a view from afar

Recently had to work with a Ubuntu server and I wanted to get the latest darcs working on it. Simple install guide follows, pending this making it into.

Last night I gave my first presentation in the form of the huddle at GeekUp Sheffield II. A few people asked me for the slides so I've posted them on my blog. You can grab the PDF version here.

I think the discussion could have gone on longer. If anyone wants to bash out some ideas, I hang around on the GeekUp mailing list, or you can email me direct (address on the first slide).

Many thanks to everyone who attended and spoke at the event, and to Jag for organising it. It was a great night, and I hope enough people will come forward to speak next month to make it even better.

I now have an account on the github beta - and it's pretty cool. Since I've only done one thing with it I can only comment on one feature: forking. It's pretty effortless, and only took me a few minutes to get my Mailtrap LogParser extension up there. Best thing - assuming they are telling the truth :) - it's easy for the maintainer of the parent repo to merge the changes back in.

I suspect github will eventually change the nature of open source collaboration. But where is darcshub?

I just came across a need to test emails sent in a Rails project. It's a RSpec story integration test I'm working on (using Selenium, not a RailsStory), and using ActionMailer in test mode is not good enough. Instead I'm using Matt Mower's handy tool Mailtrap

I created a listener class to start and stop mailtrap as the story runs - which is easy enough - but I needed something to parse the log file from Mailtrap. So I created Mailtrap::LogParser - code available here for anyone that's interested.

As soon as github gives me a beta login, I will fork the Mailtrap repo and add this in. For the mean time, you can use the tarball above.

This is just a stopgap solution really, until Mailtrap has a way of outputting a more structured (and therefore easily-parseable) output.

Thanks to the incredible incompetence of our soon-to-be new broadband provider DST, my blog may be out of action for a while (10 days is apparently the worst case). DST let the MAC code we provided lapse, and Pipex are refusing to issue a new one. (Pipex actually claim that issuing a MAC code is considered a form of cancellation, so I'm not even sure why we still have a net connection at all.)

Unfortunately, due to the time I'm spending at work lately, I don't have time to move the blog to shared hosting. I intend to do that as soon as I can though... I'm getting ever so slightly sick of the universal contempt that consumer ISPs show for their customers.

Since Google bought FeedBurner, their MyBrand feature has been free. This means you can access FeedBurner feeds via "feeds.yourdomain.com". All it takes is a CNAME record in DNS to point feeds.yourdomain.com to feeds.feedburner.com, then you can access FeedBurned feeds via a URL you own. It's pretty generous of Google seeing as it means you can switch feed tracker with a simple DNS change...

Here is my Apache config (with added line breaks) to send the Mephisto-generated URLs to the FeedBurner ones:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
    RewriteRule ^/feed/atom.xml \
                http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home \
                [R=301]

Actually the feeds.feedburner.com addresses haven't moved, so if you are subscribed to this blog via the Atom feed you will still get updates. But the correct address is here:

http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home

...and geeks like being correct, right? :D

I just bought a CanoScan LiDE 25. Apparently I'm not the only person that thinks Canon's scanner software is a crime against humanity. I now use Yep for scanning, so I just need the TWAIN driver provided by the Canon installer. But the closest I got to making it work was seeing it install the files, then delete them immediately after. Yes, that's right. I WATCHED THE FILES DISAPPEAR from /Library.

I think Bart Simpson has the best phrase to describe this software - it sucks and blows at the same time.

My installation guide follows...