I’ve run in to many different issues trying to build OpenEmbedded or recipes on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. The list kept getting longer, with fixes to some and workarounds to others. Just setup a new 8.04LTS (server) VM and all works clean, straight-out-of the box. Back to progress…and thanks to the Gumstix mailing list for not responding to my question, forcing me to give this a shot. ;)

I ran into a bit of an issue trying to connect a suite of Gumstix computers to my local Airport Extreme (WPA2) WAP. The fix is really simple; I just had to add a “proto” configuration in the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file:

network={
        ssid="yourSSID" 
        proto=WPA2
        #psk="your_passphrase" 
        psk=bf83f4c896110b115bee8ff77b372f844435108950476a51667dd1b4a97e5b98
}

The rest of the directions here are still good.

I’m sure there’s a lot of fuss over the Why He Chose JRuby over Groovy article that wormed its way yesterday. I couldn’t help but smile while reading it.

Having been a part of the dialog in both Ruby and Java/Groovy camps (including seriously over-heated mailing list exchanges) it somewhat surprises me that anyone would “pick” any language/platform in the blanket sense. Although I would tend to shy away from Java (and thus Groovy) I know it has its place firmly rooted in many enterprises, applications, and appliances. Ruby for me, and my developers, is more about simply doing something we like to do (very fast) and seeing a high-rate of success. The details are left for others to banter about, like Why He Chose JRuby…

I wish there was some scientific, empirical evidence that could quantify the developmental performance rates of both Ruby and Groovy. Any of you PhD candidates out there…sign up.

Here’s a thought: use whatever makes sense. If your developers have a rich background in Java, don’t push Ruby on them and expect great things. If your developers are willing to “adapt and overcome” throw a few prototype Ruby projects out there, providing the opportunity for them to grow horizontally. Whenever I come across the Java/Ruby arguments I always see the same thing. The Java crowd always comes off as ultra-conservative to the point of stubbornness. The “other” crowd always comes off as passionate and eccentric to the point of juvenile.

Parting shot – the debate/argument is more about the communities than the tech. Look deep into what’s happening in each, and who the players are.

I have a couple of “customer” projects hosted at GitHub – which are restricted to Private access. GitHub does a excellent job of utilizing SSH keys to manage developer access, based on each computer that requires access.

But, I need a way to provide “local” access to development and deployment code. One of my projects involves mass deployment of the software to many platforms (as many as 500 at a time). So…I obviously need to optimize the fetch/deploy workflow to accommodate.

What I’ve done is fairly simple, and has been documented under other use cases. This is just my spin on it.

Start with “cloning” the GitHub repository to a local working copy:

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$ git clone git@github.com:kitplummer/private.git

Since, my development machines are Macs I can use the built-in Web Sharing feature to expose a web-accessible remote shared environment.

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$ mkdir ~/Sites/shared.git; cd ~/Sites/shared.git
$ git --bare init
$ git remote add shared ~/Sites/shared.git

Now, I need to “push” my working copy into the newly created shared repo:

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$ cd [location of private.git repo]
$ git push shared master

There’s one simple step required to make the shared repo available (from the webserver):

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$ cd ~/Sites/shared.git
$ git-update-server-info

And, voila. There are some hook tricks which I don’t necessarily want. I’m choosing to just manually push the current working copy to the shared environment whenever necessary for deployment.

To get the repo from the webserver: http://localhost/~[kplummer]/shared.git

Thanks to David Goodlad for going to RubyConf and talking about embedded Ruby and taking the time to put together this lil gem called slider. Just too cool.

I’ve gone and added a few things to make it work for me a bit better – check it here @ GitHub.

Here’s a quick screencast:

I noticed the first time the video plays through – it goes really fast. Weird. Haven’t seen that before.