Programming Rule #42

"Every problem has already been solved. It is Open Source. And it is the first result on Google"
--Ara T. Howard (I don't know if he's actually the one who said that first, someone correct me if I'm wrong)

I spent some time this weekend watching the Mountain West Ruby Conf's videos and I must say what I've seen so far has been great (now I'm really exited about the Ruby Hoedown). The session on Ruby Queue is going to be immediately useful to me in my effort to distribute selenium tests over a linux cluster. It's actually quite amazing that the solution I had cooked up approached the task of clustering from almost the same way--simply using a queue to feed shell tasks to an array of nodes. It's quite ironic in light of Ara's quote on Rule #42 and his project that basically sent mine to the grave.

Luckily my solution was only the product of a few weeks of work off and on. In < style="font-weight: bold;">it's that simple. So, I'm going to take my project off rubyforge and stick it somewhere else. The one thing that I really need that RQ doesn't handle is clustering with Windows machines. Since I need to run tests with IE I'll have to spend some time to see if this is something that could be worked into RQ. I have absolutely zero experience with Windows and NFS so I don't have any idea how much work would be needed at this point.