Week 220

This was another short week, post-Easter, and a pretty quiet one at that, especially as Chris was away on holiday in Australia. I hope you’re having fun, Chris.

SSL on a single sub-domain

Having been away on holiday myself for a couple of weeks (trying hard not to look at a computer), it took me quite a while to catch up with what’s been going on. To ease myself back into some technical work, I decided to pick up a relatively benign looking card about enabling SSL for one of our sub-domains.

Unfortunately as far as I can tell it’s not possible to enable SSL for a single sub-domain while not responding to SSL on the base domain or on the other sub-domains. Looking on the bright side, I learnt a fair bit about the SSL extension, Server Name Indication, and the X.509v3 extension for Subject Alternative Name.

P35 submission

Tom has been grappling with the mysteries of submitting our P35 to HMRC via the Basic PAYE Tools. It didn’t help that the HMRC server appeard to be down or overloaded for much of a 24-hour period, but he got it submitted in the end.

Ruby Manor 4

James A has been busy with preparations for Ruby Manor 4. Regrettably, I’m not going to be able to make it this year. It’s a shame because the list of talks looks excellent and the venue sounds great. I hope all the attendees enjoy the conference and appreciate the effort that James A, Tom Stuart and Murray have put into it.

3-2-1 launch?

Tom has been doing some thinking the experience that he and Chris gained on Project Los Roques and how we might offer a similar short engagement to prospective clients as a “product”. In particular he’s been thinking about how we could have some kind of skeleton application which would include common libraries to save time setting them up.

MiniTest extension

In another vain attempt to do something short and self-contained, I went back to try to finish off some changes to MiniTest which I started a while ago. The idea was to provide a robust way to run a single MiniTest test by specifying a file and a line number with the idea that this making editor integration easier.

I have the basics of it working, but I’ve been struggling to come up with the best way to make it available: pull request to MiniTest, a MiniTest extension gem, or something else. Even though MiniTest provides a number of extension points, it’s pretty awkward to define a new test runner extending the functionality of the existing one.

Heylist!

James A has also been keeping an eye on HeyList!. If you want to tap into the real pulse of the conference, you might want to consider following the Ruby Manor 4 list which currently has 107 members. It’ll be interesting to see how many people use the list on Saturday and how useful they found it.

Printer kits

After a short delay due to temporary difficulties getting hold of some Arduino Ethernets, James A has sent out a few more Printer kits. I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with them.

Anyway, that’s your lot for this week. Have a great weekend!

– James