Paul's Web Pages

10 Years of Spacelabs

Paul van Tilburg — 2010-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.

The past

Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.

Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.

I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.

The future

Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

FOSDEM 2008

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

I skipped a year, but… how can I skip this big(ger) gathering of Debian and GNOME people!

Taking and Giving

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-04T00:00:00+01:00

From Debian I downloaded, installed and toyed around with Liquidsoap. It took me a few moments to understand the language, but once I did, I got very enthusiastic about it. I always wanted something more than just streaming a set for my friends now and then and this tool allows me to created a quite contrived webradio setup. More about that later…

To Debian unstable I finally uploaded Camping, a small Ruby web framework for MCV type applications. It is in NEW now. I’ve been writing (or at least started writing) quite a few apps based on Camping the past few months. Primarily because it is fun, but also because I like its flexibility and strength very much (see also some examples). Once Camping is in Debian, I’d like to put more Camping apps out in the open.

On Its Way

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

I have ordered my new MacBook today. The model silently got an update yesterday and that was what I was waiting for.

While my “old” PowerBook (4 years old) is still working fine, it has a broken hinge and unexplainable display-startup problems. Combined with the fact that it always connected to all my peripheral devices, external drives and a second screen, it is less then ideal to just pick it up and go. (Although we have XRandr 1.2 now, the whole desktop environment is not integrated with these features yet).

Moreover, because I somehow ended up in a 5 year cycle of needing a computer system update and something portable at the same time, I always bought a heavy laptop. This time, I want to break this cycle, and buy a light, portable laptop and maybe later some workstation. And why Apple or a MacBook… well, I have good experiences with it, well-designed and thought-through, and if you look for portable laptops, < 1000 €, with a 12-14" screen, quality hardware and good specs, the MacBook is on of the few options that is left, actually.

Broken HDDs Revisited

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

Two years after writing about what I found out when I was looking why my HDDs kept breaking down, I started to receive emails about this post. It seems that it was mentioned in an Ubuntu bug report and this morning I noticed that exactly this bug report was mentioned on Slashdot, so I can consider my post to be slashdotted (indirectly). For the past week, I’m counting 15,000 hits and it is still rising fast. It’s a good thing that I use a static HTML journal, so that my journal-hosting-pentium-233MHz can handle this. It’s also a good thing that the issue finally gets some attention.

Getting Rid of Titles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months.

Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

Arnaud and I finally managed to release Ruby D-Bus “Almost live from DebConf 7” 0.2.0. The release was planned for DebConf 7. However, I didn’t manage to get it ready in between all the talks, meetings, and other social stuff. Ruby D-Bus is an implementation of the D-Bus protocol in pure Ruby. After starting the development in February, it soon became apparent that several other projects were out there with about the same goal, such as Pure Ruby DBUS and R-Bus.

Our approach is to have an API that is close to the old Ruby D-Bus bindings. While the other, similar projects seem to have a slightly different goal, we still invite them to come to some sort of merging so that no duplicate effort is put into three or four separate projects with almost the same result.

The 0.2.0 release is our first real public release. We have a large subset of the features working and documented. The main focus of this release was to improve the API documentation and the tutorial. The 0.2.0 release is a release for exploratory purposes. We invite everyone interested to have a look at the API and inner works and provide us with feedback and/or patches. This means that the API can still change a bit over time based on feedback and tweaks performed by ourselves. So don’t built a big application on it just yet if you’re not willing to make some changes later on. For more information, see our project (Trac) page.

DebCamp Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

It is time for a DebCamp update, since I’ve been here three days now. I have mainly been working on picking up the slack regarding Debian/Ruby Extras. This meant: getting rid of a CDBS rule that substitutes the entire team in the Uploaders field, cleaning up some package, uploading some packages with new upstream, solving and filing bugs.

During all this, the “picture” of the environment outside is actually only missing yellow/brown trees shedding their leaves.

Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

In between the Debian/Ruby Extras work I have been able to finish the documentation of our Ruby D-Bus protocol implementation. It is due for release this weekend and I think we’ll make it.

