The Buckblog

If only I weren’t so busy!

There are several projects I keep wishing I had time for. I may start a sidebar to my blog to enumerate them, just so I always have something to do when my current projects terminate. (Ha, ha.)

• _An improved mkmf.rb@_. The @mkmf.rb library (“MaKe MakeFile”) is used by C extension libraries to produce portable makefiles. It works really well, except for two things: one, it has ZERO documentation (which makes it very hard to determine what it can and can’t do), and two, it is very non-object-oriented. I’d love to see a new version of mkmf, that is extensible, documented, and object-oriented.
• @Net::SSH::Server@. Yup, that’s right—an SSH server implemented in Ruby.
• Forum for Blog Article Comments. Rather than integrate comments into a blogging engine, have an external forum running that has one thread per article. Support minimal user authentication to prevent automated spamming. (whytheluckystiff used to do something like this…doesn’t look like he does anymore, though.)
• Database Abstraction Layer using Copland. Something like Ruby/DBI, only powered by Copland.
• Object Relational Mapping using Copland. Something like ActiveRecord, but using Copland to tie it all together.
• Tapestry in Ruby. Something like I did with Copland, taking ideas from HiveMind, except I’d like to do the same with Tapestry.
• Blogging Engine. Don’t get me wrong—Rublog is great. But I still think there is room for another great blogging engine…
• Ruby Plug-in for XChat. I’ve already written one of these, but it’s rather buggy and I think I could do much better now.