (A fork of Pidgin that aims to be listen more to the community) and making sure that it gets enough momentum to stay alive is probably the best answer to extremely stubborn developers wanting to do things their own way at the expense of the ‘users’. However, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the fork gets enough energy to keep itself running.
I’ve been wanting something to visualize mysql slave delay. Looks like LordElph has gone ahead and wrote something already to do it. Cool beans.
DistroWatch has a very good article summarizing the state of running OpenSolaris on the desktop at the moment. Personally, I’m interested in Solaris technology seeing more widespread usage although am not a gigantic follower at the moment.
For me the most interesting part was their discussion on what is happening with Nexenta, a project to graft the power of the Debian/Ubuntu userland on an OpenSolaris foundation. To me this seemed like one of the more promising projects since the mental overhead of relearning a whole bunch of new commands drops by a large factor and I can focus on really grokking the parts that make Solaris unique and not get too involved in the other parts until I feel good and ready to dive in.
Currently, Nexenta has decided to step away from the desktop and focus on the server backend which I think is just dandy since most of the features that OpenSolaris touts are more appropriate for the server at the current moment. (ZFS, Zones, Xen) and I think it’s worth getting these tools integrated in seamlessly without too much fuss.
Currently, one of the annoying things that I had learned when trying to play with OpenSolaris is that some features that get a bit of press require following bleeding edge of OpenSolaris which requires learning to keep track of basically trunk for a distribution. (For example trying to play with Xen is something that requires more recent builds of Open Solaris). While there is something to be said for learning things from following trunk. It can be a little frustrating when you also want your computer to actually do some work outside of sending bug reports and searching forums / mailing lists / blogs for ‘How do I get X working’
Avery Pennaru posted a blog entry on git is the next UNIX where he hypothesizes that:
git is a totally new way to operate on data… Git was originally not a version control system; it was designed to be the infrastructure so that someone else could build one on top… Git is a platform… Much like Unix itself, git’s actual software doesn’t matter; it’s the file format, the concepts, that change everything.
So the underlying ideas are what makes git very powerful. Interesting thoughts. I’ve played around with using git but I still can’t see it past a version control system at the moment. A VCS that still has very weak Windows support which is a serious problem for getting a TEAM of people to actually use the system. But I see that Windows support slowly moves forward.
Anyways, I want to believe the hype in git but show me some real-world examples instead of pie in the sky thoughts, please?
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