LDAP wrapper for ypcat, ypwhich, ypmatch commands.

I’m converting a site over to LDAP from NIS. It’s a legacy HPC shop with dollars on the line for every minute of unavailability, so there’s lots of stuff that “they”, both vendors and customers, don’t really want to fix if it ain’t broke. Converting from NIS to LDAP is one of those sticky gray areas, especially when you’re talking about decades of legacy. Fortunately the problem area is restricted to just administrative stuff — no end-user type of access was ever supported. Limits the machines running special things to just a handful.

Having taken a good look at the various NIS/LDAP wrappers available, none really seemed to fit the bill precisely in a clean enough fashion for my sense of taste… My airplane reading for last year’s SAGE conference was Perl Best Practices, and I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the quality of code that I’ve been able to write since then. Following some of the guidelines, such as leaning on Pod::Usage for automatic documentation, and designing around the data, really makes an impact. Writing code that catches error conditions and reports on them in meaningful ways is also a useful practice — I’m particularly fond of the beginning section that pulls in all the required perl modules in a graceful(tm) fashion.
Continue reading

Go Go Gadget Shopping Cart!

Well, with less than 90 minutes (45 reading the book, 45 of coding and copying) I’ve got a shopping cart running. I’m finally getting the hang of this Rails thing. It’s clear that knowing the Rails helper functions and libraries is going to be at least as important as being able to write Ruby code….

Continue reading

Wanna buy a book? Ruby+Rails+mySQL == my private bookstore

Although I had some problems getting mySQL installed and talking to Ruby/Rails (all my fault!), once that was resolved, it took less than an hour or so to get the sample storefront up and running.

I’ve always been a fan of incremental development and “scaffolding”, and Rails is the very first programming system I’ve seen that really, really supports this model, and damn well.

Continue reading

Hello OpenSolaris Blogs and Bloglines!

Thanks to Jim Grizansio, the OpenSolaris Community Manager from Sun, my blog is now appearing on “OpenSolaris Blogs”:http://opensolaris.org/os/blogs/ and Jim’s “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/jimgris site. Ok, I’m strange, I find this to be extremely exiting.

Presenting at Central Ohio Linux User Group

I’ll be presenting today at the “Central Ohio Linux User Group”:http://www.colug.net/. My topics today will be OpenSolaris and LOPSA. COLUG, although billed as a Linux User Group, is really focused on all Open Standards technologies. Anyone from Central Ohio, come on out. Also, if you’re within a couple of hours drive of Columbus, or if…

Continue reading

In defense of password expiration

[Edit: This entry was posted in 2006.  I no longer consider password expiration to be a useful security measure.  Please see my new post on this topic here or here.  I've also added some in-line comments below.]   Recently, as noted on Slashdot, Gene Spafford, author of Practical Unix and Internet Security and one of…

Continue reading

My First Code Putback in OpenSolaris

I’ve spent the last four years working on classes to complete my BSBA and my MBA, and I just realized exactly how much time it had taken. My classes are winding down; last night I turned in my last paper, and next Wednesday is the last night of class. I’ve been feeling a bit melancholy…

Continue reading

Ruby on Rails – mySQL and other fun

When last we left our intrepid Ruby/Rails explorer, he had just completed part I (chapter 5) and had a running toy application. He was preparing to create his first Ruby on Rails application that used mySQL. Of course, this would be the work of but a moment, because mySQL is always trivial to install, never…

Continue reading

Changes at Sun Microsystems

Just saw the end of Sun’s quarterly earnings announcements and the announcement that Scott McNealy stepped down as CEO to be replaced by Jon Schwartz.

To say the least, I am stunned at the moment. I never expected to see Scott step down. I’ll have to think on what this means for Sun, but I think it means good things. I think Jon can make changes that Scott couldn’t, because Scott was too emotionally invested, and it would be “against his nature” to do.
Continue reading