It’s been a while since I’ve managed to do a release of Rails-CMDB. This is mainly because I got stuck working parts of the test suite and I’ve been doing things that have kept me away from a computer.

However over the last few days I’ve managed to get an import integration story working, which seems to be working. I’ve also taken the chance to migrate to Ruby on Rails 1.2.5, but there are some DEPRECATION warnings still to dealt with.

I’ve finally upgraded to Leopard and so far I’m loving the following:

• Built in ssh-agent support.
• The iCal and Mail integration.
• Spaces.
• New look Finder.
• Profiles in the terminal.
• Being able to map network shares from the dock.

The things that have not improved.

• Using a real UK PC keyword is still not handled correctly (I’m had a ergonomic keyboard for years).
• There seems to be no way to change to size of unread counts in the dock (annoying for netnewswire).

I’ve also just spent what seems like an age getting my keyboard back to functioning correctly, after MacOS refused to do anything to change the keyboard type with the following error (also sometimes the change keyboard type button disappeared from the keyboard and mouse section of system preferences):

I’ve given in and gotten an account on twitter (this was mrpurpleduck, but changed since to geekyandblonde), mainly to stalk follow some friends.

Currently I’m not planning on using it much tho and as such I’ve turned on protected updates.

Updated 2020-10-27: Updated to reflect change of handle on twitter and now mrpurpleduck is someone else.

Untitled by Jon Middleton, on Flickr

It’s been a while since I posted and this is mainly because I’ve been very busy with work and also trying to cut back on computer use for the last month. Currently I’m managing to hold back on the upgrade to Leopard, however this is because some really important software is missing support and thus preventing me upgrading :-(. I’m hoping that early December will give me the new shiny.

Swan by Jon Middleton, on Flickr

While out and about yesterday afternoon we noticed on the Edinburgh Evening News headline boards that swans on one of the lochs in Holyrood park have been poisoned (See BBC, Edinburgh Evening News); Saint Margaret’s Loch directly below Saint Antony’s Chapel.

It’s been confirmed that they have lead poisoning of all things and they are thinking about draining the loch in an effort to find the source.

If I find out more I’ll post an update.

I got some very good news in the post this morning (well it turned up for a start). After weeks of waiting  I got the letter informing me that I had passed the ITIL Foundation v3 exam, which I sat on 27th September.

Really happy about this as I started reading about ITIL some time in May this year, just before I learned about version 3. All in all I think it’s a good improvement over version 2 and well worth doing.

It’s been a few weeks since I did any work on Rails-CMDB. This is mainly down me being busy and getting stuck on how to test the import of data. I’ve come to the conclusion that it really is an integration story, so now the problem is how to do the file uploads.

It’ll not be hard to generate a complete set of CSV files and place them on disk, but my issue would be how to upload them. Does anyone have any useful suggestions ?

Playing with manual exposure by Jon Middleton, on Flickr

While in the park on Saturday I spent some time playing with manual exposure, trying to get some sky shots with texture in clouds by just using the camera exposure meter and no post processing.

The best three images are on Flickr, however I think this one is my favourite.

There’s a story that hit Slashdot today about Debian (see bug #433869 not using the security.debian.org system to send out an update to the timezone data for a change in New Zealand daylight savings time.

The update in question is not a security fix, however having the correct time on a system is very important for security. Without the correct local time across all of your different systems (and thus having the correct timestamp on log messages) you will not be able to collate messages between different systems (e.g. routers, firewalls, other unix/linux systems) during an incident. This has already been released by Microsoft, Red Hat and, I expect, other vendors.

Untitled by Jon Middleton, on Flickr

Today I indulged myself by getting a new small camera rucksack. So I just had to wander out into the park to see how it handles, before going out for a full day.

Got some shots I’m really happy with including this one. The coming of autumn is starting to really show in the world around us.

It’s taken a long time to get this release of Rails-CMDB ready for release, as I’ve done some tidying of the code base, plus adding lots of unit and functional tests. I’ve also improved the the views into the database and added the notation of Environments within Locations.

The source code can be found here. Not sure what is going to be in the next version, however I would like to get a public Subversion repository set up when I feel the testing good enough to catch any issues.

Veiled Vestal by Jon Middleton, on Flickr

This is a wonderful sculpture which is housed in the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth House.

I think the veil looks so real it’s really hard to believe that it’s carved out of marble from looking at a photo. In fact I would say it really has to be seen to take it in fully.