Since the Horde Project's successful migration from CVS to Git, I have become more and more impressed with the capabilities of the Git source control management suite. Then I discovered Github. Github is an incredibly useful tool, enabling developers to share and receive contributions from others in a surprisingly easy way. I feel strongly that this kind of tool helps fully realize the potential benefits of open source. And since every clone of the repository is a full copy of the history (including all branches, change-sets and comments) I have the comfort knowing that even if Github disappears tomorrow, I have not lost any valuable information.

With all of these considerations, I have moved the ldap2dns repository from Alkaloid's Subversion repository to a brand new repository on Github. Thanks to git-svn, I was even able to import all changes, branches and tags easily. Github also provides a wiki and downloadable files. While I will continue making announcements about releases here, the actual downloads and any future documentation will be found on Github.

Check out the new ldap2dns repository at Github: http://github.com/bklang/ldap2dns. Even better: fork my repository, make some kind of change, then send me a pull request. Your changes can get merged back upstream with a couple clicks of a mouse button. Cool!

Thanks to Github for this incredible community tool.

Over the last week, several commits have been made to the repositories hosting Beatnik and ldap2dns that have enabled IPv6 support in those applications. These changes come after several years of being on the "To-do" list and Alkaloid Networks is very excited to announce this key change in support of the future of the Internet. At this point the changes seem to be working, but feedback is, as always, appreciated. Look for IPv6 to be officially supported in the upcoming ldap2dns release version 0.5.0 and Beatnik 1.0.

Beatnik, The Horde project's DNS record manager, has made great strides over the last two years. The UI got the drastic overhaul it so badly needed. Some really helpful ease-of-use features were added like autogeneration from a template and one-click serial updating. Per-domain security can allow delegating responsibility of zone management to different Horde users. An, of course, many, many bugs were fixed along the way.

To take advantage of these exciting new features, check out the latest code from the repository for each application. ldap2dns is hosted in Alkaloid Networks' Subversion repository at http://svn.alkaloid.net/gpl while Beatnik is hosted in Horde's Git repository.

This is a quick update to talk about the recently released OS X Widget for entering time into Hermes: Sandals. Sandals was checked into the Horde CVS repository last night and is now ready for use. Hermes, the Horde timetracking application, can be used to track time against a variety of projects, clients, and deliverables (including tickets and todos kept within Horde).
Hermes achieves this integration by taking advantage of Horde's excellent inter-application API functionality. Sandals takes advantage of Hermes using Horde's XML-RPC exposure of application APIs. While Sandals is a bit rough around the edges (especially when it comes to catching and displaying helpful error messages) it does work well and can be used out-of-the-box. Check it out by grabbing the latest CVS version of Hermes and look in the scripts/ directory for Sandals.wdgt.

In addition to Sandals I wanted to announce a recent Codelet upload. checkubc.rb is a Ruby script that will monitor OpenVZ virtual machines (either from the host or within the guest) and report when a container gets too close to its configured limits. It will additionally send an alert whenever a failcnt increases. Check out checkubc in the Codelets section of this website.

Looking to add online video support to Footstops.com, I scoured the internet looking for an online video plugin for the WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE. Everything I found was very insecure, opening up dangerous tags such as <object> and <embed>, to the end user. I wrote mceOnlineVideos as a plugin to add Google and YouTube Videos but uses an image placeholder and replaces the image during output. This keeps the content safe from malicious users but still very usable to end users.

See mceOnlineVideos in action at Footstops or read more about it and download it here.

In other news, there have been some cool developments in the last little while. Ben Klang, an active developer for Horde, is now hosting the main CVS tree for Horde right here on Alkaloid Networks and Jeff Smith is opening up Realclip development again for use in a number of large-scale projects on the horizon... but I'll let those guys fill us in on the details.