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Notes from New Hampshire Ruby User Group, 25 June 2009: Pat Allen, Thinking Sphinx and Casey Rosenthal SASSiJS

By Ted Roche on June 27, 2009 in CSS, Home Page, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Twelve people attended the June meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails User Group , held on the 4th Thursday of the month ( we usually meet on the 3rd Thursday) at RMC Research in Portsmouth (Thanks to RMC and to John for hosting the meeting!)

Nick Plante was our master of ceremonies. As is the custom, we made a round of introductions to find out the most of the folks were “from away.”

Pat Allen put on the first presentation, on Thinking Sphinx. Thinking Sphinx is a Ruby library (not just for Rails) that allows Ruby applications to work with the Sphinx full-text search engine. Pat presented a slightly shortened version of the presentation he gave at RailsConf, and the presentation was clear, engaging and interesting. Participants had lots of questions to ask on search technology, word stemming, project status, what it’s like to be a Freelancing God, what being the lead on a popular Open Source project is like, what’s a kilometer, and more, and Pat’s answers were insightful. Check out (pun intended) the source on github, the support on Google Groups and Pat’s guide to using Thinking Sphinx on Peepcode.

Pat also took a moment out to plug his upcoming Rails Camp, a not-going-to-make-a-profit weekend get-together in BarCamp/Unconference format for 30-ish people at Bryant Pond, Maine. It sounds like a great event and a nice location and a price that can’t be beat: $120 for 3-nights, 3-days food, lodging and conference. Get details and consider signing up at http://railscamps.com/#ne_july_2009

Casey Rosenthal asked us, “What are style sheets for?” a number of times during his presentation, for good reason. Casey talked about SASS, Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, a part of HAML and his reimplementation of SASS in Javascript, SASSiJS, sounds like “sausages” leading to all kinds of predictable jokes. But the topic was thoughtful, intriguing, interesting, and controversial. SASSiJS actually allows a .sass file to be downloaded as part of the HTML file, with similar syntax to a stylesheet link, and a JavaScript file that interprets the .sass file into CSS and applies it to the HTML document. Discussion was far-ranging and insightful: “What’s this good for?” “Would designers use this to make their CSS DRY?” View the source on GitHub at http://github.com/clr/sassijs/tree/master.

Thanks to Pat and Casey for their great presentations, to Nick for organizing, and to John and RMC for the facilities.

CentraLUG, 6 July 2009: Philip Sbrogna, WINE

By Ted Roche on June 23, 2009 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

WINE may or may not stand for “WINE Is Not an Emulator;” you might consider coming to the meeting to find out.

The July meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, CentraLUG, will happen on the usual first Monday of the month, starting at 7 PM at the Hopkinton Public Library’s Community Room. Gather for Q&A and informal chat at 6:30.

Philip Sbrogna, an activist with the Monadnock Linux User Group, MonadLUG, will be presenting WINE. Philip got his start in the field of computers programming games for early microcomputers in ’79 after which he spent some time on mini’s at DEC. After an intermission on submarines he returned to the world of corporate computing where his daily fare at a small southern NH company provides him some opportunity to do the DB & Web dev thing. Personal interests include optimizing algorithms & innovative datastructures; particularly NXDs. He’s been a Linux enthusiast since switching from Coherent to Slackware in ’94.

Learn more about running Windows programs under Linux natively (Ubuntu Jaunty for presentation). Talk will include architectural overview & practical demonstration of what works and what doesn’t. Bring your favorite Window program along to see how it fares.

Note this meeting is at the Hopkinton Public Library 61 Houston Drive, Hopkinton/Contoocook, NH. Google map here. (Also, if you are coming from the southwest on route 202/9, the route 127 road over the Hopkinton Dam is once again open after a long repair closure.)

LUG Happenings, June 2009

By Ted Roche on June 8, 2009 in JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

There’s a couple more LUG meetings this month.

The Monadnock Linux User Group, MonadLUG, will be back at their usual location this Thursday, June 11th, and will feature Ed Lawson talking about Scribus, the desktop publishing software. I’ve used Scribus to create newsletters, posters and banners, and recommend it. Ed puts on a good presentation, too! You’ll find directions to the meeting here.

The NH Ruby / Rails group meets on the fourth Thursday of the month, June 25th, and will have two awesome presentations: Pat Allan will talk about Sphinx, and Casey Rosenthal will speak on SASSIJS. Details here. It promises to be a great meeting!

Notes from PySIG, 28-May-2009

By Ted Roche on May 29, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, PostgreSQL, Python, Technology, Web Development

It was a dark and stormy night. Nonetheless, six members made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester.

