Over the past few weeks I have increasingly found myself unhappy developing Rails applications in NetBeans 6. While I was initially happy with the productivity boost from moving from writing applications in nano to using a full IDE I found myself reverting to using nano. The reason was simply that NetBeans was putting too much load on my desktop system. The system isn’t exactly slow (Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB RAM) yet when running NetBeans the system load was hovering between 4 and 5 making development tedious. Before trying NetBeans I had read a lot about various IDE’s and I decided to revisit that research. One consistent complement to Eclipse with RadRails was that the performance was snappy. I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to expand my Rails IDE experiences.

Single sign-on is the desire to have 1 set of authentication credentials and account information per user on a network. It’s a problem with which institutions large and small struggle. For large institutions the problems are often related to scalability and compatibility with large numbers of disparate systems. For smaller organizations the issues are often related to the manageability of the infrastructures. Finding a solution with the right fit for a particular network can be daunting to say the least. I decided to review what the options were to consider implementing one of them for a network with about half a dozen users and about 50 systems (many virtualized).

It was a disappointing experience. A friend of mine was looking to replace Vista and willing to entertain the idea of moving to Linux. So I brought over my Ubuntu CD’s and tried to run them. Although slow, the Live CD is still a good way to show off what the desktop will look like and test driver compatibility. Unfortunately the Live CD would lock up with a scrambled screen on boot. My friend was not impressed.

Encryption is becoming more common as users realize the dangers posed if someone were to get the data on their computers. The Ubuntu installer even prompts the user to setup an encrypted disk. While encrypting the primary disk of a desktop or laptop is desirable, I tend to use an external encrypted disk to store much of my data. To be more accurate I create a single large partition on the disk and encrypt that partition. I thought it would be useful, especially given the quality of information on the web, to share my process and some information about the options available.

I’ve been reading good things about the newest versions of NetBeans as an IDE for Ruby on Rails development. I decided to try it out and see if it worked well for me. the current NetBeans packages in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) are version 5.5. So to try out the new version I had to download it and install it manually.

Like most users these days I have many user accounts on various websites. Dealing with security can be quite an issue with so many passwords. A lot of accounts, say to a discussion board, are not too problematic if the credentials get compromised. For other sites, like financial or email services, compromise represents significantly more danger. It is wise not to use the same usernames and passwords on different servers for the reason that if 1 gets compromised others are put at risk. I find it’s best to use a password manager and generate passwords for various sites and keep the password file protected by a strong password or passphrase that changes regularly. I also find that it helps keep such accounts organized so I don’t lose track of them. I wanted to see if there was an application that would suit my needs using Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

A few weeks back I had my first attempt at recovering files deleted on an ext3 partition. The operation was not trivial but in the end it was successful. I’ll recount a little about what I learned, and share some resources and tips.