Well, only one surprise…
Don’t let the dormant website fool you. ExMachinaTech is not dead, nor is novi. I’ve been working on a related project and wanted to make sure it was a solid deal before revealing it here:

Together with the good folks at O’Reilly, I’m going to publish a title on Kickstart and yum. You may recall, I wrote a series of articles on this very topic some time ago.  I now get to expand on and update that material, all so you folks can get a handy guide to your favorite tools.

The work is now in progress, though the publication date is still a little hazy. More news as it’s available.

Get it while it’s hot! The crew at Dr Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) have published my latest article, “APR Networking and the Reactor Pattern” (November 2006 issue).

It’s a tour of networking code in the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library. I use the classic Reactor pattern as my example.

To celebrate, I have finally added the long-promised list of my published articles to the website. Enjoy.

GCC 4.x knows I’m getting old and forgetful. GCC 3.x, however, is less tolerant of me skimping on #include statements.

novi 1.1.6 fixes a coding error that caused the build to fail on CentOS 3 and likely other operating systems.

If you haven’t been able to build novi thus far, you may want to try this release.

As of version 1.1.5, novi includes source RPMs (SRPMs) in its output.

If a fair portion of your build tree is SRPMs — that is, your favorite repos don’t have prebuilt packages for your OS/hardware combination — this new version of novi will help weed out the newest source pacakges. In turn, then, you don’t have to build all of the SRPMs and then use novi to sort out the latest binary packages.

As always, you can grab this from the download area.

novi 1.1.4 is now available for download.

This version uses RPM epochs as part of the version comparison.