Guus Bosman

A plant in our living room is sick.

There are little things on the leaves and the leaves look wet. I'm not sure what to do about it but it doesn't look very healthy.

The plant is pretty far from the other plants and they seem to be fine but I'm worried that it might be contagious.

Is there a cure for something like this? Any recommendations?

Tonight I was at the March meeting of the Raleigh-area Ruby brigade. It was the first time I went and found it quite interesting. There were 'lightning talks': everybody was invited to give a short presentation on technical subjects. Most of them were only a few minutes, and a broad variety of topics was presented, very cool.

- Larry presented http://soundmanager2.rubyforge.org, a small library that makes embedding MP3 sounds on a website really easy and pretty
- Quick example of combining Ruby and Silverlight. Silverlight is "Microsoft's Flash" and is based on an ActiveX object. According to the presenter a runtime environment for the Mac and Linux is available also.
- Probably my favorite talk of the evening: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com. A concise overview of where these three languages are different in how they deal with instance variables. Insightful and funny.
- Fixture Freedom. How to get rid of fixtures in test cases (and why that's useful). http://fixturebusters.com
- CTAGS and RTAGS. I had heard of CTAGS before but never really dug into it. It's a way to make an index of important symbols in your source code. Maybe I'm naive here, but if you want code insight wouldn't it be time to move to an IDE like Eclipse instead of using VIM? (/ducks...)
- Data tables for Ruby -- similar in purpose to Matt Raible's display tag library for Java
- A 'public service announcement' -- a plead to not use MySQL
- A comparison of Subversion with git. Git allows you to have the version history locally on your development machine. It also allows you to make local commits, and works together with Subversion nicely. This looks like a really interesting tool.

The order in which the topics were presented was based on their duration: the shorter the talk, the earlier you were scheduled. A fun and useful evening.

This week it's been busy at work as we have a release coming up. I'm learning some new technical stuff, mainly around Ruby, and I did some Javascript work. To my surprise that wasn't too bad and I even enjoyed it -- Javascript used to be my least favorite language but tools like prototype and script.aculo.us make it a lot nicer than what it used to be a few years ago.

Today's been an easy day. I've been organizing some paperwork and I'm preparing to file taxes.

Three weeks ago Drupal 6 was officially released. There are lots of improvements in the new version such as better anonymous commenting, but my main reason for upgrading is to make sure I'll always have the best security fixes in place.

Stuff that I used to have a plug-in for, such as 'Pretty signatures' and the very useful 'Update status module' are now part of the standard distribution.

However, some major modules that I use do not have a 6.0 version yet. Most critically, CiviCRM, CCK and the Views module are still in development. These are modules I use extensively, so I'll defer upgrading until versions of those modules for Drupal 6.0 become available.