Posted by
Shane – October 28, 2008
I just used Git for the first time and I think I finally understand what all the hullabaloo is about. Git is a distributed source control tool being used by the Linux and Ruby on Rails community.
The difference between Git and other source control systems like Subversion is that there is no need for a central repository for your source code. Your code remains completely distributed amongst the various machines and people that are working on it.
I currently use Subversion to maintain my source code, but I am thinking that I may like Git better.
UPDATE: To install Git on Mac OSX (10.5) I used the following, graciously taken from this forum post at Slicehost.
First, get the source code for the latest stable build here, then:
sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
tar xjf git-1.5.5.1.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.5.1/
./configure
make
sudo make install
Posted by
Shane – July 28, 2008
I have been toying with a MySQL server at work for loading data from a legacy database and creating user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory. I am using linux along with MySQL, Ruby and the Rails framework. While I am certainly no über-expert at this, I am finding the task not only manageable, but altogether pleasant. My current workflow looks like this:
- Mount Windows share using Samba
- Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
- TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)
I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!
Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.