Technical Stuff

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Hobix

There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental.

Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental!

Ruby D-Bus

A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API.

I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens…

OpenID

I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service.

Koditoj

Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

Moved Jabber Server

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID.

Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:

First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of jabber.luon.net, that is:
```
  msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
  …
```
Note that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:
```
  jabber.tcp      1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-client.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
  xmpp-server.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
```
With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
Then, I modified the address of jabber.luon.net to point to the new host and let it propagate.
Next, I sent a MOTD (luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client¹.
Finally, I installed a second C2S component on luon.net that connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.

It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

¹ I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <→ talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

Broken HDDs

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-11-24T00:00:00+01:00

So, what’s with all the broken laptop hard disks?! I have two laptops running almost all day (one as a cheap simple server with built-in UPS) and one as workstation. But in the last, say, 2 years I had to replace the 2.5" (laptop) hard disk drives 4 times! Since laptop HDDs cost a lot more per megabyte than normal 3.5" drives, this was becoming an expensive issue for me.

So, I geared up S.M.A.R.T on both machines and did some investigating. The major issue seems to be the load/unload system that is integrated into more and more of these drives nowadays. The heads will automatically be retracted (parked) after some idle time to decrease the risk of shock damage and reduce power consumption. However, this seems to be a bad combination with Linux. I have not done any research into the specific implementation of the journaled file systems that I use (ext3, XFS), but it can something to do with it. It seems the heads of almost all laptop disks I encounter are continuously unloaded and loaded instead of around 5 times per hour.

It seems a hard disk drive is made to allow for 300.000 load/unload cycles, after that the mechanism wears of so that inaccurate moving can occur and the platters can be damaged because of a small miss. Now, my drives had 650.000, 1.2000.000 and 900.000 before bad sectors and completely erratic behaviour start to occur, but this was within a year.

My most recent broken drive had about 3 load cycles per minute, this means 180 per hour. With things going bad at 600.000, the disk thus had a lifetime of 3333 hours (138 days). This is ridiculously short. So I’ve turned APM of all my drives off (hdparm -B254). Better a small risk of bad sectors when dropping my laptop than having to replace my disk within the year. Also note that my brand new Western Digital disk has spent 14.000 of its load cycles within the first 15 hours that I was busy with installing Debian and recovering backups!

If someone has more information about this, please let me know.

Working, Cooking

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

I haven’t written for a while, I have been busy with working and well… cooking, eating and watching movies with friends.

Cooking

Bram was left parentless the past two weeks, so he had to do some real cooking for the first time in his life. We set up cook-shifts in our group of friends (Admar, Bas, Bram, Christian and me) to provide everyone with a nice dinner every evening and transfer some of our cooking experience to Bram. Since Bram is a vegetarian, it was a learning experience for us all. Fortunately, it all worked out really well, we made (among other things):

Lasagna bolognese
Pesto wraps
Chili sen carne
Curry something

Working

Work has progressed very nicely the past two weeks. Our (Bram and me) task is to build a DV conferencing application for the desktop. Yes, this means streaming and receiving 30Mb/s full-duplex. The first building block we have created is a D-BUS service that can startup, pause and stop programs or GStreamer pipelines (depends on what is available at that moment) to route DV data from DV/RTP, TCP, FireWire bus etc. to the screen, back to the FireWire bus. Also a command line tool was created to control the router process.

Next is to make a GNOME2 GUI tool to create a nicer interface for the router called VideBabilo. I have made a small mock-up, the implementation be done next week (that is, if we get that far).

Note that this will still just dial/connect to a host, since there is not protocol yet. We plan to add this later, possible by means of XMPP (Jabber). This protocol probably will handle: inviting to a conference, rejecting calls, ending a call, etc. First peer-to-peer (like GnomeMeeting) and then talking to multiple people.

No Software Patents in Europe

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Wooohoooo! (I know it has been announced everywhere already, but still would like to have this in my archive :-)).

