Ruby/LDAP 0.9.3

Posted on Saturday, 18th February, 2006 by ianmacd

I have just released Ruby/LDAP 0.9.3.

This is mostly a bug-fix release. The changes from 0.9.2 are listed below:

  • LDAP::Schema#names and LDAP::Schema#attr will now allow names with hyphens and/or underscores.

  • A warning about @sasl_quiet when run in debug mode has been silenced.

  • Uninitialised data structures in LDAP::SSLConn#bind and LDAP::SSLConn#simple_bind have been fixed.

  • Ruby/LDAP now builds properly with OpenLDAP 2.3.

  • Build-time options –with-ldap-incdir and –with-ldap-libdir have been replaced by –with-ldap-include and –with-ldap-lib. This is a consequence of making extconf.rb more standard.

  • The Windows build has been improved, so that it should now at least build without error. Whether it will work is another matter.

It’s good to get a new release of this out the door, even if the changes are very minor. I did all the major work I wanted to do on this library in previous versions, mostly for the 0.9.0 release. In particular, adding the ability to manipulate LDIF data was very important to me at the time. Now that I’m not working and actively using LDAP, I’ll have to find my motivation to work on the code from some other source.

In the future, it would be nice to improve the quality of the Windows build. Various people report varying degrees of success in getting the software to work under Windows, but since I have no Windows build system, I can’t really work on the code. Progress is pretty much restricted to integrating any patches I get sent.

As a longer term project, it would be nice to be rewrite Ruby/LDAP in pure Ruby, rather than wrapping the C libraries, as is currently the case. Ruby/LDAP will always have better performance than a pure Ruby solution, however, so that’s probably best started as a separate project.

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Sitting Pretty

Posted on Saturday, 18th February, 2006 by ianmacd

Yesterday, we took receipt of our new couch and dining-room table . In fact, if I had been alone in the house at the time of the delivery, I would have accepted the wrong couch, as they brought a much bigger one than the one we ordered, and it was in a different colour. Of course, I didn’t remember any of the details, so it was Sarah who piped up and announced, “Er, that’s not our couch.” After an extra trip back to the shop, they were back with the right article.

In the process, the ground floor of the house has been transformed. Our old couch, bought for about $50 from our landlord in Palo Alto back in 2002, has now moved to the front of the house, in what we have chosen to designate the sitting-room. So, not only do we now have a comfortable place to sit in the living-room, but the front of the house no longer looks so bare. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of work to be done before the sitting-room looks anything like finished. We want to get a Persian carpet for that room, plus another couch and one or two comfortable armchairs. That means spending a lot of time in shops, testing couchs and looking at carpet designs.

We had an interior designer come over in the morning, too, so hopefully we’ll soon get some new ideas from her. We especially need help with the lighting, as we still have a number of bare light fittings around the house. A hindrance here is that Sarah and I have quite different taste when it comes to illuminating our living environment.

The other major news yesterday was that the car dealer called to let us know that our new Audi A6 Avant has arrived from the German factory. They’ll be taking care of the registration paperwork early next week, so I’ve made an appointment to pick up the car up next Thursday afternoon, by which time it will be registered in my name, polished and ready to go. Exciting!

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In Camera

Posted on Friday, 17th February, 2006 by ianmacd

Sarah went out this morning to her first La Leche League meeting (you should blog about that, Sarah), so I seized the opportunity to upgrade Gallery from version 1.5.2-pl2 to 2.1rc1. The new version has lots of nice new features, including vastly improved security when it comes to keeping one’s photo repository outside of the Web server root.

On the other hand, it required the configuration of a MySQL database and, for some odd reason, this version has lost the ability to auto-rotate portrait photos on import, based on a bit in the EXIF tag. Why wasn’t this feature carried over from version 1?

Anyway, all of this was in preparation for uploading the long-overdue photos detailing months eight and nine in the life of the world’s most beautiful baby.

In addition to these two new albums, the Tall Timbers album contains a lot of new photos from our recent trip to see Fenella, Tim, Cameron and Willow, out in rural Maryland, USA. Some of those are really lovely, so if you’re the kind of person who coos over cute children, you won’t want to miss that one.

Phew! That should keep my mother-in-law quiet for another month.

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New Furniture

Posted on Thursday, 16th February, 2006 by ianmacd

René from Forma called yesterday to give us the good news that our long-awaited couch and dining-room table have arrived in the shop. We’ve scheduled their delivery for Friday afternoon. It’s going to be wonderful to have a comfortable new couch to sit on. I can’t wait.

We still haven’t found any dining-room chairs that we both like, so the search for those goes on.

I bought an Artemide Tolomeo Terra floor lamp yesterday for my home office. After unpacking it today, I discovered that it’s not supplied with a light bulb. I don’t know why I thought it might be. I’ll have to get one tomorrow.

The new house is slowly coming together. All of my books, DVDs and CDs are now unpacked and stored. I still have a lot of junk in my office, which I’m going to have to either throw out or move down to the cellar over the next week. The danger with moving stuff down there is that we’ll never look at it again, so that’s something we’ll have to guard against.

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Chompers

Posted on Wednesday, 15th February, 2006 by ianmacd

I keep forgetting to mention that Eloïse now has a couple of bottom teeth. I don’t get to see them very often, but they’re definitely there. I can feel them while I’m attempting to brush them.

She’s growing up and it’s all going so fast. One minute, she’s being born; the next, she’s smiling; soon after that, she’s rolling over; then, she’s sitting upright; before you know it, she has teeth! At this rate, she’ll be having her own children some time in 2007!

Even though I’m at home with her every day and essentially miss nothing, the speed at which the days, weeks and months go by is discomforting. Perhaps that’s because so much has happened in the last twelve months; I don’t know. We have plenty to do this year, too, what with furnishing the house and finding our niche in the new life we’ve created for ourselves, but I nevertheless trust that the pace will be less frenetic. After all, we have no plans to have another baby, move across the world or buy another house this year.

Yes, by the end of 2006, I do hope that it will feel as if it has slunk by more slowly than the year before it.

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