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TRUGhat 2006:1 Recap
Sunday, 21 May 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby, Toronto, comments closed

I’ve been very remiss in updating things lately, a promised update on what happened with TRUGhat 2006:1. Sy Ali put together a brief summary of the event right after it happened. We had a good turnout to this event, with twelve of us present. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy with work over the last several months that I did not have time to prepare to the degree that I should have for what we wanted to do.

Everyone enjoyed themselves, and the project was interesting, but we didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to. The original goal was to fully reimplement libarchive in pure Ruby: we did not achieve that. In no way, though, would I call the hackahon a failure except on that measure. Most everyone who attended learned more about Ruby and about how tar files are constructed. There was high interested in continuing the work from a number of attendees, some of whom have continued to contribute to the SVN depot.
I know a bit better what needs to be done to run a hackathon, and will be ready for the next event which has been suggested for August. I’m looking forward to it.

This Saturday: TRUGhat 2006:1
Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby, TRUG, comments closed

Reminder: TRUGhat iswas Saturday, 6 May 2006!

The Toronto Ruby User Group’s first hackathon is this Saturday, 6 May 2006. If you are attending, please add your name to the TRUGhat wiki page.

When and Where?

TRUGhat 2006:1 will be held on 6 May 2006, from 10:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Tucows has generously provided the space and network availability for this event at its offices in Toronto, at 96 Mowat Avenue, one block westeast of Dufferin, south of King. Transit accessibility is good, with both the King West streetcar and the Dufferin bus passing near the office. Parking is plentiful for those who will be driving.

What Do I Need to Bring?

We will be providing wireless access, and the Tucows office has wireline access.

Pizza lunch will be provided from a nearby Pizza Pizza, courtesy of yours truly.

What else?

See you there!

If you are worried that you might get lost, please email me at halostatue(at)gmail.com and I will provide you with my cellphone number to contact me on the day of the hackathon.

Ruby Net::LDAP
Tuesday, 2 May 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby, comments closed

I did something different recently. Back in December 2003, when I had more time than I knew what to do with, I registered the net-ldap project on RubyForge. I thought I had a need for LDAP, but as I delved into it, I found that I had needs more interesting and more pressing. LDAP is ugly. I’m not sure I want to understand LDAP.

So, a month ago, I put a call out for a developer for the Net::LDAP project. I had a couple of bites, but Francis Cianfrocca had the experience and drive that I was looking for as someone to ultimately hand the project to for development. Francis has exceeded my wildest dreams. He is a firm believer in the idea that API matters, and that a pure-Ruby implementation is of prime importance here.

He’s going as far as to suggest a pure-Ruby server implementation like WEBrick for LDAP details. More than that, he’s got a C++/Ruby library that he’s intent on making possible to use if it’s available on the user’s system, for performance reasons, but will still work well without it. If you use LDAP, or you think you might want to use LDAP, pay attention to this project. Francis is looking at the idea that people don’t get LDAP and trying to abstract the nastiness away. And that’s a good thing.

I wholeheartedly endorse the work that he’s doing now, and while there’s a long way to go, this is a project to watch.