User Reviews
Subversion: Why are you still using CVS?
by GrumpyOldMan
Subversion is what CVS should have been. It's no mystery that projects are moving en masse from CVS to Subversion.
Subversion follows the same client/server model as CVS, but is a strictly better implementation. Subversion's command line tools will feel familiar to anyone comfortable with CVS, and most of the clever accessories like Tortoise and online code browers are available for Subversion. It's worth making the switch for the
26 of 40 users found the following review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes | No
Ruby: Great fun, with some quirks
by GrumpyOldMan
After coding for decades, I've been using Ruby for about a year and am thrilled with it. It's my first-choice language for any new project.
The language is very compact and elegant, and you can express a lot of code with very little typing. Unlike some other languages, though, this compact code isn't hard to understand. Ruby code "reads" nicely, and you can write code that looks very much like simple English instructions.
That
8 of 9 users found the following review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes | No
ZABBIX: Gets the job done, but what a headache.
by GrumpyOldMan
I am currently using Zabbix to monitor a half dozen Ubuntu servers for a website. It does the main things it needs to do: it monitors machine status, displays graphs of various statistics like load average and net activity, and sends email in the event of disaster.
However, Zabbix is an utter nightmare to set up. The documentation is extremely sparse and often simply doesn't match reality. The monitoring web site is horribly slow and has
4 of 4 users found the following review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes | No
ferret: Just use your database
by GrumpyOldMan
I spent some rough times in the summer of 2006 trying to put full-text indexing on my website using ferret. Things may have improved since then, but I found ferret to be too slow, buggy, and cumbersome.
Every change to your content requires an update to the ferret index, and the index takes a quite while to rebuild. Is this because Ruby is a terrible choice for CPU-intensive jobs? I also found ferret's search result sort order to be
RubyGems: Great, a non-optional package manager.
by GrumpyOldMan
My opinion might fly in the face of the Ruby developer concensus, but the last thing the world needed was another package manager, especially one that you seemingly can't escape and that has very few packages.
The only gems most people ever download are Rails and its dependencies, and delivering that component as a gem really just seems to complicate server setup. I have to install Gems so I can install Rails? Why can't I just jump
2 of 6 users found the following review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes | No