Charlie Farinella posts the announcement that Patrick Galbraith will speak on MySQL replication at the MonadLUG meeting on Thursday night. This is a must-see meeting for anyone interested in working with MySQL in production applications where replication is essential for backup, standby or failover situations.
Archive | 2008
Notes from Ruby/Rails SIG, 16-Sept-2008
We had a triple-header at the September meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby and Rails group, held as usual on the third Tuesday of the month at RMC Research in Portsmouth.
Brian Turnbull… spoke on the HTTP protocol, reprising a well-received presentation he did at the SeaCoast Linux User Group last week. At SLUG, he was able to talk for over two hours. Due to the schedule, Brian was far more restricted this time, but did a great job of covering the material and trimming it to fit the allocated time. RFC 2616 is the key document you want to read, and it is quite readable.
Scott Garman… spoke about the Virtual Private Server (VPS) that will be offered to contestants of the upcoming RailsRumble. He showed us the console and talked about the advantages of a VPS over some of the other shared hosting solutions. Scott had recipes for setting up the VPS with Ubuntu 8.04 and Rails in two configurations: one using Mongrel and the second using Passenger’s mod_rails plugin.
Nick Plante… spoke on the git version control system and the GitHub hosted services.
The doorprizes were many and generous. The big prize was a conference admission to the upcoming Voices That Matter Professional Ruby Conference, coming up in Boston November 17-20. I was lucky enough to win that. Nick Plante also brought three copies of his new book co-authored with David Berube, Practical Ruby Plugins, so many folks went home happy that night.
Tune in to the next meeting of NHRuby by keeping an eye on the website at http://www.nhruby.org
Notes from PySIG, 25-Sept-2008: What’s New in Python 2.6
Fourteen people attended the September meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH, 7 PM – 9 PM.
Our presenter of the evening had to postpone, due to family obligations, so we had a general night of discussion. It was vigorous and interesting. I was a tad late to the meeting, so I missed Ray Côté’s description of a gotcha using Python. It pays to show up early to the meetings! Bill Sconce brought along a two page agenda and list of topics, focused on new features in Python 2.6. This lead to a lot of discussions, clarifying what can be done in earlier Python versions and how the new version works, including many times when we dropped to the shell and started python to test out our assumptions.
Janet provided yummy cookies, as always — thanks, Janet! And Ben was harassed in absentia. Thanks to Bill for arranging, announcing and herding cats to run the meeting, the Amoskeag Business Incubator for their great facilities, Janet for the cookies, and all for attending and participating.
Professional Ruby Conference, Voices That Matter, Boston
Join Me at the Professional Ruby Voices That Matter Conference
FULL DISCLOSURE: I was the lucky attendee who won a free admission at last Tuesdays NH Ruby conference.
Do you really want to install software from a psycho?
Well, like you can really tell. I hear some of the current software vendors throw chairs around in tantrums.
But I’ve been struggling to get VMWare 1.07 to work with my Fedora 8 installation on my main development laptop. A kernel update, sorely need to address some outstanding security issues, required that the proprietary kernel modules for VMWare be regenerated and installed as well, and I was running into a glitch that all the Googling in the world didn’t seem to yield an answer to.
Finally, I found a clue on the Fedora support forums, suggesting I download the latest patch to the VMWare source from http://www.it-psycho.de/2008/07/27/vmware-server-106-mit-kernel-2626/ and sure enough, I’m up and running again.
Ruby/Rails SIG tonight: tripleheader!
Scott Garman posts a reminder message that tonight’s Ruby/Rails SIG meeting will be a special meeting: three presenters on three topics, and some awesome door prizes: Brian Turnbull on HTTP, Scott Garman on VPS, and Nick Plante on git. There will also be discounts for Linode, a raffle for free admission to the Voices that Matter Ruby 2008 conference in Boston, and perhaps Nick will even bring copies of his new book (with David Berube), Practical Rails Plugins. A meeting not to be missed!
Using the Bourne Again Shell Effectively
Thom Holwardy points out three blog postings with some great tips on Using the Bourne Again Shell Effectively using the vi or emacs-style editing. [a late, lost post from Friday the 13th – ooo!]
EBM better than ABM!
I was listening the FLOSS weekly podcast of Perl monger extrodinaire Randal Schwartz interviewing Jan Lehnardt about CouchDB, a free-form, non-relational database. CouchDB is built by Damien Katz, one of the originators of Notes and a developer currently employed by IBM. The CouchDB project is hosted by the Apache Foundation. Jan mentioned that his projects include “Everything But Microsoft” meaning that his software was running on Linux and BSD, Debian and RedHat and Ubuntu and CentOS and the Unixes and OS X. I found that a much more inclusive and open way of looking at development than “Anything But Microsoft” that’s often portrayed as a irrational and zealous rejection of anything Microsoft. For those who like to put a positive spin on things, I think that EBM beats ABM by a long shot.
A List Apart annual web survey is open
I took the A List Apart web survey and so should you!
Available as of this morning at the A List Apart website, their annual survey of designers, information architects, web interaction designers, experience engineers and web codemonkeys got 33,000 responses last year, and guides much of their content at the web site as well as their awesome An Event Apart conferences. Provide your input! Share your insights! Experience the community!
Listening to… August 2008
Kent Beck spoke at O’Reilly Media’s RailConf on Test Driven Development, Patterns and Extreme Programming and I got to listen while working out last week. A long trip to a client gave me an excuse to listen to last week’s Technometria interview on Sxipper, and catching up with some 2006 archival Twit.tv FLOSS recordings featuring PHP’s originator Rasmus Lerdof and a second one with Jeremy Allison on Samba.