“After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes: A strong signal against patents on software logic, a sign of lost faith in the European Union and a clear request for the European Patent Office (EPO) to change its policy: the EPO must stop issuing software patents today.” — Free Software Foundation Europe press

It is finally over. Kudos to the FSFE and FFII (and all parties I am forgetting here) for their work.

HDD Damage

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

After the power outage of last weekend, some recovery work had to be done. Still about a quarter of the machines didn’t return after power was restored (mostly due to BIOS issues). The most important problems were hard disk failures in two key machines: ranger (doing the IPv6 routing, general workstation) and bar (mail, CVS and Ildus server). It still amazes me how unreliable these pieces of machinery still are after 50 years of development. If I look back at problems I had with machines in my past 12 year (or so) of experience, it has always been hard disks! I know, I know, it has moving parts, works on a very small and precise scale, but still…

So it seems all Luon.net CVS repositories are gone, which really is a shame. These repositories where about to be moved to Subversion on another machine (cube) this week, but nature seems to sense these things. I hope to get my hands on some (old!) backup tapes and retrieve at least older revisions. Ranger has received a new disk and will get a fresh Sid install any time soon.

FOSDEM 2005 (2)

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

Just sorted out our photos (mostly photos of us/people in the album) of FOSDEM 2005. It was a nice FOSDEM this year (except for the cold weather) and I’ve heard some interesting talks.

We focused on the Debian and GNOME stuff. The GStreamer and Flumotion talks were great, and not to forget the Wikipedia talk. Also the device mapper stuff was interesting and an overview over the Debian release process (by Andreas Barth) and Debian QA (by Jeroen van Woffelaar).

Although it’s a slightly different corner of FOSS, it was interesting to hear the GPL enforcement talk (by Harald Welte) as well as Richard M. Stallman on general (so non-software related) copyright law.

It was also good to see the vast presence of Debian users and developers. Once a distro poll was performed during a talk and over 80% of the hands were for Debian. The Debian booth was crowded as well and I was told at the end of Sunday that a lot was sold. I wanted to thank the people in the booth for spending the weekend there, Wouter Verhelst for his good work for the Debian Developers room and the people who held a talk there.

This year’s problems at FOSDEM were the network (if you had to/wanted to use it), and the fact that there were sometimes to many interesting talks at the same time and on other moments nothing at all. Also did talks end exactly on time, but this meant there was no time for moving to other buildings.

Anyway, great FOSDEM, looking to next year’s already. But for now… on to GUADEC 2005!

FOSDEM 2005

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-02-25T00:00:00+01:00

I’m off to FOSDEM tomorrow with the people of Spacelabs after doing a huge amount of planning at the last moment. I’ll be there both days.

It was a pity to see that there was nothing about Ruby scheduled at all this time (unlike last year). No tutorials, no talks… quite a shame, because a lot is happening in that area. Besides that, I am going for Debian and GNOME related talks, so if that interests you too, I will see you there.

IORCC

Speaking of Ruby, I was contacted by Todd Nathan about the 2005 International Obfuscated Ruby Code Contest (IORCC). At the moment I have no time to assist or partake, but it’s a nice and fun initiative, I might as well advert it here :)

I’m looking forward to the results of this contacts and also the deobfuscations.

WL500g

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-02-06T00:00:00+01:00

I completely redid the network at my parents today. I’ve bought an Asus WL500g gateway/router/access point already a month ago. It is replacing the two Linux boxes I had there earlier (the gateway and the wireless router). Although it was nice to play with the basestation, these boxes gave my real network learning experiences… still going to be a bit of a pain to turn them off and put them away.

Running Linux

The Asus WL500g is quite a nice thing running Linux. They do give specifications of the machine and there is nice custom firmware with SSH and other useful enhancements (I want to thank the people of the WL500g info forum for there help). I plugged the printer in, which immediately worked as a HP JetDirect RAW port for my CUPS setup and my parents Windows XP print FUBAR. In the custom firmware they have killed the GPL violating lpr hack (Raw printing) and replaced it with this solution. So it does almost anything now: NAT, SSH server, LPR, DHCP, DNS, DHCP-DNS, web interface, busybox with flashfs and all this syslogged to a remote machine.

