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net-ldap version 0.1.1 has been released!
Thursday, 18 March 2010

Posted by austin in: Ruby, comments closed

Pure Ruby LDAP library.

Changes:

### Net::LDAP 0.1.1 / 2010-03-18
* Fixing a critical problem with sockets.

### Net::LDAP 0.1.0 / 2010-03-17
* Small fixes throughout, more to come.
* Ruby 1.9 support added.
* Ruby 1.8.6 and below support removed. If we can figure out a compatible way
to reintroduce this, we will.
* New maintainers, new project repository location. Please see the README.txt.

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net-ldap version 0.1.0 has been released!
Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Posted by austin in: Ruby, comments closed

Pure Ruby LDAP library.

Changes:

### Net::LDAP 0.1.0 / 2010-03-08
* Small fixes throughout, more to come.
* Ruby 1.9 support added.
* Ruby 1.8.6 and below support removed. If we can figure out a compatible way
to reintroduce this, we will.
* New maintainers, new project repository location. Please see the README.txt.

### Net::LDAP 0.0.5 / 2009-03-xx
* 13 minor enhancements:
* Added Net::LDAP::Entry#to_ldif
* Supported rootDSE searches with a new API.
* Added [preliminary (still undocumented) support for SASL authentication.
* Supported several constructs from the server side of the LDAP protocol.
* Added a “consuming” String#read_ber! method.
* Added some support for SNMP data-handling.
* Belatedly added a patch contributed by Kouhei Sutou last October.
The patch adds start_tls support.
* Added Net::LDAP#search_subschema_entry
* Added Net::LDAP::Filter#parse_ber, which constructs Net::LDAP::Filter
objects directly from BER objects that represent search filters in
LDAP SearchRequest packets.
* Added Net::LDAP::Filter#execute, which allows arbitrary processing
based on LDAP filters.
* Changed Net::LDAP::Entry so it can be marshalled and unmarshalled.
Thanks to an anonymous feature requester who only left the name
“Jammy.”
* Added support for binary values in Net::LDAP::Entry LDIF conversions
and marshalling.
* Migrated to ‘hoe’ as the new project droid.
* 14 bugs fixed:
* Silenced some annoying warnings in filter.rb. Thanks to “barjunk”
for pointing this out.
* Some fairly extensive performance optimizations in the BER parser.
* Fixed a bug in Net::LDAP::Entry::from_single_ldif_string noticed by
Matthias Tarasiewicz.
* Removed an erroneous LdapError value, noticed by Kouhei Sutou.
* Supported attributes containing blanks (cn=Babs Jensen) to
Filter#construct. Suggested by an anonymous Rubyforge user.
* Added missing syntactic support for Filter ANDs, NOTs and a few other
things.
* Extended support for server-reported error messages. This was provisionally
added to Net::LDAP#add, and eventually will be added to other methods.
* Fixed bug in Net::LDAP#bind. We were ignoring the passed-in auth parm.
Thanks to Kouhei Sutou for spotting it.
* Patched filter syntax to support octal \XX codes. Thanks to Kouhei Sutou
for the patch.
* Applied an additional patch from Kouhei.
* Allowed comma in filter strings, suggested by Kouhei.
* 04Sep07, Changed four error classes to inherit from StandardError rather
Exception, in order to be friendlier to irb. Suggested by Kouhei.
* Ensure connections are closed. Thanks to Kristian Meier.
* Minor bug fixes here and there.

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FOSSLC Panels and Me
Thursday, 16 April 2009

Posted by austin in: Technology, Toronto, comments closed

I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate recently to be invited to participate in two panels presented by FOSSLC and hosted by the University of Toronto.

The first panel, held on the 31st of March, was about participating in the Google Summer of Code and my experiences as a mentor. With me on the panel were Diego Novillo who works at Google on GCC; Blake Winton (@bwinton) who mentored for DrProject; Nelson Ko who mentored for Tiki Wiki; and Behdad Esfahbod (@behdadesfahbod)who was in different years a student for, a mentor for, and an organizer for the GNOME Foundation. It was a lively and informative panel, and I think a lot of interesting things were said.

