Roel really does work!

Yes siree Bob! Believe it or not, captured on film for all eternity, Roel working!

Mamma lock up your kids, Daddy turn out the light, the party is over.... I have seen it all here at work now.

Many thanks to the alert Marco de Klijn for capturing this memorable moment!

PRIMA project kickoff

PRIMA stands for the Project Information Monitoring Application that the two interns, Lisa and Ikram, pictured here are doing for us at my work.

The will be spending the next six months working on this project to provide diverse project information such as test coverage, build information, and anything else we can think up over the next few months. This information they will be pumping, flashing, and beautifying for a large flat screen display to be mounted centrally in our department. Both developers and visitors will have a nice graphical view of our projects and progress. It is a very high profile project which we will be trying to give the necessary publicity within our offices.

I am very excited to be mentoring them through this project which should end with them writing their thesis to graduate with a bachelor in Software Engineering from their HBO in Eindhoven. We will be using Scrum as the development methodology and they are entirely free in their choice of frameworks as the application will be running in our department. No architectural restrictions that normally apply to a bank environment.

They will be keeping a daily project journal on their PRIMA blog.

AbTLinux package manager tagged v0.2

Over the last few days I have been playing with the code for abt, the AbtLinux package manager, on a newly installed Ubuntu box. The auto detection stuff that installs abt for you seems to be fine (some bugs fixed), basic features are there, and I included a new package for checkinstall.

I feel this is good enough to put out a tag, so today I give you version 0.2!

You can find it over in subversion at our site: http://www.abtlinux.org or just run:

$ svn co https://abtlinux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/abtlinux/src/tags/abt-0.2

Feel free to provide input or comments on irc.freenode.net at #abtlinux.

Ruby system function help and hints

Lately while using Ruby and trying to make sense of the system() function, which has a boolean return value, I was getting a bit frustrated. It seams you have one of two choices, so thought I would outline them here.

First, you can use the system(command) function which will execute your command in a subprocess and report a boolean success value. It should be noted that stdout will be available on the screen/console while the given command is running and you can redirect with the standard Linux commands (such as tee, |, >, >>, etc.).

The second option is to use what are called backticks, which allows you to capture the commands output into a variable. Note that you will no longer see stdout on the screen/console, but you will receive stderr on the screen/console. Usage is like this:

stdout = `#{command}`

It matters not whether you use the first or the second option, they both provide a means to check their resulting exit codes. I use the standard Bash variable $? like this:

exitcode = $?.exitstatus

These hints and tips should clarify the various options you have when accessing the underlying (Linux) system and to help you when trying to sort out what to do with the results of your commands.

The all new Dilbert widget!

This is just awesome, I have added it to my site, you can vote on the daily Dilbert and much more. You can see it in my sidebar and pick one out yourself at http://widget.dilbert.com

Compiler complaint

All Physics

Beer Brewing Bender!

For all the Futurama fans out there:

"The Beer Brewing Bender Project is finally completed. This is a fan built, full sized Bender from Futurama featuring a 6502 CPU powered brain to make him speak triggered by a prop remote control straight out of the show. Inside his body is a beer fermenter used to brew up a batch of real Benderbrau beer!" [...read more...]

Ruby include path

This has been bothering me for some time, wanting to include paths that will be searched when I want to 'require' or 'load' some class in my project. It is not very nice to have to use a -I flag, but there are other ways.

Use of the $: global variable:

• $:.push("/whatever")

Or the $LOAD_PATH variable:

• $LOAD_PATH.unshift '/whatever'

IRC fun!

Year in review 2007!

As 2007 is almost over, I look back and see not only exciting family events, but a new job, an excellent year of cycling, and a very productive year in my open source projects.

The year started with my sister visiting our newly born son (Dec 2007). She dropped in with her son and they spent a lovely week here playing and visiting. I also got my first Daddy Prize this year and even a repeat!

I continued to teach freelance for IBM Netherlands Learning Services. This time for and external customer in Rijswijk, the European Patent Office. Another amazing event was that my site was Dugg, someone found my online Linux courseware and the server was severely challenged. I moved over to Blogger after that to evade. One think that came out of it all was that I took some time to update the courseware and provide distance learning solutions to all my courses.

AbTLinux project progressed well this year, I got the package manager to install its first package and much more. Another project, the Baby Game was re-released and used by three different families to run their own baby games (results: a girl and two boys). I decided to stop my work on eGroupware and the Publication Management System, just focusing on AbTLinux. I continued to post Linux and Macbook solutions on this blog (over 55), see Software category.

In April I started the application for Dutch citizenship, finally getting my first Dutch passport this year! Just in time too, as the Queen stopped in at my work to open our new building.

Cycling this year included my last trips to Nijmegen as I started a new job at the SNS Bank in s-Hertogenbosch. I also cycled in the Veluwe, Normandy (Pointe du Hoc, Utah, Omaha, Port Bassin), and Limburg. I booked over 3000 km's and the best part is that I did not fall down once! ;-)

We closed out the year by purchasing a new house and selling our current house. This brings many new plans for the beginning of 2008 when we have to paint, modify, and then move into our new home.

Wishing you all the very best for the New Year and a happy and healthy 2008!

Mac security update causing cups failure: Symbol not found: _cupsFileRead

Today I wanted to print over my home network using the cups system on my macbook, but BOOM, got this message when starting cupsd:

Link (dyld) error:

Symbol not found: _cupsFileRead
Referenced from: /usr/sbin/cupsd
Expected in: /usr/lib/libcups.2.dylib

Seems the last security updates have borked out all pre-cups v1.3.5 printing systems. When looking at the cups download site you also find the following note from Apple:

"We are no longer providing binaries for Mac OS X since CUPS 1.3.x is not fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.4.x. You can compile and install CUPS 1.3.x from source, however most of the GUI administration tools provided in Mac OS X will no longer work."

It was a source tarball download of v1.3.5 and configure, make, make install for me to get the cups server to run again. A few gotcha's I ran into:

• it seems printers configured with the standard preferences tools on the macbook don't work over cups.
• using the localhost:631 administrative interface to adjust your configuration changes the permission (group set to lp instead of wheel) on the entire tree /private/etc/cups/*

Another posting of this issue can be found here on the Apple Support Forum which describes installing the cups v1.2.12 also solves this issue and allows you to work with the preferences tooling to install printers again. I did not try this one yet as I am comfortable setting up printers by hand or with the cups admin web page (not forgetting to adjust the permissions on your /private/etc/cups).

Macports update

How to upgrade / update your macports software (both packages, repo, and installed software:

$sudo port selfupdate
$sudo port -d sync
$sudo portindex
$sudo port upgrade installed