Ruby/LDAP is a useful ruby library that allows you to connect to and manipulate LDAP directories like OpenLDAP and Active Directory. Unfortunately

• the library isn’t distributed as a gem; and
• depends on native LDAP libraries for its operation

This puts it out of reach for many ruby developers deploying to a Windows environment without an installed C compiler. In the past I’ve leaned on a few good Samaritans that posted pre-compiled versions, but unfortunately most of these have either been taken down or are really old.

So, in desperate need of an install on a new windows VM I just built it from source. If you trust our binaries you can download the gem-ified ruby-ldap build based on the latest 0.9.7 release and compiled using Visual Studio 2008.

unzip ldap-0.9.7-mswin32.gem.zip
gem install ldap-0.9.7-mswin32.gem

I’ve tested this on a few boxes, though your mileage may vary.

As I’ve written here before, we’re really big fans of the efficiency and simplicity of command lines here at Zetetic. We actively use them at points in the PingMe and Tempo are considering expanding our use of them, in particular to include Graphical Keyboard User Interfaces.

So, some interesting reading:

• Mozilla UI designer Alex Faaborg on the GKUI
• Introductory article on Mozilla’s Ubiquity project
• Don Norman’s article on the return of the CLI for the ACM
• Aza Raskin’s (Humanized.com / Enso developer) blog post on the return of the CLI

ANYTHING is possible in PL/SQL.

While I’m waiting for my Windows VM to reboot, just figured I’d mention that Oracle’s free tool SQL Developer totally rocks. And it supports MySQL for you geeks out there (POSTGRES 4EVA!!!!!)

It makes coding and testing complex PL/SQL fairly painless. It’s built on Java and runs on Mac OS X beautifully.

We made a couple of maintenance updates to Tempo last night, and added in a couple of features that numerous users have been asking us for:

• “Yesterday” date range selection, which we now use all the time.
• Inclusion of locked status on time export, a flag that some use to track whether or not they’ve billed for an entry already.