Monthly Archives: February 2005

Only 18 bugs for MemberDB 0.4!

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Yes “only” 18….

although the “make installation procedure not suck” has to be the most important.

I’m very tempted to branch and make a 0.3.1 release the “no, it really works this time” release. mainly because there were still a few annoying bugs (being female could cause you trouble if you messed with the edit-member page. It would store it okay, just always display it wrong (which meant that it *looked* like it wasn’t recording you as female).

Hopefully I’ve stopped the javascript error box popping up on some platforms too.

BK emacs integration

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I finally got around to installing the bk-emacs integration that i cloned way back when. Seems useful enough. I do like emacs – some things I do wish were better (especially how to get started – it’s annoying having to learn weird keys for things). But, once you know it – it’s great! Very fast to navigate around and very powerful (and customisable to whatever you’re doing atm).

bk://bk-emacs.bkbits.net/emacs

although the web is probably better :)

http://bk-emacs.bkbits.net/emacs

A good quote from: jwz – Hula

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jwz – Hula

This is not only classic, but something that I shall now be thinking about whenever coding:

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Going Hoary on the Desktop

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Downloading hoary-install-i386.iso and will soon be Ubuntu on my desktop machine. There is no doubt that my laptop will shortly follow (shipping a kernel with benh’s sleep patch for my albook will make me an instant-switch).

The main thing I want to make sure of is that they build their kernels with sane enough options for XFS.

sydney meeting

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I’m in Sydney for the weekend for a Linux Australia committee meeting. This will be the third year I’ve been on the LA committee.

So, if you’re in Sydney and want to join us for a drink and a discussion – get in contact (la committee, me, or ppl on the slug list should know).

Lots to discuss and talk about, should be good.

helping in public forums

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So, what’s my deal with helping out in public forums?

we seem to all be a helpful lot at mysql… hanging out in the web based forums at dev.mysql.com (for some obscure reason, some people actually like web based forums. give me usenet anyday), or on the lists (like the cluster list) and in #mysql on freenode.

i guess i help where i can (and it’s quick, or a likely bug, or when it’s a good idea to clearly document something). Also, reading the forum/list can help me learn some stuff too.

I less enjoy it when it is “Distributing (basic) clue to users”. Especially when it’s just simple bloody obvious things. People tend to actually have well thought out questions on a list. IRC it tends to be different.

although i wont go and spend time investigating something for a list/forum Q. I figure that if i have to expend effort, then it’s probably something that should be put to support – as in paid support.

I remember asking for a fair bit of handholding into GNU Arch. But that is a bit of a “once it clicks, it’s all good”, and i was trying to get into it before there was the wiki and stuff with lots of useful info and stuff.

although this is just my ramblings and thoughts… will have to look up if there’s any actual policy on this.

over use of XML when XML is not what you want

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sometimes XML is great. Sometimes, it’s not. If GnuCash used a database (e.g. embedded mysql) – we’d be in great shape. I could easily extract stuff out of it into my own reports and stuff and it’d rock. Instead, I can’t and have to learn some other way. annoying. Accounts.gnucash is now about 700kb. That’s less than a year. Going to be lots of fun in a few years… hrrmm.

All this finance data is in tables. You know what that means? A relational database is ideal.

same with Gnome Time Tracker. cool app. Won’t scale at some point no doubt. Currently, i have a greater than 300kb gnotime-data.xml file. why? I ask. Surely there is a better way. How is it going to run when i’ve been using it every day for year?

On the other hand – using XML for documents in OOo and stuff is like the best thing ever (it makes sense). For RPC it still seems like a huge amount of overkill.

it’s another rant on ‘the right tools for the right job’