In preparation for the release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibdex) I’ve been running several virtual machines with the beta OS. I’ve created 1 virtual server each for Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. The latter 3 were created so that I could evaluate the different desktop environments in preparation for the upgrades of my own system as well as the systems of others. Kubuntu will be using KDE 4 and I was curious as to its performance and resource consumption. Xubuntu is aimed at computer with less resources but I’ve never seen a comparison between it and Ubuntu to know whether it is worthwhile. I started each server as a clone of Ubuntu Server and installed the desktop environment package (ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-desktop). I chose a couple of simple metrics about each desktop and came to some conclusions.

For system administrators with ruby installed on Debian and Ubuntu systems it’s time to upgrade those packages. Here are the security notices / advisories:

• USN-651-1: Ruby vulnerabilities
• DSA-1651-1 ruby1.8 — several vulnerabilities
• DSA-1652-1 ruby1.9 — several vulnerabilities

I was trying out some graphing libraries for a Rails app where I wanted to show some small graphs. I researched gruff, sparklines, scruffy, SVG::Graph, CSS Graphs, and PlotKit. Ultimately I settled on using gruff despite its reliance on rmagick which is known to be fairly resource intensive. I decided I would just jot a note or 2 about each one of these options.

I recently completed an evaluation of rails plugins for gathering statistics. I tried railstat, sitealyzer, and hit_tracker. To save the suspense I would recommend against using any of them. I had 2 separate scenarios: simple hit tracking for pages and web statistics for a site. These 3 plugins are what I came across in my searches. Here are my experiences with each.