tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-197652342011-04-21T12:58:14.663-05:00Small notes about technical related stuff I do, mainly OpenBSD and RubyGerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.comBlogger211100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1715861463039074212008-05-21T22:42:00.005-05:002008-05-21T22:55:06.297-05:00

binpatch is a ports-like framework for building binary patches for OpenBSD.Thanks Mike Erdely (merdelly@) for contributing to this release.Visit http://openbsdbinpatch.sourceforge.net to learn more about binpatch.Download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/openbsdbinpatch/or take a look at http://github.com/santana/binpatch

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-57357369586784510332008-05-12T19:00:00.006-05:002008-05-12T19:43:34.291-05:00

Ruby Inside is carrying the news of Rails 1.2 Release Candidate being tagged by David Heinemeier Hansson. Some of the new features are mentioned, along with instructions for getting Rails 1.2 RC.I'm glad to see that the activerecord-informix-adapter gem was finally built and published in the Ruby on Rails' gems server, as can be seen by runninggem list --source http://gems.rubyonrails.com -rThe

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-47518107469203649292008-04-26T21:13:00.010-05:002008-04-26T21:56:13.618-05:00

There has been an exodus of Ruby developers recently, moving from Subversion to Git for SCM. Being a happy CVS user, I was curious about what Git could offer for a team of one developer.After understanding the workflow used by experienced Git users and its benefits, I started to think the other way around: why use CVS when I can use Git.Then I decided to move binpatch and Ruby/Informix

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-88061421036358139872008-04-01T18:59:00.012-06:002008-04-01T21:15:58.106-06:00

Yesterday night Ruby/Informix 0.7.0 escaped from my hands, after a vacational sprint that allowed Ruby/Informix to get new and important capabilities. The most obvious one is the support for the INTERVAL data type.Actually, Ruby/Informix was able to handle insertion of INTERVAL data types already, because Informix accepts an ANSI SQL standard formatted string as an INTERVAL. Today, we can still

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-24343981535392634742008-03-27T21:14:00.010-06:002008-03-27T22:04:14.394-06:00

I was waiting for the next release of Ruby on Rails to say this, but it's taking more time than I expected.Rails/Informix was already imported in the Ruby on Rails SVN repository back on October 14th, 2007, but the activerecord-informix-adapter gem was not available as expected when Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released.Well, Jeremy Kemper was so kind to tell me on December 27th, 2007, that the 

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-89162664266675144712008-02-12T00:06:00.002-06:002008-03-16T09:36:29.579-06:00

Antonio Cangiano, a Software Engineer at IBM, recently posted in his blog an Essential guide to the Ruby driver for DB2, which included some samples of IBM's ibm_db Ruby driver. This driver supports not only DB2, but several IBM databases, Informix included.As Antonio states in his guide, it was not meant to be thorough (that's what the API reference is for), but it certainly helped to get an

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-21430500842845900262008-02-11T23:41:00.000-06:002008-02-12T00:06:18.308-06:00

Some weeks ago, Akmal B. Chaudhri, Senior IT Specialist at IBM, completed a set of demos about working with Informix on Windows.In part 6 of this set you can find an excellent guide, step by step, from scratch, about how to get Ruby on Rails working with Informix, using Ruby/Informix and Rails/Informix.Thanks to Akmal for posting this demo and for giving (Ruby|Rails)/Informix a try.

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-19414486374295895952007-12-05T22:17:00.000-06:002007-12-18T12:20:29.804-06:00

I have updated Rails/Informix to implement DECIMAL support and fix a pair of bugs that prevented the generation of db/schema.rb. I'm happy to say that on its 1.1.0 release, this adapter is mostly complete - indexes is still missing - and robust.By the way, even though Rails 2.0 is out already, the ActiveRecord's Informix adapter gem was not published. I have tried to bring this issue to Jeremy

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-42323649353673697052007-01-24T16:32:00.000-06:002007-11-01T00:41:42.377-06:00

Almost a year has passed since my last post and a lot of things have happened.I didn't quit my job after all and that meant that I could still work on the Ruby extension and the Ruby on Rails adapter for Informix, which have become richer in features and more robust.Ruby/InformixLatest Ruby/Informix version is 0.6.2, and has gained the following features:Use of BigDecimal for MONEY/DECIMAL

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1166418897185543452006-12-17T21:34:00.000-06:002006-12-18T19:10:47.063-06:00

Ruby/Informix is almost full-featured and closer to 1.0.0. Don't hesitate to e-mail me if you have any suggestion, comment, criticism, feature request, bug report or question.In this release there are two new major features added: multiple connections to databases and scroll cursors.The interface to scroll cursors provided by Ruby/Informix resembles that of Array objects for accessing elements.

