Astroblog

Branches Visualization for Gitorious

Oh yeah, I really like Git. Having a whole repository locally and everywhere is great pleasure. And branching and merging is great fun. The only complicate thing is it's complex revision identifiers. But I don't think there's an easier way to do it right.

For overview, I use Giggle, a nice tiny tool. QGit does its job, too. When you're not in a fixed team of developers a hosting project comes handy. I use GitHub for that and the feature I use most is the Branches Visualization. But there is a problem: GitHub isn't free software and that practically centralizes development with Git.

Enter Gitorious, an open source platform. It is a bit different to GitHub, organized into project/repository instead of user/repository, but written in Ruby on Rails, too. I doubt if it will scale to many users. But that doesn't matter as much as it does with GitHub, because if not everyone sticks to gitorious.org development will become decentralized again. Like with Trac for Subversion.

The feature I miss most is the mentioned branches visualization. I want that, desperately. So I worked on it last weekend.

You can get the code from the 1-image-tells-more-than-megabytes-of-logfiles repository. I hope merging into mainline will be considered soon.

I don't know much about graph visualization and was very happy when I got it to work that quickly. My intention was to make it ordered by date instead of the natural branch/merge order. This introduces some problems under the circumstances of clock skews. I hope that my commit sorting attempt has gone right and will look nice with lots of repositories.

It should also be noted that generation of these graphs doesn't take more time than the other graphs that are already there, like the commits by week or commits by author graph, although it produces a huge SVG tree instead of tiny PNGs.

Currently, the graph is being shown vertically in the sidebar. But I like the idea of having a horizontal timeline, perhaps spanning all repositories of a project. Also, the SVG isn't 100% valid as I introduced title attributes for the circles — a way to show commit information in hint popups. At least Firefox does it. This could be done much better with JavaScript. Feel free to fork.

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PEP aggregator

Einfach um die Welt zu inspirieren habe ich doch mal mithilfe von Ramaze und XMPP4R einen web-basierten PEP-Aggregator gebaut. Dieser wurde auch schon auf Planet Jabber von Dave Cridland erwähnt.

Er wird natürlich exzessiv von User Tune dominiert, da hier die allermeisten Updates kommen.

Übrigens experimentiert Twitter auch mit PubSub.

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SOCKSify Ruby

Kluge Menschen anonymisieren möglichst viele Internetverbindungen, die nicht auf Performance angewiesen sind, und welche Requests herumschicken, anhand welcher man ein Profil erstellen kann. Feedreader sind zum Beispiel ganz sinnvoll.

nulli fragte mich letzten August, ob es nicht möglich sei, jegliche TCP-Verbindungen eines Ruby-Programms durch einen Tor-Proxy umzuleiten. Ich schrieb ein Drop-in, welches den alten Konstruktor von TCPSocket umbenennt und einen neuen, welcher nach dem Verbindungsaufbau zu einem beliebigen festen Server eine SOCKS5-Verbindung zum gewünschten Ziel aufbaut.

Ich habe das Repository zwar schon einmal auf ruby-talk@ geschickt, aber es kamen keine Reaktionen. Deshalb veröffentliche ich einfach mal eine Version 1.0. Es muss doch paranoide anonymisierende Ruby-Hacker geben da draußen.

Da Releases zubereiten ziemlich Zeit frißt, habe ich mich nur um eine kleine Dokumentation und ein Gem gekümmert. Zum SOCKSifizieren eines beliebiges Ruby-Skripts genügen folgende Zeilen:

% sudo gem install socksify
% tor &
% socksify_ruby localhost 9050 skript.rb

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Jetzt, da die Affero GPLv3 erschienen ist...

Jetzt, da die Affero GPLv3 erschienen ist, denke ich ernsthaft an ein nächstes Harvester-Release, ist ja schliesslich Software as a service.

Danach sollte der Code aber wirklich ein Clean-Up. Im jetzigen Zustand funktioniert er zwar gut, aber falls mal jemand reinguckt, ist mir das eher peinlich. Dabei würde ich gleich einen schicken Datenbankabstraktionslayer benutzen. Naturgemäß greife ich dafür zu Momomoto, da aber einige Harvester-Hoster auf MySQL schwören, kann ich diese PostgreSQL-spezifische Bibliothek nicht einsetzen. Zum Glück gibt es für Ruby aber eine Menge Alternativen, siehe Wikipedia.

Ich hatte den Harvester zwischenzeitlich schon in C++ und in Erlang begonnen. Falls sich Mithacker finden, dann ist das Motivation, ansonsten gehts in Ruby weitaus schneller.

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Harvester: MRSS rewritten

Well, I always want to write more often here, but I'm lazy and then I think: I would be more productive if I generate some more code now.

This post is in english because there are a few similar projects out there. But I haven't looked at them at any depth because MRSS is the Harvester's core component and must always be tweakable to fit my needs.

MRSS was written when I knew just the basics of the three common feed formats RSS 0.9/2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and ATOM 0.3/1.0. Almost everytime I added another feed from a different Blog Software I've had to add further hacks to MRSS. It always choked on differently styled feeds with their various forms of plain text and markup embedding, escaping and inclusion. I also avoided most ATOM feeds because it was... broken.

A few days ago I turned Stepardo's blog to Harvester food and was once reminded how crappy MRSS was. Time to refactor. Time to rewrite.

I now wish to point the reader to the source browser for a better understanding of the following discussion. You can now see a pattern I tend to use very often in my small Ruby projects. I'd like to call it Intrusive Decorators.

A way of doing things with a class, here REXML::Element, could be deriving from it and adding functions. But in this case you'll also have to convert the element's children to that class. Something we do in XMPP4R everywhere, but it's hairy, especially in combination with a monster like REXML.

When your functionality is just a short-cut like in this example one would normally create a Class Method (aka Static Function in other languages) and implement it there. But that's way too much to write when you're just using it.

In Ruby it's possible to modify classes after their end. You just define it again, but this time without a class it derives from. This technique can not only be used to create such short-cuts like MRSS' REXML::Element#s but also to add completely new features to already existing applications. See my Ruby-SOCKSify mini-library (GIT, Browse) for example.

Please pay attention to the handsome function style that can be seen in MRSS::RSS::Item#description. Make use of nil, false and NULL everywhere and in any language!

So much talk but nothing that makes a better MRSS.

The key feature is object-oriented abstraction to distinguish between feed formats. This is the only and right way to do it, and now I really wonder why I didn't use it back when I wrote the first version of MRSS. Maybe because I concentrated on just RSS while ATOM support was given birth by Neingeist.

Hell, I'm really proud of that new code. Code which violates some basic OOP rules, I guess. But that makes it even more fun.

Feel free to show me (well-formed) feeds that don't display nicely in the Harvester and I'll fix that. I'm also thinking about some test-cases. Test data (thanks to fukami for showing me this once) exist. But I like to have the same content everywhere for minimal test code.

Anyway, it's working fine for now. If I'll touch MRSS again it will be kicking REXML, the XML library I know best and which has an easy API. But it is also bloated, sometimes buggy and handles namespaces & element name prefixes the way you don't want to handle them when processing documents with multiple namespaces.

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hacksummary.rb

When I read Josef's Hack status for a second time, I suddenly felt in mood for reimplementation. He did a 30 line self-contained shell script, I created a 157 line object-oriented Ruby script:

If you really want to take me serious, check it out with:

git-clone http://cthulhu.c3d2.de/~astro/git/hacksummary.git/

It can already do SVN & GIT whilst other repository formats can be added easily. I'm waiting to pull from your tree!

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