We had an Open Mike Night format, a round-table discussion where everyone shared what they were working on.

I plugged upcoming meetings, available as always at http://gnhlug.org — MonadLUG in particular, is to be praised for posting 4 months worth of meetings in advance.

Mark has a client who’s weaning off a proprietary OS and looking for a replacement document management system / word processing system, and is considering LyX, which is a front end to LaTeX and has numerous utility scripts written in Python. Mark asked for suggestions for additional resources and the two Bills were able to come up with some ideas.

Arc talked about some wireless technologies he’s researching (neat stuff!). Arc also reported the Gaming SIG is coming along nicely: 5 people at the first meeting, 10 at the second. Details at gnhlug.org . Hoping to schedule a FPS (First Person Shooter) night soon. Coming up next Friday June 5th, the SIG will take a look at the awesome audio utility, Audacity, as it relates to gaming, and then engage in the Battle for Wesnoth. Gaming SIG meets at the Brady Sullivan building in the DynInc offices on the fifth floor – see http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/GamingSIG.

Shawn O’Shea completed a course in Network Design and Planning at UMass Lowell (and got an ‘A’, congrats!) and showed us his lab work, written in Python! He very bravely showed us his code and we talked about some of his algorithms and looked at a couple of the modules he used, including optparse, netaddr and cmd.

Bill Freeman reported he’d been working in Plone and Python 2.4 and missed some of the features available in later versions. He created some code to address the worst of the deficiencies, and hopes to be able to release it freely soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the fine facilities, to Arc for bailing us out with an extension cord, to Janet for the awesome (!) cookies, and to all for attending and participating!

CentraLUG Notes, 4-May-2009, Cole Tuininga on MySQL Optimization

By Ted Roche on May 28, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

Sixteen people attended the May meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group. Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for the use of their meeting room and projector!

Announcements:

David Marston, SwaNH Dinner, May 14th
Maddog: working with Koolu on Freerunner-based phone, running “Cupcake,” the version 1.5 of the Google Android phone OS. See http://www.engadgetmobile.com/tag/koolu/ and
Me: watch gnhlug.org for future meeting announcements

Cole works for Dyn Inc, the parent company to DynDNS and the other Dynamic companies. Cole Tuininga presented tips and tricks on optimizing the performance of MySQL in high-traffic, large-dataset situations. He talked about the selection process Dyn, Inc went through to select databases and the large scale processes they have automated at Dyn. You can find the slides on the GNHLUG site at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MySQLOptimization.

By the way, seven of us made it to Panera Bread before the meeting for a breaking of the bread. I hope to make this a regular extension to the regular meetings.

Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for providing the facilities, to Cole for the presentation, to all for participating!

June meeting *Might* be next week, or we may have to reschedule — securing a location has proven to be a problem. Stay tuned.

Notes from MonadLUG, 14-May-2009, Tim Wessels and Kablink

By Ted Roche on May 27, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

Five people attended the May meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group. Thanks to Charlie for scrambling at the last minute to secure the Peterborough Town Library for the meeting, as our regular venue was unavailable. Charlie made the iniital announcements – Ed Lawson presents Scribus in June, Charlie will show OpenBSD in July, no August meeting, and Patrick Galbraith returns for another (not-to-be-missed) meeting on MySQL in September.

Tim Wessels did the main presentation of the evening. Kablink is the Open Source version of Novell’s Teaming product, bought from SiteScape, Inc., a company that started in Clock Tower Place in Maynard, MA. The Open Source version had been known as ICECore previously. Source code can be downloaded from http://www.kablink.org and sourceforge. Tim discussed some of the history of the project, where and how it is being used, possible ways to configure it for workgroup and corporate enterprise use. and reviewed some of the challenges and tricks to installation and configuration. If you’re looking for an Open Source competitor to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, with the ability to create portals, finely-control roles and access, and scale to thousands of documents, Kablink is worth investigating.

Thanks to Tim for the presentation, Charlie for running the meeting, and all for attending!

Notes from NH Ruby, 21-May-2009: Brian Turnbull on Monit, Tim, Nick and the other Nick Lightning Talks

By Ted Roche on May 22, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

The New Hampshire Ruby / Rails Group met on the 3rd Thursday of the month at RMC Research. (Third-Thursday is the new standard, but June’s meeting is likely to be on a different night; see below.) Ten people attended. Nick Plante started off the meeting, noting that David Berube had to back out due to emergency, but we’d fill in with ad-hoc Lightning talks.

