Ape::Tracks

Owned?

After a few conversations with colleagues I'm now worried that software I create at home might end up owned by my employer - my personal coding projects tend to overlap with the same areas I work in. In my original employment terms I had default 'IP' rights, but I'm not so sure now... I don't want my hobby coding to turn into more unpaid overtime.

Fortunately, since I stopped the silly overtime habit I've not managed to actually do anything productive at home in its place (progress in Eve Online probably doesn't count), but I need to find out what the situation is before I stop procrastinating. I also need to actually click 'publish' on this blog more often.

(goes to check on the training for Astrogeology Level IV)

JRuby on Rails

JRuby started off looking like a novelty project with little practical use, but in less than a year it's become a practical tool, something with definite advantages over it's more established rivals. IBM, Oracle and Sun are already using it themselves for web apps. Netbeans 6 has rather good support for Ruby built in, and much as I cringe when running Tomcat servers (from a sysadmin's perspective) from a developer's point of view .war files are a definite advantage.

This article describes what happened when some of Sun's Java web developers chose to try JRuby and Ruby On Rails.

I think JRuby is going to do very well in 2008.

Link: Igor Minar's Blog: JRuby on Rails Rewrite of mediacast.sun.com Launched

Free Beer Wins Here

Vienna (open source) is great software, but NetNewsWire (now a free download) works much better on my little old PPC Mac, so I've switched over.

Link: NetNewsWire vs. Vienna - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Happy Birthday Perl!

Perl is 20 years old today, and Perl 5.10 has been released, the first major new version for five years. Read Perl 5.10 for people who are not totally insane for a summary of the neat bits.

I can't mention Perl without feeling compelled to mention Ruby (the guilty conscience of a lapsed Perlist - I spend much more time with Ruby nowadays) so I'll add that Ruby will be 15 next year, a couple of years older than Java.

Notes on Leopard

I normally wait and let other people suffer from Point Zero problems, but I got Leopard on release day and immediately upgraded. (This was written weeks ago)

Leopard would not install at first - the installer would boot, but my disk wasn't shown. It was visible to Disk Utility, and it was even mounted (I like having a shell available in the installer!), but it would not appear. I tried three or four times. My boot partition was called "system". On a hunch I changed its name and tried again, and it appeared immediately. I've not been able to repeat the experiment, so I'm not 100% sure the name was causing the problem.

The extras in the installer (Disk Utility, Terminal) are nice. A tetris game or web browser would have been even nicer, as the install took rather a long time*.

Network browsing (Samba, AFP) seems much better. Until now Mac OS hasn't been very good at interacting with LAN file shares, but I think Leopard has got it right at last. Overall speed seemed good too. Windows tends to get slower with each new version, but Mac OS X gets faster.

LDAP and Kerberos integration is looking very strong indeed - all sorts of software can take advantage of directory information and Kerberos authentication. Apple are using Sun's NFS automounter and it's far better than static mounts: just browse on the commandline by cd-ing to servers by name, with Kerberos there to make NFS useful again. There are various LDAP tools that I expect to spend days playing with, like catnip for sysadmins.

Spotlight seems to be much more effective and faster. Previously I've not been impressed, but things like Smart Folders now look practical rather than just good in principle.

Coverflow views seem slow and gimmicky. Maybe on a faster Mac they'd be more fluid and responsive.

At first I dismissed the Finder's new Quick Look preview feature as just a copy of similar elements of Windows and KDE desktops, but it's turned out to be much more useful and convenient than I expected.

The Dock graphics seem to be a bit tattier. I like the reflective surface but the icons don't look quite right. My Mac is a PPC Mac Mini without accelerated graphics, and I wonder if Apple are assuming more powerful Macs when optimising the display.

Leopard's desktop style (especially the blue colour and icons) reminds me of an old Gnome theme. This is good.

Time Machine will not work with network drives, or DMG disk images on network drives. This is very disappointing.

Spaces provides a good implementation of multiple desktops, but there's no facility to name the spaces. Clicking on the Spaces menu displays a list of numbered desktops with blank areas where names would fit, but there's no way to set them. Odd.

The new voice is rather good. There's just one, and I've heard better, but a huge improvement over the ancient ones.

SMB/CIFS mounts are faster and friendlier. There's still no reliable way to get them to mount automatically on login other than via an Automator script, but that works well enough. I'm not sure if it would be better to use Samba for CIFS, or Netatalk for AFP.

The default desktop and login screen image is rather gloomy, and a strange choice. Replacing /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg fixes that easily enough.

'Get Info' on the Finder's contextual menus has moved, and 'Move to Trash' is dangerously close to where 'Get Info' used to be.

Bundled developer software is much better, with less need to head to MacPorts straight away. Subversion is there, Ruby, Ruby Gems, Mongrel and Ruby On Rails too, all with DTrace patches applied. Apple's bundling of Ruby on Rails with all Macs is rather significant, I think.

I'm disappointed by the delayed arrival of ZFS and iSCSI in Mac OS. Hopefully they'll turn up soon.

