...is Amazon's excellent S3 storage service. We're using it for the indi downloads and it works great - they handle the big files while our Rails site serves up the site itself. Also, it's easy to automate since they've got a nice Ruby API. Good times.
We're using PostgreSQL as the indi backend; it handles requests both from a Jabber server and a Ruby on Rails web site and web service using the native extension (i.e., written in C) driver.
It's working great so far, and since ejabberd has native integration with PostgreSQL, we'll be able to switch to that pretty easily.
> How corporate involvement affects real open source projects
I dunno. PMD has certainly benefitted greatly from corporate involvement; the reason that the most recent release included support for checking JSP/JSF code was that a corporate-sponsored developer put together a nice JavaCC grammar and did all the integration work.
As the project lead, I'm happy that PMD has new functionality and a larger audience, not least of all because that may lead to more book sales! One can but hope, anyhow.
> Modular, grey boxes of CTOS goodness *ahem* everywhere.
Nice. My office, G-SLS, was involved (in 1996-1999) in getting CTOS to run in an emulator on Pentiums. Actually, all the real work was done by contractors, and I was a mere papershuffling LtJG. But anyhow, it was awesome - the logistics software (SCAMP, CMPlus) ran orders of magnitude faster, and the guys in the field loved it.
...when I was in the Coast Guard. I was demo'ing some shiny new bar coding equipment, plugged in the barcode printer, and smoke rose and sparks flew. That kind of squelched the demo.
The Coast Guard was a big Unisys customer for a while - lots of workstations running the Convergent Technology Operating System (CTOS). I'll bet that even here on Slashdot no one's heard of CTOS...
We use it for testing indi on a variety of platforms - we've got preconfigured WinME/XP/2K VMs that we can fiddle with. It's great for isolating bugs like "when indi is installed on a Win2K box where Outlook has not been configured, blah happens". Nifty stuff!
> Finally, support options are limited for most open source software.
But if the author has written a book about the product - or even anything vaguely related - then buy it! For example, DenyHosts is an excellent tool, and the online documentation is good enough that I can use it without any more docs. But if the author were to put together a book, I would certainly pick it up in appreciation for his time spent in developing and supporting that fine utility. In the meantime, I PayPal'd him a few bucks.
> Expert's Exchange requires you to scroll three screens past advertisements > from the actual question to the answers (when they're actually available without > registering, that is). Not to mention the disgusting IntelliTXT ads they insert > into the actual text...
So true. They've gotten to the point that when I google a problem, I immediately scroll past the experts-exchange.com links to try to find a real solution.
And I'd never post anything there; if I figure out anything interesting about Rails or Ruby or PMD or whatever I just blog it.
> That front page of indi loads unbelievably slow.
Yup, that's just a function of the Rails 1.1 effect - getindi.com is currently sharing a DSL line with rubyforge.org, which is serving the RubyGem index that lets people install Rails with gem install rails. Yikes!
...all seems well. The fonts seem a bit nicer, for what that's worth. Not sure about the new eye candy (rotating thingies around the cursor), but, hey.
Mostly I'm hoping that this problem is fixed. We shall see...
PostgreSQL is certainly working fine as a Ruby on Rails and Jabber backend for us... maybe I'll worry about it once we get up over a few terabytes, but for now, it's more than capable of handling everything we throw at it.
And good books keep coming out for it, too, which is reassuring.
There's an interesting post on Dharmesh Shah's blog about how startups may not want to give away their software for free. One of the points he makes is that in order to charge for something you've got to set up an infrastructure - credit card validation/debiting, SSL cert, and so on - and it's good to get that in place so you can start bringing in some money right away. It's a good read.
I suppose a middle ground might be a free, but invitation-only beta. This seems to be working well for indi, at least so far...
Gnome's got a great library in GLib. I wrote a tutorial for IBM last year on the GLib collections; there are so many useful utilities and data structures in there. If you're writing a C app on Linux it's definitely worth a look, and if you're already using the GLib collections, take a look at that tutorial to see if you can optimize anything, like using g_list_prepend vs g_list_append.
...coauthored an excellent book on PostgreSQL that was just published by Apress. The title makes it sound like it'd be a bit light, but it takes you all the way up to writing stored procedures, writing C programs that hit the database, using all the utilities, and so forth. I'm using PostgreSQL as a Jabber backend and the book has already proved useful.
Too bad they didn't talk about hitting PostgreSQL from Ruby... but since most folks are using ActiveRecord to do that, it's probably not a big deal. And if you use the Ruby/C client, it's quite snappy.
Yup, right on... would just need a Ruby extension that talks to it. Or I guess you could just exec it with a commands file, although that seems a bit clunkier.
Slashdot Mirror
...is Amazon's excellent S3 storage service. We're using it for the indi downloads and it works great - they handle the big files while our Rails site serves up the site itself. Also, it's easy to automate since they've got a nice Ruby API. Good times.
We're using PostgreSQL as the indi backend; it handles requests both from a Jabber server and a Ruby on Rails web site and web service using the native extension (i.e., written in C) driver.
It's working great so far, and since ejabberd has native integration with PostgreSQL, we'll be able to switch to that pretty easily.
It's a code analysis utility.
> How corporate involvement affects real open source projects
I dunno. PMD has certainly benefitted greatly from corporate involvement; the reason that the most recent release included support for checking JSP/JSF code was that a corporate-sponsored developer put together a nice JavaCC grammar and did all the integration work.