Brian Turnbull talked about Monit [link updated – Ed.] (see his slides here), a small-memory and resource-consuming application for monitoring key performance metrics, and launch scripts and/or alerts when alarm levels are met. Brian talked about early days of managing Mongrel and the necessity to restart the services on failure. While that’s mostly been resolved with later versions (and new options like Passenger), this is still a handy utility for keeping services going, especially if you’re troubleshooting some balky applications. Brian included some clear examples in his slides. We talked about how this wasn’t a solution for remote monitoring (your network could be down, even if you’ve restarted Apache), there were solutions, like running Monit on a couple of machines “watching the watchers” and other solutions, but that Monit was a simple and relatively lightweight solution. Other tools, such as Nagios, are available for more complex problems and the need for customization. Excellent presentation!

Tim Golden, our host, announced he had finally gotten to “Hello World” (a long running joke within the group) and described some of the challenges of setting up a Ruby development environment in Windows. He used the Ruby one-click-installer, and installed many gems. He’s trying out NetBeans as his IDE, and sticking with SQLite as the development database.

Nick Quaranto spoke on his work with gemcutter, developing a new scheme for a gem repository with a simple and scriptable API and a more scaleable and responsive repository architecture. This could grow to be a worthy replacement to RubyForge.

Nick Plante showed off the cool stuff he’s developed at RDoc.info – a web site that displays Ruby documentation generated with Yard . Noting that GitHub hosts your web pages and repositories if you name your repo as yourname.github.com and provide an index.html, he and fellow troublemaker Jeff Rafter came up with the righteous hack of creating the user and repo of http://docs.github.com and hosting the documentation for the thousands of projects hosted at github, fashioning their Yard template to closely duplicate the GitHub interface. For all practical purposes, they added a new feature to GitHub. The GitHub owners were… disturbed. But we hope they’ll come around, as this is a pretty elegant solution.

Nick Quaranto took the podium again to show off the use of Metric-Fu at ThoughtBot for their public projects. Metric-Fu is a rake task that automates other metrics tools (like Flog and Flay) to generate a number of interesting statistics that will point out excessive churn or suspicious smells in a project. Nick showed off the Sinatra front end to the package. This could be another very interesting set of pages on any repository offering software, although Nick noted that it would be resource-intensive, as the test runs and coverage processing can be pretty extensive.

Nick Plante announced a possibility of getting a special speaker in June, although the meeting would need to be on an alternate night. All present agreed that shouldn’t be a problem. Stay tuned for the announcement.

An excellent meeting, well worth the cost of admission. And that’s not even counting the free pizza! Thanks to Nick Plante for organizing the meeting, to Brian, Tim and the two Nicks for their presentations, RMC Research for the great facilities, and all for attending and participating!

If it’s the third Thursday…

By Ted Roche on May 21, 2009 in Apple Macintosh OS X, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, Ruby, Web Development

If it’s the third Thursday of the month, this must be Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Today’s the day for the (recently rescheduled) New Hampshire Ruby / Rails Group to meet. Tonight’s meeting will feature two presentations: David Berube (co-author, Practical Rails Plugins, former leader of GNHLUG and CentraLUG) talking about high-performance web sites using Ruby on Rails and MySQL, and also Brian Turnbull (contributor to Rails Rumble and Portsmouth Coworking founder) talking about Monit, the monitoring system. The full meeting announcement is here. Hope to see you there!

Notes from NH Ruby presentation, 30-April-2009

By Ted Roche on May 1, 2009 in Home Page, LAMP, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Fourteen attendees made it to the NH Ruby / Rails group meeting on Thursday, April 30th. We met on the 5th Thursday of the month, unlike our regular third Thursday (note that the next meeting is on May 21st, our regular night) at RMC Research in Portsmouth, thanks to host Tim Golden.

We did the usual round of introductions. NH Ruby attracts a great mix of people: beginners, experts, professionals, hobbyists, computer people, engineers. We had two presentations — Russ Jones on state machines, and Nick Quaranto on Git — as well as pizza provided by organizer Nick Plante and announcements and discussions from all.

Russ Jones is an independent contractor (as “codeofficer“) and has been working in Rails for some time. His presentation was on state machines. Russ has presented before, speaking on Design Patterns in Portland for the Maine Ruby User Group. Russ admits he was a more of a skript kiddie in PHP, getting code to work, but is taking a more serious engineering angle to his work on Ruby. See Russ’s slides here. We reviewed the definition of state machine from wikipedia, formal and correct, but Russ prefers a simpler one: a machine serves as a container for states, and supports the events and transitions between states. Typically implemented as the supporting structure for a single attribute of an object, ex: states could be “draft,” “reviewed,” “approved,” published,” “destroyed.” Attributes are most often a string. Events are often exposed as methods and have “guards” that could be used to validate and/or nullify an event, log it, or trigger afterwards. Two most common implementations are State Machine and Acts As State Machine — the first is a Ruby plugin, the second originally Rails code, migrated into a gem. Russ showed us an example code of a class “Light” that has a state machine to store “intensity” and an event “switch.” Showed another example from the State Machine docs of an auto transmission.

