Peak Progress: Category Code

Fixing Problems with Proofread

Tim — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:35:00 -0500

I've started working on Proofread again. I missed working on it during the flurry of wedding activities. My focus is on improving my ability to track and fix problems with the themes as Typo moves forward. If other people leverage the effort to help maintain the themes, then that is a big bonus.

I deployed a new page that in one view shows the status of all the various themes for each version of Typo. I'm calling it the theme matrix until I figure out a better name.

I also cleaned out a lot of spam that accumulated in the Trac instance. Apparently the RSS feed that I subscribed to from the Trac doesn't keep me updated on changes to tickets - that is where a large number of the defacements happened.

I'm keeping an eye on the cron job that was intended to run tests against all of the theme/Typo combinations right now, and after some work it seems to behave as planned. I thought I had that working a while back, but I thought wrong. Tests are no good if they never run.

Next on my plate is an RSS feed that will show failed theme tests so that I don't need to actively seek out the failures. Once that is done, it will be time to patch some of the broken themes.

Life Without Mail Merge

Tim — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 01:37:00 -0500

Kate and I talked to the pastor at church last night, and that means we officially have a date and time for our wedding. Not a moment too soon -- we're getting down to the wire. Invitations need to go out soon. They probably should have gone out last week, but why split hairs?

I'm the one with the laser printer, so it was up to me to print labels. I have mail merged using Office before, but I don't have Office installed on my Apple. I'm sure I probably could have figured out mail merge to generate labels using NeoOffice, but I just didn't really feel like it. Why should I when I had ReportLab at my disposal?

That's right, rather than spend time figuring out an office tool, I just wrote a program to generate a PDF suitable for printing labels. Want to know the best part? I think it took less time that way... 25 minutes. Sadly, I'm almost positive that getting margins and columns right in NeoOffice would have taken longer since I'm such a novice user of that application. Python is such an easy, productive programming language.

Bonus: this got me thinking. Why can't people manage guest lists online and then easily print out things like mailing and return labels? Does such a service exist? Where?

And what if you could marry up your guest list with mimash.com? Wouldn't that be cool to see the geographic distribution of your guests?

So much to do, and so much fun.

Rails Upgrades + Typo Themes

Tim — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:11:28 -0500

All of the Rails applications running on our dedicated server have been upgraded to the latest version, so we should be safe from the big security issue that was recently uncovered.

I wanted to get all of the themes that have gone missing from Typo Garden into Proofread. I'm close -- I have all of the screenshots downloaded, and I have stub directories for each missing theme in subversion. I need to chop up the screenshots in a few different ways with a (yet to be written) small python script before I can add the themes into the Proofread repository. That must wait until tomorrow, as it's already 3:00 in the morning, and I still have a day job. :-)

Proofread: Minor Revision

Tim — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:43:00 -0500

A couple of small changes made it into Proofread this weekend. Search actually works in a somewhat sane way, and there is an Atom feed per theme.

There are improvements left to be made to both of those features, but it’s a start.

Typo Themes Tagged for 4.0

Tim — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:57:43 -0500

All themes in the Proofread Typo Themes repository should now work with Typo 4.0. Most themes needed an update to their sidebar rendering and their head elements, but bash, sed, and emacs made short work of the task.

For those of you who like numbers, that’s 82 themes ready for your Typo 4.0 powered blog.

Browse the themes.

Bug reports for the themes.

Bug reports for the catalog.

Proofread Progress

Tim — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:16:00 -0500

I was a big geek on Friday night. I stayed up for the better part of the night working on Proofread. My time was split between working on the code that runs the back end of the system and getting the rest of the themes still available from Typo Garden into the the repository.

Amazingly most of the themes work for the trunk version of Typo, which means that people waiting for Typo 4.0 to make its debut will have plenty of themes to choose from. The unfortunate news is that this batch of working themes is a complete accident, and we still need to apply the fix if we want to make sure that the themes will continue to work as development proceeds.

Lots of work left to be done, but today I spent the afternoon driving to open houses, and my evening was consumed with cleaning my own house for potential home buyers.

Flailing, Failing, Finally Success!

