Archive 7/2005

On my quest for more ruby skills I’m currently trying to get to know Madeleine. No, not a girl, although this would be quite a welcome change for me actually. I’m talking about the object persistancy layer for Ruby.

From time to time I have to write some small bash scripts (since writing them in Perl/Ruby/Python/... would simply be an overkill). Most of the time this involves some kind of directory-listing-parsing which is quite simple using find, grep and sed.

In case you haven't heard from Odeo yet: Odeo is a podcast community somehow comparable to sites like flickr. You can browse podcasts by tag, subsubscribe to them, comment and rate them. Odeo also offers a small application called Odeo Syncr that automatically (if you've configured it that way) downloads new podcasts from your subscriptions or any other podcast that's in your queue and hasn't been downloaded yet.

link

Hm.... I'm not really making progress here. Although I'm still not sure if using a binary distribution is really some much a progress over using a source distribution after all. Anyway. Today we installed another machine in the office and this time we used Gentoo. And... what should I say? It was fun enough to make me homesick. Then in the afternoon I had some problems getting the ati-drivers to work under Ubuntu which motivated me even more to get back to Gentoo.

Today I wanted to have a index.html for a directory full of DocBook articles. Being quite lazy I simply wrote a small Ruby script for doing this since I couldn't get sed to do what I want:

Since yesterday there is a new version of Ruby On Rails available: 0.13.1. It seems like this version has introduced a version-check on Ruby which makes it hard to get Rails installed on Ubuntu 5.04. The problem here is, that Hoary uses a pre-release of Ruby 1.8.2 as base which was made 2 days before the final release.

Since Ubuntu Hoary only offers Bittorrent 3.x updating is a good idea if you want some of the newer features. So here comes a little step-by-step guide on how to get Bittorrent 4.x running:

Now I've finally come to the point where I don't want to stress my poor laptop with having to compile everything so I've removed Gentoo from it and installed Ubuntu tonight. This doesn't mean that I don't like Gentoo anymore or something like that. I still use it on my server and it's still my first choice if I have high performant hardware at my disposal.

Today I started learning OCaml, an object-oriented functional language. I won't write all that much about my learning progress here since 43things is IMO the better place to do this. But on the other hand I will probably write a small summary after I've reached a point where I think that I know the basics