Russ switched to Safari and TextMate at this point, and showed us a hand-coded CMS used for publishing items to the web. The Admin module has the ability to change the state (submitted, reviewed, approved, published, rejected, spam) of submitted articles. Digging into the code, he shows us he was using two Listable and Statusable mixins as separate modules as his primary posting entities – Jobs, Events, Classifieds, etc. — share these behaviors, but not all their attributes. State Machine also includes a link into graphviz that generates diagrams of state transitions, great for documentation. His final example was a command-line driven simulation of the states of his motorcyle, from off to idle to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, crash and repair states! An excellent presentation with clear examples!

Nick Quaranto is in a 5-year Software Engineering program at RIT and is interning this semester at Boston-based Thoughtbot. He blogs at http://litanyagainstfear.com and can be found on twitter and github as qrush. Nick’s slides can be viewed and download at drop.io/gitstarted. While Nick’s presentation was all-slides, it wasn’t fluff: he packed a lot of heavy concepts and pushed through a lot of material pretty quickly and clearly. I think Nick made a fair assumption that most of the people in the room should have the basic concepts of source code control down, and dove right into the material. So, we got a brief introduction to the basics followed by some intensive work on forking, branches and rebasing. I found this to be a very useful presentation and took lots of great notes for future reference. Also, note there is a “Learn More” slide near the end of Nick’s presentation with a couple of very useful links.

Thanks to Russ and Nick for great presentations, to (the other) Nick for organizing and publicizing the meeting, to Tim and RMC Research for hosting and to all for attending and participating. Next meeting is scheduled for May 21st, same location, topic TBA. Hope to see you there!

Notes from DLSLUG, 2-April-2009: Nifties!

By Ted Roche on April 3, 2009 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

“Nifties!” are the name for the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group meeting nights when a featured speaker can’t be found: the Users of the Group make short presentations to each other, hopefully eliciting the “Nifty!” response.

I spoke on my work with Nick Plante and Brian Turnbull starting a business to host a coworking site in Portsmouth, NH with several of the folks there before the meeting started. We had some insightful discussions on the terminology of commercial space leasing, and the intricacies and politics of finding the right spot to start a business.

Rich Brown of Dartware talked about Dojo, the javascript library, and a book he borrowed from the DLSLUG library. (see below for more)

Lloyd Kvam presented his book report on the Google Apps books. Google Apps allows a small business or group to buy a domain, register it with Google Apps. We shared experiences of setting up domains in Google Apps.

Then we realized the meeting was actually next door in L02 rather than L01, not the first time we’ve gotten the wrong room, so we moved over and caught the end of a presentation. Then Bill McGonigle showed how ejabberd was set up with Red Hat – family user accounts (Pluggable Authentication Module – PAM) to which he contributed some code.

Richard Brittain (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~richard) showed a ksh script to kill a subprocess after a specified timout and another script that would check a path (checkpath.ksh) and remove all the cruft that builds up as software is added and removed, machines appear and disappear, etc.

Rich Brown of Dartware presented his Dojo report again. Rich needed a simple web page that would let his clients enter in several key pieces of information in a form and from that data generate a configuration file in a specific format. Eventually, he realized a prebuilt library of JavaScript could do a better job, he worked with Dojo and realized he needed a reference. He borrowed the Dojo book from the DLSLUG library. While there were a few frustrations, overall he was pleased with the content of the book, it’s organization, clean examples and good indexing. The book didn’t have a good description of how the CDN supplied JS libraries can be downloaded over the web quicker and in the correct forms and versions; he ran into a race condition that took a while to debug. The Dojo book covers 1.1 while he was working with 1.2, may even be up to 1.3 by now, always a problem with letting the ink dry.

Parker (I didn’t catch his last name) posted a Madebyparker.com blog entry that was spurred on by trying to make a copy of document, but the machine was eating dollars, so scanned to his email address and sent it to himself: nine pdfs in nine pages. The Dartmouth facilities wisely try to minimize the waste of paper with something called “GreenPrint” but the implementation leaves something to be desired, especially for folks running Linux. He searched around and found a command line to concatenate the documents together into one PDF for faster printing and management.

Ten folks made it to the meeting, and I have no doubt everyone learned something; a great result!

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