April 21st, 2008
This is pretty exciting. I have never bothered about Google’s Summer of Code and have literally been forced (curse you, Kumar) to propose my project I’m working on.
And in the end I have a promising student and Google accepted our proposal. Watching #gsoc while everybody was waiting whether they got accepted caused more traffic than #freenode-newyears. Looking forward to days and nights of my spare time vanish for a fancy T-shirt.
Nah, seriously. A lot of people have asked for an easy-to-handle web-enabled package repository. It will surely be very helpful as a clean and featureful basis for mentors.debian.net as well as the replacement for PPAs and REVU. And this will be my first large open-source Pylons project, too. I’m excited.
Posted in Debian, Pylons, debexpo | No Comments »
February 18th, 2008
I really don’t mind if Debian lags behind with package versions. And I’ve gotten used to running an ancient version of “pgadmin3″ (the GUI client for PostgreSQL). But now that I upgraded a few pgsql servers from 8.2 to 8.3 and started pgadmin3 I was surprised - in a not at all fun way. Several warnings were displayed. Googling a little I found the cause:
“pgAdmin 1.6.x doesn’t support PostgreSQL 8.3.x. Upgrade to 1.8″
How funny. pgadmin3 in Debian depends on wxwidgets and apparently the current version of wxwidgets didn’t make it into Sid for stability reasons or whatever. So now I’m running into trouble with PostgreSQL 8.3. Somehow I can’t laugh about that. Alright… downgrading to 8.2 again. Is that even possible? Okay, pg_dropcluster and get my backup tapes out.
Posted in Work, Debian | 5 Comments »
January 15th, 2008
Since I started playing with Javascript about a year ago I became aware of a pretty large number of Javascript libraries that offer additional functions or even widgets for a nicer user interface. I had started with prototype/script.aculo.us because it was included by Pylons. But when I found out that I’m not really bound to it I started looking around in my usual pointless search for “the perfect tool” ™. Finally I stranded with jQuery and I fell in love with it quickly. Give me results quickly and I’m willing to dig into the more subtle parts of something.
Sure, other people told me that jQuery is lame and Dojo is it or YUI (the Yahoo UI library) or even ExtJS. ExtJS? Yes, I looked at that before. Very impressive demos like the “Web Desktop”. I didn’t want to write anything like that though so I enjoyed it as a proof-of-concept and was done with it. But somehow one of my current projects requires a “grid” - that is a table that acts as a paginator (you get shown chunks of data and can navigate back and forth) but allows you to select rows and run actions. Perhaps I would also need a tree view. ExtJS supported all that so I dumped jQuery for a moment and created a (Mercurial) branch of my project to try out ExtJS.
There were instantly a few things I didn’t like. The whole Javascript was 500 KB large. Hardly something I could use on a production web site. Imagine a >500 KB start page. I also had to throw away my CSS for a moment and use their stylesheet - with 850 not-documented classes. Anyway - I surrendered to that and started playing with ExtJS. Strangely loading the page took 10 seconds in Firefox. After some research I found out that there was a bug in FireBug (a Firefox extension that web developers can hardly live without) with large Javascript files. Yes, 500 KB is large. Finally I found a hacked version of it that disabled a few features just to work better with ExtJS.
So finally my application loaded the Ext-all.js (the documented order and list of files I had to include was wrong) and could copy/paste a grid example into my application. One day later it worked. I had defined Stores, Proxies, ColumnModels, Actions, GridPanels and PagingToolbars and after 150 lines of Javascript I finally loaded JSON data from my web service (running on Pylons) and had the grid fill with it. I better hadn’t looked into the generated HTML - made me dizzy looking at all the nested DIVs and TABLEs. My Pylons code was just 5-10 lines though. It was an adventure of surfing through the API documentation of ExtJS that is complete but unusable to me. It defines all possible parameters and options but those are inherited from one another, some aren’t documented because they are “common” and you hardly get an impression on what they mean or how to use them. There were nice examples and everything they did was well documented. But that didn’t help me do more than that. Even doing server-side sorting of the JSON data meant firing up FireBug and watching the parameters - I had expected that to be documented somewhere.
Finally I decided not to work with ExtJS any more. If my application consists of 90-95% Javascript and 5-10% Python/Pylons then I’m not spending my time as intended. Using ExtJS basically means surrendering to it. Just use their library and style sheet and change as little as possible. 500 KB Javascript and 850 CSS styles are pure bloat. And while their license is basically the LGPL they have some weird additional clauses in their license like you can’t use their theme graphics and styles outside of the ExtJS context. I understand that a library of such a quality can’t be maintained by a handful of volunteers. So I see that they want to make money with it if others start making money with it. But somehow it was too much legal stuff for me. I prefer software that is just free. MIT or BSD. Or even GPL - I don’t mind. (Everytime you complain about the complicated licensing you are pointed to their license consultants to convince you.
).
It’s a great library. It has great widgets. It even creates HTML that is strictly valid in all browsers I could find. But I was not ready to surrender my application to ExtJS. I wanted a grid to support my application. Fortunately I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel because Matt Knight has recently published his Ingrid grid plugin for jQuery serving me well. And another (ridiculous) point for jQuery: it has mailing lists. ExtJS has a web forum. I hate web forums. Some people say mailing lists are archaic. But I can delete threads or blacklist people or reply properly in a text format. Morale: the flashiest isn’t always the best - neither for the user nor for the developer.
Posted in Work, Open-Source, Pylons, Programming | 1 Comment »
December 30th, 2007
My wife is a pretty good paintress and for Xmas painted a Debian logo at the wall of my basement terminal room. Now that’s comfy. 
Posted in Debian, House | 6 Comments »
December 22nd, 2007
Just wanted to drop a tip on you about the Firefox keyword search feature. I use it to quickly access packages.debian.org on package information or to retrieve the BTS page for a bug number. With it you can use “bts 123456″ instead of “http://bugs.debian.org/123456″. May not appear much shorter but I like it anyway. Here an example on how to add a search keyword for packages.debian.org:
- Locate a search form (like on packages.debian.org), set all the select options like you want (e.g. only package in “unstable” and from “main”) and then right-click on the actual text field where you enter the search query and select “add a keyword for this search”:

- Give the bookmark a name (does not matter) and the keyword (should be short):

- Now you can use that keyword in the location bar (where you normally type the URL you want to surf to) and add the word that you search for:

- You will be redirected to http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=cream&mode=path&suite=stable&arch=any
So basically getting the package page for this “cream” package means pressing Ctrl-L to highlight the location bar and just enter “pdo cream” and pressing Enter.
For me that was the second most valuable tip when using Firefox. The best tip would probably be how to make that monster take less than 10 seconds to react to mouse clicks on the menus when you have 20 tabs open simultaneously and to consume less than ridiculous 500 MB RAM or freeze up every minute when you use flashy sites like youtube. I really wish 3.x will finally fix that.
P.S. I wonder why wordpress shrinks all my images. I hope you can still guess what I meant.
Posted in Work, Debian, Open-Source, Find | 3 Comments »