Yeah, I'm a Rails fanboy now

A lot of my day job now involves working with Ruby on Rails. At first I wasn’t sure how much I would like Rails or ruby, given that I had been doing a lot of C#/C/whatever desktop work before. Not surprisingly, though, I’ve become quite addicted. The test-driven nature of development is a welcome change — most desktop apps I worked on didn’t even have tests. The Rails community has done a great job of banging automated testing into people’s heads. Almost every tutorial, book, or random blog post I’ve seen emphasizes the importance of good automated tests. Hopefully it has helped decrease the instances of ‘snorpage’, but perhaps my co-workers would disagree :)

Anyway, I love Rails so much that I’ve converted my blog from Wordpress to Enki. Enki is more of a create-your-own-blog construction kit than a turn-key solution like Wordpress. That was one of the main reasons I chose it over Typo or Mephisto — I wanted to be able to easily hack on it.

I wrote a quick and dirty script to help me import the Wordpress posts into Enki. Any fellow Enki hackers can grab it here.

Fun with Studio

I’ve been working on a new project now for a while called SUSE Studio. Essentially it is a web interface which allows you to build your own customized version of SUSE. You can select packages, do some configuration, and even add your own branding.

I created a media center appliance to see how hard it would be. The appliance is based on openSUSE 11.1, and boots right into the excellent Elisa Media Center. You can download the image here. The tarball contains one file, which you can ‘dd’ to a USB storage device. We’re working on writing a small application to make this part easier.

On the first boot it will do some one-time setup like repartition and resize the disk, install NVIDIA or ATI video drivers (if appropriate), and setup X.


Download Elisa Media Center Appliance

New Job

For quite a while I had been working on SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client, which is Novell’s diskful Thin Client solution. It had a lot of challenging aspects, not least of which was fitting a minimal GNOME environment + apps onto 128MB of flash. That work is mostly wrapping up, though, and I’ve moved to a new team.

At the beginning of the month I started working on SUSE Studio, which is a web-based appliance builder for SUSE. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone a little, and it hasn’t disappointed there. We’re using RoR, which I am really enjoying so far. Ruby was ridiculously easy to pick up. Rails confused me at first with the amount of magic that it does behind-the-scenes, but there is a lot of information on how that works so getting up to speed wasn’t too bad. I bought Agile Web Development with Rails which has been very helpful as well.

novell-bugzilla.user.js updates

I’ve updated the Novell Bugzilla Autologin greasemonkey script again. Just click here to upgrade your current version or install it for the first time. You of course need greasemonkey installed.

I’ve removed the “go to login page” step. It now just logs in directly via AJAX and refreshes your current page. It has also been rewritten to use jQuery (and jQuery.blockUI) which cleaned things up a bit and gives a nicer “please wait” message :)

Slashdot looking for open proxies?

I saw the following somewhat-strange line in my web server logs today:

216.34.181.45 - - [25/Aug/2008:10:23:51 -0500] "GET http://tech.slashdot.org/ok.txt HTTP/1.0" 401 523 "-" "libwww-perl/5.812"

That web server is running on the IP of my home router. The requesting IP appears to be a Slashdot machine. My guess is that they are trying to find out who accesses their site through an open proxy. But why? Is there another reason they might send a request like that? Do they ban proxies if they find one?

UPDATE: Apparently, they do in fact ban open proxies (according to this). Supposedly a lot of comment spam comes from them. I wonder if it would help blogs at all to do something similar?

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