I recently ditched Gentoo on my notebook for Xubuntu (Ubuntu with the XFCE windows manager), after a portage block removed my coreutils, rendering it pretty much useless. I’m still a big fan of Gentoo, but will likely be using it for servers and not desktops. I’ve recently been turned on to KDevelop for working on my Ruby on Rails projects. Although not as polished as Textmate for the Mac, I do find it a nice alternative. It has a nice class view, embedded console and IRB shell, a pretty nice “find in files”, and many other features. I’ve been a longtime Kate user, which happens to be the editor in KDevelop.

(KDevelop with the Class View on the left and console on the bottom)

But since switching to Xubuntu, starting up KDevelop was sluggish starting up. I also had “the process for the file protocol died unexpectedly” error (appearing twice). Since KDevelop is a KDE application, I knew it probably needed to KDE libraries for different file protocols, kioslaves. So although not a dependency (which it probably should be), installing the kio-locate package solved my problems.


$ sudo apt-get install kio-locate


CSO Online, the web edition of the CSO magazine, has re-launched. CSO focuses on security and risk within the enterprise. We worked closely with Keith LaFerriere at Visual Activity to iron out a usable design. We think the results are awesome!

We also helped by migrating the content from a legacy CMS (content management system) to their current one. To do this, used the power of Ruby with some help by the popular ActiveRecord library to quickly extract information stored in a blend of MS-SQL and Oracle databases to a nice single Oracle database.

Chekout the new website at http://www.csoonline.com and the new site tour at http://csoonline.com/sitetour.

For our RallyClock product, we are implementing some simple bar graphing in our next round of enhancements. In doing so, we looked around for some existing plugins to get it done but decided on rolling our own. Read more about the plugin we wrote and how it works.

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