First, if you’ve visited here in the last month or so (not just reading my feed), you probably noticed that I set up my del.icio.us bookmarks to actually get saved as posts here. Over the course of time, it started looking pretty awful considering my relatively infrequent posts (I mean the real posts with actual content written by me). So, I’ve reconfigured the del.icio.us tool that was posting those links here to save them to a separate category called, appropriately enough, ‘Bookmarks.

This is a brief review I wrote of Practical Ruby for System Administration by André Ben Hamou. I was going to try and have it published elsewhere, but decided I should post it here. Ruby has been growing at a staggering rate of popularity over the last couple of years. In particular, its use as a web-programming language has probably not failed to get many peoples' attention. However, given the precedence set by languages like Perl and Python for use in systems administration related work and the undisputed reality that Ruby has been influenced by these predecessors (in particular Perl), it should come as no surprise that its growth in the sysadmin world has been similarly on the upswing.

So, in the effort to get myself setup to work on my desktop machine, I’ve been thinking about a different approach to my workspace configuration. I’m not talking about the physical workspace, though I’ve had many thoughts about that, too. This is about my virtual workspace. Really, truly virtual. Some people know that I’ve been a long-time fan of VMware. I think I first started using around 1999 or 2000, when it was still a very early and somewhat rough bit of software.

Ok, so here’s the deal, my laptop (supplied by my employer) is kaput. The BIOS started report SMART errors about a month ago, but I didn’t worry about it too much. I never got any errors while using it, so I just backed everything up and figured eventually I’d get them to send me a new drive. But then it got worse: the LCD started going crazy. It would randomly fade to a sort of greenish, off-white color.

Once again the Portland Ruby Brigade will be hosting an evening of wide ranging talks about Ruby. This year the focus is on people doing strange things with Ruby. Strange, of course, is anything just a bit outside the usual. If you’ve created a new Ruby-based interface for hacking your brand new internet-enabled phone (rPhone anyone?) or composed your latest bit of metaprogramming magic, we’d love to hear about it.

So, it occured to me that after soliciting everyone in DorkbotPDX to post the announcement for this to their blogs, I failed to do so myself. Bad self! So, here it is, the official announcement for the first ever DorkbotPDX event: Come join DorkbotPDX, people doing strange things with electricity, for our inaugural event at Vendetta on June 24th at 5pm. If you’re a hacker, painter, engineer or sculpture, musician or maker you’ll fit right in.

So, just a quick update to let anyone who cares know I finally dumped Typo and moved over to Mephisto. I’m using Mephisto to manage some other sites, so it just seemed to make sense to stick to one system. Nothing much else to say except that I’m sure most any links pointing here are probably now broken. Oh well, such is life. Get on with it…

A while back I agreed to do tech reviews for two Ruby books from O’Reilly. The first of these, Ajax on Rails by Scott Raymond, was just published a few weeks ago. It looks to be quite an excellent piece of work (of course, I know the tech reviewing was top notch ;~). I just received word that the second, Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini, has been published, too. Both look to be worth picking up.

well, sorta anyway. I did some more playing around with why’s modifications to mod_ruby and was able to throw together a quick test to show that in fact it should be quite possible to implement a SiteMesh-like system using Apache, mod_ruby (patched) and Hpricot. Here’s, in short, how I did it. First, I downloaded Apache 2.0.59 since that’s close to the version we’re running on the server on which I’ll eventually be using this system (it’s actually 2.

I’ve been working on setting up some servers for a project with which I’m involved (in all my infinite spare time). These servers are going to have a variety of web applications running (some of which will be third-party), but we (that is, me and the other guy ;~) would like to keep a somewhat consistent look & feel across the board. Of course, the obvious solution is to just edit the templates provided with each application (assuming the have templates at all).