10/5/08

OSS sit-rep

I figured I’d write a quick situation report on the three open source projects I’m involved with:

  • Tcpreplay Pretty much in total maintenance mode right now. I’m more then happy to help users and fix any bugs which people report, but I’m not working on any new features right now.
  • OpenPacket Looks like OpenPacket is in the process of being restarted and is going to move from Ruby on Rails to PHP. My last experience with PHP (about 7 years ago) was enough to make me swear it off and I’m just not interested in re-learning it again. Hence, I suspect my role will be limited to providing suggestions for the team.
  • Cabernet Due to the move & my vacation to the Yukon/BC/Alaska, development has definitely slowed down, but now that things are getting back to normal I’m expecting to get some more work done. One thing I’m considering is starting a rewrite. Cabernet was my very first RoR application and I’ve definitely learned a lot and there are a lot of new and interesting plugins out there which are quite interesting.

    The other option is working on the UI. There are still a lot of things which need work (especially adding bottles and searching) which I don’t think would need a complete rewrite. I still need to decide what Cabernet should become- a OSS application for end users or a hosted solution (which seems to be the norm for the wine drinking community).

08/10/08

Prawn- not just for the BBQ

With the upcoming move, we’ll have to unload & reload our wine collection from the wine cabinet. For some people that may not be a big deal, but when you’re dealing with a few hundred bottles being tracked in a database, it’s important that all the bottles go back to their original location after the move. Hence I’ve been looking at generating a printable inventory that we can take with us for the move. As you may know, printing web pages doesn’t always give the expected results, so I’ve been playing with generating PDF files. Continue reading

06/8/08

Rails 2.1

I’ve successfully migrated Cabernet over to Rails 2.1. Not being a power-rails developer, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that has changed. Most of the API remains the same, and the one thing that’s changed (pagination) has been replaced with an easier to use module (will_paginate). Continue reading

06/2/08

Cabernet isn’t dead

With tcpreplay 3.3.2 development wrapping up, I think I’ll take a break from C and concentrate on Ruby. I’m still using Cabernet and with Passenger, it looks like my goal of distributing a Rails application is finally doable. So that means getting Cabernet ready for Rails 2.1 and of course cleaning up the UI so it’s not so horribly ugly. Continue reading