The second panel is what FOSSLC calls a “Leaders panel discussion”, taking place next Wednesday, the 23rd of April. I’m going to be participating with some fascinating people (not everyone is yet listed on the page) and I’m looking forward to it. The questions haven’t been decided yet, but I think that there will be interesting things said.

Mac Recipe Management Programs, Planning a Revisit
Sunday, 12 April 2009

Posted by austin in: Personal, Recipes, comments closed

Mostly through a couple of bundles that I’ve purchased recently, I have acquired full licences to Acacia Tree Software’s SousChef and MacGourmet Deluxe (which is, remember, MacGourmet with all of the plug-ins included).

One thing which I mentioned in the last review for MacGourmet is that it failed to import my data from Yum 2.7.4 due to a change in the XML format by the new owners of Yum. This has, as promised, been fixed. I imported my database without problems.

SousChef, I’m happy to report, can now import from MacGourmet databases. It’s not quite the direct import that I’d like, but I have now imported my Yum database into SousChef via MacGourmet.

This leaves Yum 3.0, which I have purchased. These, to me, are the best three recipe management programs in the Mac world. I know some people love YummySoup!, but as I said in my last review, I’ve never been able to warm to YummySoup!, which is too bad because it looks nice otherwise.

I’m going to be living with these recipe programs for a while and do some serious evaluation of all three. This will take a while to do, because we’re preparing to move house at the end of May and we’ve already started packing. Bon Appetit!

Fixing a problem with hald on Ubuntu 8.10
Monday, 16 March 2009

Posted by austin in: HaloStatue, Technology, comments closed

Saved for my own reference as much as anything. I was having a problem this morning on my Ubuntu x86-64 where I was getting nothing but a spinning cursor (the busy cursor) where I should have seen gdm. The problem was the HAL daemon (hald) wasn’t starting and I couldn’t figure out why. After digging through several bugs, this gem presented itself, and I tried the changed gdm script. It didn’t fix the problem, but when I ran “lshal” by itself, I got:

lshal: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_regex_unref

This helped me find a reference on slackware-italia.com that helped me solve my problem: my ld.so.conf.d had no reference to /usr/lib, only /usr/local/lib. I added it and all is well.

mime-types version 1.16 has been released!
Monday, 2 March 2009

Posted by austin in: Ruby, comments closed

After an excessive amount of time, I’ve released MIME::Types 1.16. The primary purpose of this release is compatibility with Ruby 1.9.1, but I haven’t ignored the latest IANA registered types. I have also picked up a few other types that others submitted as patches and scanned through the latest version (1.27) of the Perl MIME::Types library.

MIME::Types for Ruby allows for the identification of a file’s likely MIME content type based on the file’s filename extension, or provides a list of extensions associated with a MIME content type, if known.

MIME::Types for Ruby originally based on and synchronized with the Perl version by Mark Overmeer, copyright 2001 – 2009. As of version 1.15, the data format for the MIME::Type list has changed and synchronization, if it happens, will be sporadic at best. The preferred source of input for a MIME::Type is the IANA registered list.

Copyright: 2002 – 2009, Austin Ziegler; based on prior work copyright Mark Overmeer.

Licence Notes

MIME::Types is available under Ruby’s disjunctive licence with the GNU GPL or the Perl Artistic licence. See the file Licence.txt in the package for full details.

Requirements and Installation

MIME::Types has been tested with Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.9.1, JRuby 1.1.6 (in Ruby 1.8 mode), and MacRuby 0.3.

MIME::Types can be installed with:

% ruby setup.rb

Alternatively, you can use the RubyGems version of MIME::Types available as mime-types-1.16.gem from the usual sources.

MIME::Types 1.16

What the Obama Inauguration Means to Me
Friday, 9 January 2009

Posted by austin in: Personal, Politics, comments closed

The Presidential Inauguration Committee has been asking for essays about what President-elect Obama’s inauguration means to individuals. Ten people out of however many people submit essays—whether they donate to the inauguration committee or not—will be selected to attend the inauguration. I have submitted the following essay about what this means to me.

In a word, hope.