TextEdit can open and save OpenDocument (.odt) word processor files! This is good news.

X11.app seems to be broken somehow. It doesn't X start from the Dock properly, and X forwarding over SSH during session setup following SSH logins fails - I can't simply ssh to a Linux server and run graphical apps. It used to work fine under Tiger.

I've had very few problems with incompatible software. The only major trouble so far is that Missing Sync 5 won't sync calendars properly (partly due to the authors not updating it, and partly due to bugs in iCal and iSync) and NeoOffice is refusing to open some files over CIFS. Overall I'm very pleased with Leopard but looking forward to improvements.

* Backing up before upgrading took even longer. Fortunately Metroid Prime 3 arrived the same morning, so I was distracted, confused and entertained by that instead.

RISC iX

I own an Acorn R260, an early Archimedes designed to run a BSD variant called RISC iX. The installed OS is broken and I've not got round to fixing it. I've occassionally tried to find install disks on the net so I can reinstall from scratch.

Now I've discovered why. There were no install disks.

Legal versions of RISC iX either came pre-installed on a R140 or R260, or were installed by Granada Microcare. Acorn did not supply distribution media to customers (although in 2006 a set of 14 floppy discs with an installable copy of RISC iX 1.14 were sold on ebay). If you ordered RISC iX, Grenada Microcare would make an appointment, come along and install it from a tape drive, taking the tape away afterwards.

From Chris Acorn's RiscIX

Thank goodness for Linux and FreeBSD.

MSX -> Wii

My first computer, after years of hoping for a C64 (or anything really - I tried begging for a ZX81 at one point) was a Toshiba MSX. And it was good. The hardware itself was excellent, and the games were great: typically European games on tape and Japanese games on cartridges. Konami carts were particularly good but almost prohibitively expensive - £20 was an awful lot to pay for a game back then (most tapes were about £8 I think).

I've been hoping that MSX would join the old systems on the Wii's Virtual Console service, and it seems I'm in luck - it's going to happen. As well as giving the opportunity to play Penguin Aventure on a TV, the MSX will also be the first home computer on Virtual Console. Maybe we'll be seeing BBC Model B games appear next :-)

Link: News: New formats confirmed for Virtual Console - ComputerAndVideoGames.com

(Beyond the rosy glow of nostalgia I have to admit the MSX standard wasn't perfect: the built-in BASIC was full of useful, easy features but was horribly crufty and slow (thanks Microsoft!) All MSX systems (even the low-end Goldstar model) were much more expensive than the c64 and ZX Spectrum. Lower initial sales and uncopyable cartridges meant much less of the playground piracy that drove sales of Spectrums.)

‘Tis The Season

The Perl advent calendar is an old favourite of mine. This year I've found Ruby and Catalyst calendars too. Daily tips and tricks await at:

2006 Perl Advent Calendar

Catalyst Advent Calendar 2006

Ruby Advent Calendar 2006

A/UX

Apple Unix (A/UX) is Apple's port of Unix to the original Macintosh. Specifically, it's a port of AT&T Unix System V.2.2 (with a handful of BSD-extensions) to Macintosh systems that were based on the Motorola 680x0 line of processors. You might be asking, "Another port of Unix... What's so special about that?" Well, A/UX combines the stability of Unix System V with the friendly graphical-user-interface (GUI) of the Macintosh Operating system. This hybrid-environment allows you to run both Macintosh and Unix programs on a single system. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

Everything you ever wanted to know about Apple's first UNIX I might give this a try if it'll run on my old LC475.

Ruby On Everything

There's been a lot of hype this year about Ruby 'replacing' other programing languages and seducing their developers. I think this has masked something far more interesting and much less confrontational: different programing languages are getting much better at working together.

Ruby runs on its own dedicated interpreter but recently there's been a lot of activity on porting the language to run on VMs predominantly used by other languages, specifically the Java JVM, .Net's CLR and Perl6's Parrot. There are also 'bridges' that let a non-Ruby application embed a traditional Ruby interpreter. Either method allows developers to mix and match other languages with Ruby.

The main JVM effort (JRuby) is going well:

Sun hires JRuby developers

Ruby running in a Java applet

Ruby on Rails almost running properly within Java

Deploying Ruby on Rails inside Glassfish

And the Ruby Java Bridge lets you use Java classes from within traditionaly executed Ruby apps.

It's even possible to extend Java classes using Ruby

Microsoft's .Net developers can join in the Ruby fun too:

Microsoft hires Ruby .Net developers

There are at least two working .Net compilers for Ruby: Ruby.Net and Iron Ruby.

There's a Ruby bridge for .Net too, called Ruby CLR

Perl's Parrot VM was the first to talk about re-implementing Ruby and promises great things but sadly has made relatively little progress. Of course, Perl6 itself is taking its time too.

The current Parrotised Ruby is Cardinal. One day Parrot will allow you to build an application from a mix of various languages, including Perl 6 and Ruby, all snuggled up together.

Perl being Perl, there is of course a Ruby bridge for Perl 5.