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1164694250580185712006-11-27T23:16:00.000-06:002006-11-30T20:51:01.706-06:00

Finally, the ActiveRecord adapter for IBM Informix Dynamic Server is ready for its first release. I have tested it succesfully on Solaris 9 and Windows XP with IDS 9.4 and IDS 10.Eric Herber has been so kind as to cover Ruby/Informix at The Informix Zone as part of a review of database interfaces for popular scripting languages. The Informix Zone is an excellent resource for IBM's Secret Weapon,

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1163305389273355182006-11-11T21:39:00.000-06:002006-11-11T22:23:09.336-06:00

This is a minor release after 0.2.0 that replaces calls to free() with xfree() to avoid crashes on Windows XP SP1.I missed the announce of Ruby/Informix 0.2.0 which basically got new handy methods to fetch and iterate over records:fetch_hash_many(n), fetch_hash_all Fetch records as hashes. fetch_hash_many fetches n records at most, fetch_hash_all fetches all records as hashes. Both return an

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1144658411019048842006-04-10T03:31:00.000-05:002006-04-10T03:44:29.676-05:00

Finally!, after a month and a half of working on it, as my day job permits, Ruby/Informix is ready for its first release. The Informix adapter for Ruby on Rails will probably follow soon!Ruby/Informix is a Ruby extension for connecting to IBM Informix Dynamic Server, written in ESQL/C.It provides a convenient interface for querying an Informix database the Ruby way and bringing the Informix power

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1143186216914212242006-03-23T23:08:00.000-06:002006-03-24T16:36:35.633-06:00

Since my last post about the Informix extension for Ruby, I have been slowly adding features and testing it succesfully with real work at the office (thank you Rafael, Óscar and Andrey), at the point that we are already relying on it, for replacing SQR and ESQL/C (used for reports and batch database processes) with Ruby.But the point of writing the extension was for having the foundation for an

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1141452829241971852006-03-03T23:45:00.000-06:002006-03-19T18:09:25.236-06:00

I've been very busy at work, solving many legacy problems. One of them is the amount of unmaintainable, undocumented and buggy C programs for accessing an Informix database for generating ... reports. Another one is an insecure and unfriendly application made with an anachronic, unsupported and buggy application builder, with an Informix database as back-end.I cannot describe enough how awful it

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1141451056769681682006-03-03T23:18:00.000-06:002006-03-03T23:44:45.490-06:00

binpatch was conceived as a mean to create binary patches on one system with the intention of applying them on as many hosts as we need. It has helped me to maintain firewalls that wouldn't be able to patch by source (lack of disk space, CPU power, ...)However, binpatch was recently being tried by Mike Erdely as a way to create a binary distribution for OpenSSH. With a creative approach, he

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1135982107459362522005-12-30T16:29:00.000-06:002005-12-30T23:39:34.500-06:00

While refactoring a braindead legacy application, I needed to separate employees' last names and first names that historically have been stored in a single field in the employees table. Easy cake, even though Spanish names can be a bit more complicated than their English counterparts. Here is the regular expression:# matches 'Gomez', 'de la Cruz', 'de los Santos', etc.apellido = '((?:(?:de|del|la

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1134970780862091082005-12-18T23:11:00.000-06:002005-12-20T23:33:19.060-06:00

Learning Ruby has been a pleasant and rewardable experience. Since May of this year it became one of my most valuable assets for solving problems at work, replacing Perl.The need to understand how Ruby on Rails works started the quest. And it was such a joy programming in Ruby that I felt compelled to expand its use beyond scripting and web applications development.Some scripts were asking for a

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1134445706418975772005-12-12T21:26:00.000-06:002005-12-12T23:35:36.993-06:00

Maintaining other people's code is ok if it is well designed, with clear and up to date documentation. But if the code is badly designed (if it ever was) with outdated or non-existent documentation, with the aggravating that it is made with an old out-of-the-market closed-source tool... well, it can be challenging.That is my reality at work, maintaining an aberration, partially written in a tool

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1134333138199206992005-12-11T13:59:00.000-06:002005-12-14T01:35:27.760-06:00

Like many others recently, I've been touched by Ruby on Rails (RoR). It's indeed a nice framework to work with. I would talk about the beauty in its ORM implementation (ActiveRecord) or Ruby's dynamic nature that made Rails possible, but others have made it already, and way better than I can.Rails can talk to many DBMS, but unfortunately not for the DBMS I have to use at work: Informix. Ok, it

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19765234.post-1134281813894455872005-12-11T00:13:00.000-06:002005-12-11T08:13:29.656-06:00

The first release of binpatch is out. Three years have passed since the first time binpatch saw the light, building binary patches for OpenBSD 3.1 and four years since the messages that started it all.Back then binary patches for OpenBSD was a crazy idea. Nowadays a hand of different proposals have arised, each of them with its own particular approach. binpatch's approach is to be true to the

Gerardo Santanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17820570857823361035noreply@blogger.com0