Tim — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 01:26:00 -0500

Most everyone knew a kid growing up that could draw. I mean, really draw. Draw so well that you felt like a three year old with an extra large, extra blunt crayon in comparison. Jason, my cousin, was that kid for me. He could so naturally draw ninjas, or turtles, or Ninja Turtlesthat I would get frustrated and give up. But while I would give up to play Nintendo, he just kept drawing. And because he kept drawing, he kept getting better.

Some people think I'm a really competent computer programmer. Thanks, Dad! Self deprecation aside, here's my secret: I am unabashedly optimistic, and I love the act and results of programming. I get restless when I can't code for days at a time. When I started an internship back in 2000 my skills included HTML, basic C/C++, and StarCraft. A few months in to the job, they asked if I knew Java. "Sure!" was my optimistic reply. I knew that Java looked a whole lot like the C++ and JavaScript that I already knew... how hard could it be? What couldn't I learn after a few evenings with Java in a Nutshell?

Lesson learned, there's a lot of nuance to the language. This was only my second full blown programming language, and I had a lot of computer science fundamentals left to learn. Ends up that I hadn't even grasped the basic concepts of object oriented programming, even though there was that one chapter that we skimmed on the subject in CS211. You know, when Dr. George didn't take over the lab monitors to keep us from surfing the net. After those few evenings with Java in a Nutshell, I was writing web applications inJava that read like C programs, complete with inline HTML. It was awesome. Since then I've accidentally crashed application servers and brought down networks with my code. Great, great times! I like to thank my network engineers and system administrators often for their forgiving nature.

Six years later, and I have two more languages firmly under my belt, plus a much deeper understanding of Java that will no longer fit in a nutshell. Once again, it was optimism that pushed me toward growth and learning. One weekend in 2001 I decided that Java wasnot sufficiently geeky, and I needed to learn Python. Five years later and I'm still writing Python, although I cringe when I see what I wrote in the beginning. One and a half years ago I learned about Ruby on Rails, and again, over a weekend I was hooked. My first Rails applications had dumb design decisions baked in. So do my most recent Rails applications, but the decisions are getting less dumb all the time.

Right now I am planning an application with a friend. Our feature list is long, and while many of the features are useful, the list of truly required features is short. So why are we adding things like Jabber and IRC integration into our pet project? Because we've never done those things before, and we're optimistic that it'll be cake managing those integrations.

Everything skillful that we do is learned. EVERYTHING. Talent helps, but talent will only get someone so far. Jason wasn't born with a pencil and eraser in hand, and I wasn't born typing at a Commodore 64. Practice and experience mold our abilities, so unless we are willing to flail about and fail as we experience and practice something new we will never progress to the top end of thelearning curve.

Go out there and break something, preferably your pride, on your path of growth. It is natural and necessary.

Proofread, Rough Draft

Tim — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 02:25:55 -0500

It’s been tough finding time to code between lounging in Santa Barbara, attending weddings, and figuring out how to buy a new house and sell the current house.

With that in mind, I’ve put up a first attempt at a theme catalog for the Typo weblog system. I’m calling it Proofread because eventually all themes will be tested against all versions of Typo and the results will be made available within the catalog. That way when you see a nice theme you’ll know if it will work with your Typo version X powered blog.

The biggest problem for now is that only my own themes are in the catalog. Oh, and some things just don’t work yet. Definitely a work in progress, but you can pitch in and help if you’d like.

More New Software: SparkliPy

Tim — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:52:00 -0500

I’m working on yet another piece of software to complement GOODCalc. It’s a sparkline generator for Python that I’m calling SparkliPy. It’s brand new, and as such it needs a good deal of improvement and documentation, but by releasing it now I will be sufficiently motivated to keep improving it. Some people might consider the early release to be an amateur move. I have seen evidence from my own cubicle that software is never really done, so why wait for some magic moment that may never come?

You can read the original SparkliPy announcement, or go straight to the SparkliPy project page.

A New Series of Tutorials on Prototype

Tim — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 23:38:00 -0500

I just wrote a tutorial on the Prototype JavaScript library in response to a conversation that I had at work today. I already have a few more ideas up my sleeve to expand the series, so now the trick will be finding time to write.

Check out Prototype for the Proto-Programmer, and the companion example page.

So now that you’ve checked it out, did you like it? Let me know!