Marten Veldthuis

Open Source Report no. 2

2012-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

And immediately I forgot to write this up for a few times... So here's what I've been up to the past weeks:

hubot-scripts. I added a Prowl/NotifyMyAndroid notification script to our work Hubot, that will push every mention of your name to your iOS or Android device.
rails: I fix a small bug where parts of ActiveSupport were not able to be loaded in isolation.
simplestats is a small Sinatra app to collect web statistics from your visitors and save them in MongoDB. I wrote this out of frustration with Google Analytics, which is probably very powerful, but all we really wanted to know were some browser usage stats, specifically the width of the viewports of our users. While you could push this to GA with a script someone posted somewhere, I simply couldn't figure out how to get the results back out...

Open Source Report no. 1

2012-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by Mike Gunderloy's attempt at doing something for the open source world every day, I figured I should be able to at least do something every week.

So here's what I've been up to the past week:

watchmen is a new extension for Python's Fabric library that is aimed at monitoring a set of servers. At the office, we're growing pretty tired of Nagios, so I did a little test to see how hard it would be to build something better. The actual checks would be pretty doable with this library, though we'd still need to build a webbased dashboard and notifications via e-mail/irc/campfire/sms.
soundcheck is my unified interface to running tests. I recently came across the need to run a Minitest suite, so I've added something to support that. Not quite happy with how it works yet, I'll probably improve it next week.
bootstrap I fixed some JS with regard to the buttons, when they are <input type="submit">s, instead of divs with class button.

fakefs

2011-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

File system faker to make testing stuff that depends on the FS easier.

Personally, I tend to dependency-inject some IO class when I need to test file stuff.

DocHub

2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Much better place to lookup stuff than w3schools. I find this a little easier to browse than the Mozilla dev center.

Sprintly

2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Very pretty scrum tool. I especially like the preformatted form for new stories which forces you to write it in a certain format, I wish Pivotal was a little more opinionated in that area.

Sugru

2011-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Air-curing rubber. Moldable for 30 minutes, then hardens after 24 hours. Seems like cool stuff.

capistrano-colors

2011-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

This little gem helps make the output of Capistrano a whole lot more readable. Highly recommended.

Compass + Rails 3.1

2011-09-26T15:37:00+00:00

Spend a little time debugging something with Rails 3.1, the asset pipeline and the Compass 0.12.alpha release. First of all, this gist works perfectly. Except we had Rails configured so that it would compile assets in production. Compilation then failed with the error that it couldn't find "compass/reset".

The problem was that we had the compass gem in the assets group in Gemfile, but ofcourse that group wasn't loaded in production.

(And yes, I do realize this was my own dumb fault. But I'm putting it here for Google.)

Unity and focus follows mouse

2011-05-04T20:25:00+00:00

Speaking of Ubuntu, the new Unity shell breaks focus follows mouse (a global menu at the top of the screen doesn't work too well when the app it represents changes as you move the pointer towards it). Which is bad enough in it's own right, but that they knew about it and just don't care, that's a lot worse. They couldn't even be bothered to remove the FFM-preference...

iMacs are laptops

2011-05-04T20:19:00+00:00

iMacs, Mac Pros, and laptops:

Every Mac Pro revision after its introduction in 2006 has raised the prices of the midrange configurations. Mac Pros are now so expensive that almost nobody like me — geeks who like big, fast, expandable desktops but don’t do many long-running CPU-bound tasks, like video processing, for a living — can afford or justify them. Sure, I’ve gotten three solid years of use (so far) out of this one and it’s still doing fine, but it was also only $2800 for the mid-speed dual-socket model. (The similarly positioned model in today’s lineup is $5000 and is approximately 2.5 times as fast, which, while impressive, isn’t as far ahead as I’d like it to be for that price.)

This pretty much sums up why I gave up on the Mac. I was no longer interested in having a huge 24" laptop. I was tired of having 4 external drives besides the iMac. The overall noise level around my desk has decreased by not having all those drives (amongst which was a Drobo with a rattling fan) there.

And the Mac Pro is just unjustifiably expensive. I'm now running on a home-built desktop, Sandy Bridge i7, lotsa RAM, and an SSD. Ubuntu, with a Windows partition for Lightroom and Photoshop (okay, and games). I hope one day Adobe will release their software for Linux too, but I can boot Windows from within Linux, and I can boot Linux from within Windows, so all in all it doesn't really matter too much which operating system I happen to have booted up natively.