Latest News >> 2008-07-20 2008-06-25

I’ve been completely fed up with news/feed/rss/atom readers these days. I use Linux as my primary operating system, and I only have a few feeds that I want to rip through quick so I can get to reading the content. Yet, trying to find a reader that doesn’t suck donkey balls has been a chore.

2008-06-21

Wanna know what all the Ruby vulnerabilities are? Or at least have a fun look at how to search through code for clues? It’s a blast.

2008-06-13

I’m dropping a large blog post on everyone to just say that I haven’t died, I’ve just been busy working on my book for A/W about Mongrel. I had contracted with them to do a book about deploying Mongrel, but then decided it wouldn’t be a very good book since we’d already done one about that topic and there wasn’t too much more to say.

UPDATE: There seems to be some interest in Idiopidae too and I’ve been neglecting the Idiopidae project page while working on Vellum. I’ve updated that page with information and updated install procedures, so please check it out again if nothing worked for you.

There’s a Vellum bug fix release 0.16 out you all can grab if you’re using it. Due to a slight change in the forall command where I stopped using raw regex and used the fnmatch instead, the unit tests for that command weren’t actually running. This meant that bugs found their way in and now the latest version of Vellum 0.16 should fix all of that. It fixes that and just adds a bunch of documentation really.

Speaking of documentation, I’m still writing the big Book of Vellum and now have the first draft of Appendix A where I do a complete walk through the Vellum code. You’ll notice that it matches the code I just changed two minutes ago in the forall command. This is the advantage of Idiopidae. Simply changing the code and re-running the book build gets me everything instantly updated.

Grab the updated copy (still without much editing yet) and read through if you haven’t already. I’ve also built this one with Emacs colors for all my friends from Reddit and YCombinator News since I know all you Lisp whores can’t stay away from your editor designed for a man with 8.5 fingers on each hand.

I’ll be rotating the color scheme each time I release vellum just to have fun with it.

You can install this latest drop of Vellum in all the usual ways, and you can also grab from Bazaar:

LGPL?

There’s also been a few good submissions from some folks with suggestions for typesetting improvements, Pygments patches and improvements, Vellum bug reports, and the PIDA project wants to use Vellum as their build specification system. They’ve asked if I’d change the license to LGPL so I thought I’d toss the question out and see how people feel about the licenses.

My main motivation for going with GPLv3 is to prevent the common situation where corporations take the work, modify it, and don’t give it back. I’m also pretty down on corporations in general these days, so I may even consider a dual license of BSD for non-profits and GPLv3 for corporations.

Any thoughts on the subject of licenses for Vellum are welcome.

Bazaar Problems

If you just updated your Bazaar and you use Paramiko, you’ll find that Bazaar blows up because the Paramiko folks removed a function (in a fucking minor version release at at that). The easiest fix for me was to simply remove the offending package and then do:

sudo easy_install paramiko==1.7.2

You can review the bug report at their launchpad site for more information.