For the Second Rails meeting in Osaka I needed to prepare some slides for my presentation. Usually there is no projector there, but we have network, so I thought it will be good everybody to access slides with their own browser. Before I used the great S5presents open-source web-based slideshow application. I even made some modifications to it.

For the current presentation I wanted to use one of the OpenBlockS boxes we have around. So I installed Debian 3.1 (document is in japanese) on it, added ruby and rubygems . The problem was, that the box come with only 64MB RAM, that’s why I needed a light versions for all software.

For the web server I wanted to use lighttpd or Mongrel . The latest require ruby-1.8.4 and also there was no lighttpd .deb in Sarge, so I dist-upgraded to Debian Etch.

Next was the problem with the database. s5presents using MySQL for database, but the box was to weak to handle it. As a result I rewrote the whole stuff to use SQLite3 . It fact it’s pretty cool – now I have my presentations in addition to the code added to the subversion repository. I can checkout and use them without need to do some database dump/restore.

For the slides s5presents using markdown by default, but I prefer Textile (warning: rebel inside). So I added Textile and RDoc support.

Finally I moved the whole installation to my notebook (hahahaha, work for nothing a ;) ), but the LightS5 code become pretty good, so I decided to continue working on it. The result:

• Single user version (no authentication)
  • tarball of LightS5-v1.2 for download (my slides included ;) )
  • development version – for subversion users
• Multiply users version (using Login Engine )
  • tarball of LightS5-v1.2 for download
  • multiusers development version – for subversion users

(WARNING: be sure after checkout to create the db/s5.db if missing:

$ cd db
$ sqlite3 s5.db < s5.sqlite3

BEFORE using the application)

The Multiusers version is running online (Thanks to William for the great hosting he gave me for free ) and there is also Trac for bugs reports and requests .

Pretty hard job only for one rails meeting a ;)

…Ajax Scaffold Generator (for Ruby on Rails) creates a scaffold page like the typical rails one, except adding, editing and deleting are all done inline. The generated scaffold is valid XHTML strict and fully styled right out of the box…

The demo and howto are also available. Be sure you have no JavaScript disabled in your browser (NoScript in Firefox)

Seems Apple already have Intel based Mac-mini :

• 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo processor
• 512MB memory (667MHz DDR2 SDRAM)
• 80GB Serial ATA hard drive
• Double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0

Mmmmmmmmm, yammy :)

From some time I’m interested from f5’s BIG-IP like a load balancing with failover solution for our network. Found interesting post with BIG-IP features :

• It runs Linux kernel 2.4 in conjunction with some microkernel OS that F5 calls TMOS.
• Customized, interactive monitors for server availability can be written in Perl.
• Traffic flow can be modified using Tcl scripts. Basically anything can be inspected and modified, on TCP level as well as HTTP.

Next week there will be free f5 seminar in Osaka . Already made a registration.

Intreresting stuff:

• KirbyBase, a small, pure-Ruby, database management system.
• Ackbar, an ActiveRecord adapter for KirbyBase
• Chapters 6 and 7 of ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’, using Ackbar/KirbyBase instead of MySQL

In general: if you have Ruby, you can have Rails too, no need to install some special database, webserver etc. Pure Rails :)

Found via Rails Tips , link point to TextDrive weblog

• Minimize the amount of FCGI listeners
• Use caching
• NEVER run “development” on FastCGI for more than 1-2 hours
• Observe your memory consumption
• Rotate your logs
• Write and run unit tests
• Check for memory leaks when you are developing
• Be careful with iterations
• Watch the Rails TRAC for bug reports
• Be vigilant when restarting your server

Use RailsHelp for quick searching through the Rails API docs.

Rules for better Rails programming :

• Two spaces, no tabs
• Blocks use { }, if they are one-liners, otherwise do … end
• Surround equal signs with spaces, @myvar = ‘foo’, not @myvar=’foo’
• Surround hash assignments with spaces, :foo => ‘bar’, not :foo=>‘bar’
• Class.method(my_arg)—not method( my_arg ) or method my_arg

From Peter Busser’s email to the RSBAC ML:

I have compiled a number of RSBAC and Adamantix packages for Debian Sarge . This allows Debian Sarge users to benefit from some of the Adamantix features…

Adamantix started like Hardened Debian. Using well tested and stable Debian base, they added a lot of modern security stuff: PaX , SSP , RSBAC , making the distro one of the best choices for servers. I was involved in the early stages of the project but stopped contributing, because I was short of time. Still I’m following their progress and I’m happy to see good stuff going to the mainstream Debian also.

For homework: Chicken – Scheme-to-C compiler – CHICKEN is a compiler that translates R5RS Scheme into portable C using a technique developed by Henry Baker (“Cheney on the M.T.A.”).

We have some new books :) (still PDF only)

 

Via Stu’s Diary :

AccessFS from Olaf Dietsche allows the system administrator to restrict access to a network port based on uid/gui, so that daemons no longer need to run as the root user:

# mount -t accessfs none /proc/access
# chown www /proc/access/net/ip/bind/80
# chown mail /proc/access/net/ip/bind/25