I do not mean this flippantly, since it was one of the major themes of President-elect Obama’s campaign. Rather, I see this inauguration as an opportunity for America to heal divisions both recent and decades deep. When I was growing up as a child of an Air Force chaplain, I learned what most American schoolchildren learn: that America is the land of equality and opportunity, and that we are a shining beacon of hope and a model for the rest of the world to follow.

By time I finished college in the middle of the Clinton Presidency, I knew that this was as often false as it was true, and I felt it becoming less true as the years wore on with the bitter partisan fighting instead of paying attention to the needs of Americans and the world.

Ten and a half years ago I met my now-wife, who is Canadian. I found it very easy to emigrate: I was disillusioned with America and saw little hope that things would get any better. I could not completely leave America behind—as the place of my birth and where my parents and brother still live, it has a deep grip on my heart. I have watched over the last ten years with deep sadness and anger as my fears of the deep divisions in America were realized. When America quickly fell to partisan bickering and bullying after 9/11, I knew that I needed to be involved in my local political process and soon after took Canadian citizenship.

Yet every two years, I make sure that my voter registration is still valid and request an absentee ballot. I avoid voting on local issues because I am not affected by them, but I try to make sure that I am aware of who is running for national office and figure out the best choice that I can make. I have voted for a hope at healing in America three times in that last three Presidential elections; this election, it seems the rest of America voted with me.

The wounds in the American psyche are deep; there are entrenched interests who would not see them healed, but I have great hope that this Presidency will be the start of the healing process. I grew up with a vision of America as a better place; under President Obama, I have hope that it will begin to be so once again.

According to the rules that they put together, I am eligible for this contest since I am an American citizen, even though I reside in Canada. I hope to win, of course, but it also felt good to write this down. I’m going to leave comments open on this, but will be moderating comments much more heavily than normal. If you don’t have anything nice to say about this in a comment, either don’t say it at all or say it on your own blog.

Mac Recipe Management Programs
Sunday, 23 November 2008

Posted by austin in: Apple, Personal, Recipes, comments closed

Updated 30 November 2008: I sent links of this review to the publishers involved (except for SousChef, because Ben Lachman the developer found this post on his own and reminded me that I hadn’t done this even though I meant to). I received a note from the developer of MacGourmet and have added some additional notes.

It’s time to declutter the house. One of the things I want to get rid of are all the recipe magazines and loose recipes that I have. To do this, I need to keep the recipes that I like or want to try. I need a recipe management program. I currently use Yum 2.7.4, which is good, but not great. I decided to seriously evaluate the various recipe management programs available for the Mac. There’s a number of them out there, each with different strengths. I’m going to be evaluating these programs on the following criteria:

There are more programs available than I am reviewing here. A number of these programs presented problems early enough in the review process that I didn’t think it was worth spending any more time on them.

One that I wish had been better was Measuring Cup. It has some really interesting ideas including sub-recipes and not distinguishing view and edit modes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have any import facility to speak of, and the controls on the lists are non-standard and finicky. It’s worth looking at if you’re just starting your recipe collection. I’m not.

Connoisseur 1.2

Only Connoisseur 1.2 is available for direct download; there is a beta version referred to, but you must contact the developer for this information.

This is not a program that I would recommend to anyone at this point. It looks pretty, and the filtering mechanism is superb, but I don’t think that this is a usable program.

Cookware Deluxe 3.2

This is another program that I can’t recommend. There are some nice features, but this program is written on top of FileMaker and it feels like it. The layout is crowded and hard to read; if there’s been thought given to making this program easier to use, it seems to have been hampered by FileMaker forms options.

MacGourmet 2.3

MacGourmet and MacGourmet Deluxe are essentially the same program. MacGourmet Deluxe includes all of the available MacGourmet plug-ins (”Cookbook”, “Mealplan”, and “Nutrition”) and is a better value than buying the plug-ins individually. Because the plug-ins are extra for MacGourmet, I will only cover them in the Extras section of the review.

This is a great program. There’s enough here that I can possibly see replacing Yum with MacGourmet. I suspect that although I don’t see myself using the cookbook builder, I would consider using the meal planner and the nutrition calculator, so I might go with MacGourmet Deluxe.

