BenCurtis.com

I just released an update to Bundle Watcher this morning that may make it a little easier to get your Ruby gem updates tracked. Now you can specify a URL where your Gemfile.lock resides, rather than having to upload a file.

You can also now see a list of bundles that your tracking, once you've logged in via Github. This list shows you at a glance which gems have been updated for your bundles.

Earlier this week I released version 1.0 of the Faker gem. It's been about 4 years since the initial release of the gem, and the API has been fairly stable for the last couple of years, so I figured it was a good time to make the jump to 1.0. :)

This release finishes the conversion to I18n. Just about everything is in the locale files now, including the ability to define custom formats for everything -- company names, street addresses, etc. And, with the magic of method_missing, you can add new items to your locale file and have them show up as methods in the Faker classes.

The 1.0 release also settles some long-standing issues people have had with bad interaction between Faker, Rails 2.3, and locales (especially fallbacks). Though I'm not actively seeking to support Rails 2.3, I at least don't want it to be broken, so this release should cover that. Both Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.8.7 are fully supported.

Finally, I want to send out a big "thank you" to everyone (and there are a lot of them) who contributed code and ideas to this release. I really appreciate the interest shown and the work done by so many people who use and love Faker. According to rubygems.org, it has been installed over 400,000 times — over 1,000 times in the past few days!

Of course, I'm not done yet... next on the feature list is Faker::Image, which will provide an interface to all those cool fake image generator services out there. :)

Today I needed to spin up a VM with CentOS 5.5. My preferred distro these days is Ubuntu, and I had to learn the CentOS dance to get an unsupported version installed, so it took me a little longer than I would have liked to get it going. Here's the secret:

When asked for the name and directory of the install image, enter vault.centos.org for the name and 5.5/os/x86_64 for the directory. If that doesn't work for you, go back a step and disable IPv6. After that, you should be good to go.