red5, mod_flex and enhost and more

The other day I updated the red5 ebuild to the most recent version (0.6.1). The red5 release team keeps me informed of releases just before they happen so that we can stay fairly up-to-date… neat!

The company I work for develops learning tools using flash and flex2. For this reason I tried to create an ebuild for mod_flex – an apache module which compiles adobe flex code (.mxml) on the fly… which is great, as you get a .swf back and thus it is much easier to test things during development. Adobe originally provided an installer for the apache module – a horrible idea, as the installer required java and a X terminal and was generally broken (for me). Upon (not only) my complaint, Adobe now distributes a plain old zip file and thus a mod_flex ebuild is a reality. Installer programs are so 1990ies..

enhost – a program which adds system facts (collected using facter from the same author) into a ldap database – is not in the tree (yet) but I’ve added it to my overlay. Great concept – although enhost could need some love. I am currently investigating server inventory systems for which enhost (or a similar program) could be pretty helpful. This morning I found nVentory which looks promising.

Both facter, enhost and nVentory are written in Ruby. nVentory is web-based and thus uses Rails. In an effort to try to grasp this language I have created some scripts which check the metadata of the portage tree. In turn this resulted in a spree of herd fixing… Thus far I enjoy Ruby and I would not mind doing more with it.

With exams out of the door – I plan on being more present in the community (IRC – uhu)… lets see how that works out.