[ Posted by James Harton
Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:11:35 GMT ]
I've spent the last wee while hacking on PikeFlows to fix some of the locking issues present in the initial version. I've made use of Pike 7.8's new getter/setter syntax to give much finer grained locking, meaning that it now runs faster because it's locking each object only for a single atomic transaction.
There are still some unusual behaviours using Public.Network.Pcap (it seems to randomly capture packets on Mac OS X for example), however appears to be working nicely on Linux.
I've rewritten the demo app flow.pike to take command line options, check the top of the file for more information.
Check out the latest source from GitHub.
Posted in Projects, Culvert, Pike | Tags flow, linux, locking, mutex, osx, pike, pike7.8 | 1 comment
[ Posted by James Harton
Tue, 26 May 2009 04:11:21 GMT ]
So I don't think it's any secret that I am not a big fan of Redhat and it's products. Sure, they've funded some great Linux projects, but their operating system continually lags behind it's major competitors.
Installing Rails on RHEL5 is an almost entirely manual process, but sticking with my philosophy of doing as little work myself as possible, I'll use Redhat's package manager yum to install as much as we can; turns out that's not much:
~ # yum install ruby ruby-devel ruby-libs ruby-irb ruby-rdoc subversion-ruby
Okay, so at least we have a working Ruby. Next we need to get Rubygems installed:
~ # wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/35284/rubygems-1.1.1.zip
~ # unzip rubygems-1.1.1.zip
~ # cd rubygems-1.1.1
rubygems-1.1.1 # ruby setup.rb
rubygems-1.1.1 # cd ..
~ # rm -rf rubygems-1.1.1
Next, since it may be years later that you are reading this, you probably want to run gem update to update to the latest version.
Next, use Rubygems to install Rails:
~ # gem install rails
Now you're ready to start coding. Just for comparison's sake, let's look at that whole process on Debian or Ubuntu from a completely clean fresh install:
~ # apt-get install rails
'Nuff said. Thanks to Tech Trivia for the pointers.
Posted in Rails | Tags debian, howto, install, linux, rails, redhat, rhel5, ubuntu | 2 comments
[ Posted by James Harton
Wed, 20 May 2009 21:54:41 GMT ]
I've been spending a little bit of time trying to find a Linux distro that is usable for pre and early school age kids, I haven't found a lot (yes, I've played with OLPC's Sugar, but it didn't blow my mind). I came across Qimo while browsing Boing Boing as part of my daily time-wasting routine in Cory's post, Great OS for babies?. Whilst I agree with a number of commenters that giving a child who still hasn't figured out the rules of their physical surroundings too much access to a virtual environment may be counter-productive, I do believe that my kids are actively searching for stimulation in a large number of ways. I wouldn't put Qimo in front of my 15 month old son very often, or for extended periods of time I would let my five year old use it to reinforce her reading and arithmetic learning.
Qimo is built upon a standard Ubuntu 8.10 distro, and contains the usual suspects in terms of Ubuntu's standard installed software. Where Qimo differs is that by default it displays a slightly more kid friendly version of XFCE Desktop with almost everything superfluous removed in favour of a small dock-like launcher at the bottom at the bottom with only a few apps listed (the full suite of Ubuntu installed apps is still accessible via the Q menu on the top left of the screen) including the likes of GCompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay.
One thing I liked straight away over Qimo's main competitor, Edubuntu, is that Qimo seems much more targeted for children to actually interact with - things are kept friendly looking and uncluttered - Edubuntu appears to be mainly an even brighter coloured theme to the standard Ubuntu with a few extra bits and bobs installed by default. Edubuntu is targeted at a slightly different user base, however, being designed for school children of all ages and teachers.
I've yet to give Qimo a whirl in front of the kids, but I hope to do that over the coming couple of weeks and will gauge their reactions and post about it here.
Tags children, computing, education, kids, learning, linux, qimo, school | 1 comment