SousChef 1.0.1

This is another program that I really like. I’m not happy about the state of import for multiple recipes—I have an extensive collection that I want to import already. Conversion utilities would be very useful here. I’d also like to see print improved some, or at least some sort of iPhone integration.

Yum 3.0

Yum was recently acquired by “Dare to be Creative” and has been turned into a shareware program as of Yum 3.0. I’m currently using Yum 2.7.4 which is no longer supported. I’m reasonably happy with Yum 2.7.4. This review is based on the trial version of Yum 3.0.

This is a fair update to a good recipe manager. I’m not sure that it’s worth the shareware cost, when others that offer more features are just a few dollars more. However, I am excited to see that Yum has been acquired and is under active development again; I would not be surprised to see Yum become a viable competitor to YummySoup!, MacGourmet, and SousChef moving forward.

YummySoup! 1.6.9.5

I’ve tried YummySoup! a few times and never been quite convinced by it.

I’m still undecided about what to think about YummySoup!. I like what it has, but it has some weaknesses that I’m not fond of. I don’t think that it’s as good as MacGourmet or SousChef.

The Verdict

Tonight, the verdict is to change nothing—I’m not convinced that the alternatives are worth the price today (including the new Yum 3.0), and the stronger contenders (MacGourmet, SousChef, YummySoup!, Yum 3.0) have serious flaws with how I need to use a recipe management program. If I were forced to make a choice, I think that MacGourmet Deluxe would be the winner, but I’m not sure that the expense is worth the time and effort it would take me to switch. I really want to like SousChef, but it’s not quite there yet for me.

Notes

  1. ↑1 A preference allows this to be changed to “edit.”
  2. ↑2 This is controlled by the display template and style, which suggests that user styles are possible.

Aw, Damn (Au Revoir, M Decoux)
Thursday, 25 September 2008

Posted by austin in: Ruby, comments closed

Guy Decoux, an extraordinary Rubyist, died earlier this month in tragic circumstances.

He will be missed by the community.

_why has some of the best commentary on this.

There’s already talk of a permanent addition to Ruby in his honour, $ABOUT.ts (”ts” was his email address), and Ruby Central is considering naming something (possibly a grant) in his honour.

Vacationing with the iPhone
Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Posted by austin in: Apple, iPhone, comments closed

This past August, my wife and I went out to Nova Scotia with my parents in their RV1. I’ll be uploading some of the better pictures I took to my Flickr stream in the near future2.

My parents tell me that they have wireless access in a campground more often than they don’t. Of the campgrounds we went to this summer, exactly three had any Internet access at all, and only one was reachable from where we were parked.

Intrepid road warriors, we kept up with our email and other web browsing most days through the iPhone. Even in Cape Breton on the Cabot Trail, we had decent EDGE data signal through the Rogers network3. For eighteen of our twenty-two days away from Toronto, the iPhone was our only meaningful Internet access. It performed like a champ. We even got tickets to see Neil Young at the Air Canada Centre in December while rolling down the road.

My parents also use Microsoft Streets & Trips with an attached GPS for navigation. More than once, the iPhone with its GPS and Internet connection (and Google Maps) gave us better directions than Streets & Trips. There was one notable incident where Streets & Trips put us in the Atlantic, but Google Maps on the iPhone gave us the right directions4

The iPhone is too small to be practical for extended use as your sole access to the Internet. It is an excellent adjunct to a standard laptop or other computer and I don’t regret the purchase or contract at all. I have some ideas on how a good web tablet might work, based on my use of the iPhone and a Tablet PC, but I’m going to let them percolate a bit before I publish them.

Notes

  1. ↑1 We call it “The Bus”, since it’s a 40-foot Mandalay with four slides, resulting in about 400 square feet of living space when parked.
  2. ↑2 …which will flood my Tumblr and FriendFeed, but such is life.
  3. ↑3 Our level of access was predicted to be minimal by some Haligonians on Segways, advertising for Aliant—a competitor.
  4. ↑4 This was in part because I used the address and not the name. Google Maps shows the wrong location for Lunenburg County Winery, but the right location for Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, B0J 2E0. Go figure.