Debian on the Asus WL500g

I tried to install Debian on it but ran into troubles. First my USB stick wouldn’t keep an ext3 fs working for 5 minutes and then I had problems with getting the modules for the wlan and ethernet card working (depmod crashing, etc.). Then it ocurred to me that except for it being nice to do apt-get and stuff of the base station, it isn’t very useful since the station can do all I want already. Well, almost…

A IPv6 capable kernel-and-tools-firmware has already be made, now just waiting for a working radvd and it’s a real drop-in replacement. :)

Long Time

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

It has been quite some time since the last entry. Past day/weeks have been either laming about or working hard for the exams. I had nothing to say really, but now, with that done, it is time to do some hacking.

Trac

I have been looking at Trac the past week and been trying to set it up on Luon.net. After having some troubles with virtual host stuff, I got it working, it is in fact very easy. Trac lies over a Subversion repository and keeps track of what is happing there. This layer provides a Wiki for writing notes and documentation, a roadmap/timeline to have an overview over what is happening and what has happened and has a bug (ticket) database, all combined in a nice and beautiful looking package. I added a Subversion post-commit hook script so that tickets/bugs can be closed or referred to via/in a svn commit log, which works very well. I like this system. It still focuses on one project only though, but it’s much better than all those Sourceforge alike stuff I keep being confronted with.

GOAT! revisited

Some people still are showing some interest in GOAT!, so I and the rest of the group that wrote it originally as a course assignment decided to take the development up again. We moved the GOAT! subversion repository to Luon.net, set up a Trac site and we are well underway. The backend is being completely rewritten, partially for code cleaning but also for replacing the story/course backend. The old backend depended on a MySQL (with a rather ugly structure) database that had to be used in the course assignment. Now we will support multiple courses/course files in YAML instead and only store user state data in MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite etcetera. When this is complete the UI is fixed and GOAT! 1.1.0 can be released. It will take YAML course files and load them on start. Users can register and follow the courses using the web interface in which GOAT! will transform the easy-to-write YAML data into a complete adaptive hypermedia document/site.

Jabber and YTex

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

Jabber RFCs 3920 — 3922

Today, the IETF published the Jabber (actually XMPP) protocols as RFCs with the Proposed Standard status. See also the press release on jabber.org . I am happy to see this! Using Jabber for almost 4 years now, I’ve noticed it has grown through the years and Jabber contacts dominate my roster since the past months. In my opinion, Jabber suffers a bit from decentralisation. On the lists I see a lot of stuff happening but nobody that controls it at all. The XMPP system is capable of so much neat stuff, I hope this brings back the drive in FOSS developers to work on Jabber, and the industry as well.

YTex

Working with Hobix and Textile a lot, I got kindof a vibe/idea yesterday. Looking at the source of the Poignant Guide I saw it was totally done in YAML to, so… What if the power of Textile is combined with YAML for structuring text as pre-language for generating LaTeX files. It’s not that I dislike writing LaTeX and want to discard it or something, but for rapid documenting, this could be really nice. An example:

 
 title: An YTex document 
 author: Paul van Tilburg
sections:
- First section: >
Bla bla, this is the first section.
- Second section:
- >
Hmm, if there are more sections, heading stuff goes
here.  I can do bold text and emphasized text.
- First subsection: >
A subjection with a  and a
table:
| head1 | head2 |
| key1  | 3.0   |
| key2  | 15.0  |

I’ve started hacking a bit and so far the structure stuff is working out. Getting Textile to work for LaTeX instead of HTML is a different story. You will hear more of this… if it doesn’t work out, you won’t. :)

RPA proposals

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

I had a look at some of RPA’s proposals for a good API design and good practices. I really think RPA is a better influence on Ruby packaging stuff then Gems are. At least from a personal and Debian packager perspective. Also saw that Why had finished Chapter 5 of the Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It’s really fun and wacko stuff to read, thanks Why!