As the project lead, I'm happy that PMD has new functionality and a larger audience, not least of all because that may lead to more book sales! One can but hope, anyhow.
> That's what happened with the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm
The Burrows Wheeler Transform is very cool indeed. Brian Ewins used it to make the PMD duplicate code detector much much faster.
> If you want something with all the features, try PostgreSQL.
Right on. I'm using it for a Rails/Jabber backend; very solid.
> taxpayers were bilked out of hundreds of
> millions by inept govt. IT contracting in the Coast Guard
Well, they bet on the wrong horse, that's for sure.
Nice! Programming in ADS on ISAM files... fun times...
> Modular, grey boxes of CTOS goodness *ahem* everywhere.
Nice. My office, G-SLS, was involved (in 1996-1999) in getting CTOS to run in an emulator on Pentiums. Actually, all the real work was done by contractors, and I was a mere papershuffling LtJG. But anyhow, it was awesome - the logistics software (SCAMP, CMPlus) ran orders of magnitude faster, and the guys in the field loved it.
...when I was in the Coast Guard. I was demo'ing some shiny new bar coding equipment, plugged in the barcode printer, and smoke rose and sparks flew. That kind of squelched the demo.
The Coast Guard was a big Unisys customer for a while - lots of workstations running the Convergent Technology Operating System (CTOS). I'll bet that even here on Slashdot no one's heard of CTOS...
We use it for testing indi on a variety of platforms - we've got preconfigured WinME/XP/2K VMs that we can fiddle with. It's great for isolating bugs like "when indi is installed on a Win2K box where Outlook has not been configured, blah happens". Nifty stuff!
> Finally, support options are limited for most open source software.
But if the author has written a book about the product - or even anything vaguely related - then buy it! For example, DenyHosts is an excellent tool, and the online documentation is good enough that I can use it without any more docs. But if the author were to put together a book, I would certainly pick it up in appreciation for his time spent in developing and supporting that fine utility. In the meantime, I PayPal'd him a few bucks.
Of course, I'm biased...
> Expert's Exchange requires you to scroll three screens past advertisements
> from the actual question to the answers (when they're actually available without
> registering, that is). Not to mention the disgusting IntelliTXT ads they insert
> into the actual text...
So true. They've gotten to the point that when I google a problem, I immediately scroll past the experts-exchange.com links to try to find a real solution.
And I'd never post anything there; if I figure out anything interesting about Rails or Ruby or PMD or whatever I just blog it.
> That front page of indi loads unbelievably slow.
Yup, that's just a function of the Rails 1.1 effect - getindi.com is currently sharing a DSL line with rubyforge.org, which is serving the RubyGem index that lets people install Rails with gem install rails. Yikes!
We're using it for indi with a PostgreSQL back end. It's working pretty well so far, even with a Jabber server hitting the same database.
For those doing a FC4 to FC5 upgrade, here are some notes that may be helpful.
> The author is also a slashdot user, by the way.
:-)
Heh, you're right, and thanks for the mention!
...all seems well. The fonts seem a bit nicer, for what that's worth. Not sure about the new eye candy (rotating thingies around the cursor), but, hey.
Mostly I'm hoping that this problem is fixed. We shall see...
PostgreSQL is certainly working fine as a Ruby on Rails and Jabber backend for us... maybe I'll worry about it once we get up over a few terabytes, but for now, it's more than capable of handling everything we throw at it.
And good books keep coming out for it, too, which is reassuring.
> it just won't be in America. Countries like China, and to a lesser
> extent India, will soon become the hubs
Bah. China has got its own set of problems, for example, they're busy limiting the names of newborn babies.
And if by "religious fundamentalists" you mean people like Donald Knuth and John Vlissides, I think we're doing OK.
There's an interesting post on Dharmesh Shah's blog about how startups may not want to give away their software for free. One of the points he makes is that in order to charge for something you've got to set up an infrastructure - credit card validation/debiting, SSL cert, and so on - and it's good to get that in place so you can start bringing in some money right away. It's a good read.
I suppose a middle ground might be a free, but invitation-only beta. This seems to be working well for indi, at least so far...
Gnome's got a great library in GLib. I wrote a tutorial for IBM last year on the GLib collections; there are so many useful utilities and data structures in there. If you're writing a C app on Linux it's definitely worth a look, and if you're already using the GLib collections, take a look at that tutorial to see if you can optimize anything, like using g_list_prepend vs g_list_append.
And if it helps you, please buy my completely unrelated book!
You are absolutely correct. I grabbed the wrong link... curses. Ah well, thanks for the correction!
...coauthored an excellent book on PostgreSQL that was just published by Apress. The title makes it sound like it'd be a bit light, but it takes you all the way up to writing stored procedures, writing C programs that hit the database, using all the utilities, and so forth. I'm using PostgreSQL as a Jabber backend and the book has already proved useful.
Too bad they didn't talk about hitting PostgreSQL from Ruby... but since most folks are using ActiveRecord to do that, it's probably not a big deal. And if you use the Ruby/C client, it's quite snappy.
Yup, right on... would just need a Ruby extension that talks to it. Or I guess you could just exec it with a commands file, although that seems a bit clunkier.
OK, Googled, looks like someone's written one, good times.
Little domain specific languages are handy things... I've been doing a lot with JavaCC lately; powerful stuff...