Bad weekend

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve had a bad weekend. Headaches, problems, busy, etc. I was able to spend some free time working on Aribigi though. I am still trying to get the annoying SEGV out and have reworked the event model based on some discussion on Spacelabs last Friday.

Also I’ve changed the webserver of the machine running this website, source, to Apache 2. I think it is/feels a bit faster (the worker model at least) and is much more flexible. Setting up SSL support was a hassle though. Next to IPv6 support, this also allowed me to set up a DAV SVN repository for anonymous check outs. This is just to try it out before creating the Luon Network SVN repository. I also switched from using no DNS server (thus using /etc/hosts) to using PowerDNS aka pdns on my internal (wireless) network. I like PowerDNS already; it has several backends, out of which the LDAP one is the most interesting. It seems I’ll have to rewrite the whole Ildus system in Ruby and adapt it to this standardised LDAP scheme (see also RFC 1297), so I can drop DNSSyncd (a daemon syncing LDAP with a bind server via zone files.) and hook Ildusd (the Ildus Luon DynDNS Update Service daemon) directly to LDAP which is directly connected to PowerDNS.

I was surprised to notice that source has the highest maximum uptime of the entire TU/e IP range, according to Netcraft. I haven’t done much for it really, it just lies here. Still waiting until it crashes so I can replace the HDD and kernel.

Gems

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-08T00:00:00+02:00

Has it been 4 days already? So it seems, hmmm… days can be sooo full, last Monday I was occupied from 8:15 till over 18:15, I think the Trimester of Hell remark on August 17 wasn’t an overstatement. I mean, it’s only the beginning!

The Ruby Pickaxe 2nd edition is bound to release very soon. I’ve been looking forward to buying this, since the first edition is based on Ruby 1.6, but I’ve been using Ruby 1.8 for months now. I have to say something about these Ruby Gems. Everyone keeps asking me what it is that I have against Ruby Gems, so I’ll try to answer that here. It was conceived as a way, ala CPAN, but then different. Since each Gems is just one directory, this leads to some unclean side-effects:

You have to install program stubs all over the place, i.e. let $prefix/bin/program link to the binary in the gem’s dir so it’s in the user’s path.
Since libraries are distributed as gems too, you can require them. You can do: require 'some_gem_lib' But for this require is redefined to search efficiently through all gems.
Since the libraries are located in one directory, programmers can abuse this by using more relative paths in the code. For example: require "../../../mylib/a/b/c.rb" This is not at all a best practice and packages packging harder.

Also some stuff learned in other package systems are not used (for now), such as Recommends, Suggests, etc. Also versioned depends are not a required thing, which, I think, shall lead to some chaos. Since the main goal is to create a standard way to distribute code to third party, packager etc. I think they should’ve been more involved. Installing these gems in those directory also violates the FHS, making it all very hard to package for Debian. I’m looking much more at RPA now, which looks very nice and interesting. I hope people aren’t going to distribute their stuff as gems only and also won’t make assumptions based on it if they do.

First progress

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

Between courses and stuff I have been able to work on Aribigi a lot, it’s progressing very well. I got multiple-UI plugins working and also made a lot of extensions on the backend. I am still enjoying this a lot but it seems I’ll have no time for it until next week, because I have to work on assignments this weekend.

Fixing Gmoo

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-10T00:00:00+02:00

The weather changed from hot and sunny to cool, clouded and rainy today. Perfect weather for updating one’s Debian packages. So Marcel and I patched up several problems for the Gmoo package to make it up to date and without outstanding bugs before Debian _sarge_’s freeze. We succeeded!

It’s amazing how much time such a thing can cost. I spent the rest of the day listening music and reading the SVNBook . I might switch to using SVN instead of CVS real soon :)