Mitechie.com

I'm working out how it's all going to work, but heads up that I'm moving my blog over to blog.mitechie.com and doing a hosted wordpress setup. It's not done yet, but I want to get things moving along.

http://blog.mitechie.com

This June is one year since I decided I was sick of code editors like WingIDE, Eclipse, PHPIDE, and Komodo. A year ago this month, I went to vim, and I haven't looked back.

This has worked out so well I've taken up other tools I never thought I'd really be using. Things like the Awesome tiling window manager, urxvt, and zsh have been changing how I work all the time.

Along those lines, I've started to use a DVCS I had said I'd fight to avoid, git. I had started out using Mercurial (Hg), and once getting started in projects on Launchpad, I moved to Bazaar for my own needs. Why do I need another tool. How many different version control systems can a person really use?

Well, I've done it. I'm a git user, most of my personal stuff is moved over and I've been using git-svn to do all of my work code management for a month now. I promised Jorge I'd do a blog post as to why I've gone this route and here we go.

First, the disclaimers. I don't do a lot of work with groups of people and tons of changesets. So I could be completely skewed. Next, I'm a web developer. My needs have a few gotchas that might not apply to everyone. Finally, as I've noted, I lean toward certain tools I find that make me more effecient, at the cost of ease of use. Vim > *

Why I'm loving git take one: named branches means one directory to rule them all

I LOVE the way in git you have a single directory for your project. You create branches within that and whenever you switch from one branch to another, the files in the directory are updated to reflect the state of that branch. The biggest reason this rules for me is that, as a web developer, I have virtual hosts setup to my various projects on a local web server. This is where my dev work takes place. When I used bzr, I had a directory for each branch and this caused me to have to maintain new virtualhosts for each of these. That management sucked and caused me to avoid new branches sometimes. Git's method makes it so low cost to create tons of small branches and keep working.

Take two: It's the command line stupid

I love the command line and the best thing git has going for it, is the command line usage. In Bzr I had a vimdiff plugin to view diffs in vimdiff. In git I just specify my diff program, from meld to vimdiff. The colored output is awesome, all of the commands are very verbose and provide great guidance and information along the way, and the log output via the terminal is just great and tweakable.

Take three: I just like the way it works

Hg and bzr are very similar. They are made to be very friendly to converting svn users and I liked that a lot as I got started in distributed version control. Git does several things differently. I like how it does storage differently, I love the build in things like stash and such (I know there are shelve plugins for bzr) and I like the staging area.

Finally: speed, hardy, and git-svn...make it complete

Work uses svn for our code and in order to get my cool branches I need a svn gateway. I tried bzr-svn and it worked great at first. Then the updates came and things blew up. Trying to get bzr and svn to play nice seemed to cause headaches and I ended up with a project I couldn't commit to because of broken plugins. Git-svn has worked flawlessly for me and when combined with the way branching works is much nicer for my workflows.

Speed matters a little bit too. It's not the reason I started using it, but it's very handy. I know bzr is greatly improved, but it's at a lot of complication. I honestly can't keep up with what type of checkout with what type of storage backend I'm supposed to use in order to increase speed of operations. I applaud bzr for the work on always improving, but it causes a lot of headaches.

Finally, my colo server is still running Hardy (hate mail can be sent to ...) and git is available on it. The PPA in launchpad goes back to hardy and it's great that I can sync things off to my colo server. Again, a small touch, but one that helps for me.

Fine, I'm a sucker. The image if from cheese on my T61 camera...it sucks I know. The black lump above my head is my cat Debian. We're just working on some Django tonight.

I had a pretty depressing conversation on Halloween. I was at a part with the head of a local community college's computer dept. I guess they've integrated the IT/CS-ish sides of things. I had wanted to ask how one goes about teaching a class as it's something I've thought might be a fun/interesting side project to do at some point. I know a couple of topics well enough to teach these days.

I found out they only offer one Linux course in their whole program. Then we got talking back-end and she mentioned that they're moving off of Linux for computers/servers the college runs on. What?! Why in the world would you do that? She made the comment that they can't find/keep Linux admins. So it's easier for them to move things to Windows servers and have the people on hand to run them.

This leads me to the chicken and the egg thing though. I mean, if you offer one Linux course, how do you train Linux admins? I only had one/two in my degree days, but it was enough to make me follow through with learning a lot more on my own. With so little exposure, it's not surprising they can't find the people. It's also not like this school is in an area where a ton of professionals would pick to live. Flint, MI isn't exactly my first choice to be.

It's definitely sad to see that even somewhere you might consider a "linux friendly zone", the education world, is a place where it's not always welcome.

We had another fun MiDevelopers meeting tonight. Our usual turnout of 7ish people. The new location worked pretty nicely, except that the wireless didn't work. Good food/drink though. It did allow me to test out the JoikuSpot application on my E71, which turns the phone into a wireless AP. It looks like Intrepid's version of Network Manager will do the ad-hoc connection ok now and a couple of guys were able to use my phone as an internet connection. Very cool to know.

I have to apologize for the iPhone hating all night. I tend to rant very well and had many opportunities to do so. When you feel strongly about something, can't help it right?

We had a nice influx of Ubuntu users so there was a mini-Intrepid release party going on. Half the group had upgraded and we were testing out/showing off some things. A couple of guys had never used Gnome Do so we had to set them straight.

On the programming side, we had a new developer show up. Matt joined us and was from the Farmington-ish area. Another PHP developer in the group, but also has aspirations of checking out this "Python" thing. We were all more than happy to explain to him how lovely life will be after giving some time to Python education.

Adam brought in his new netbook toy to show off. Very sharp looking Apire, I think it was. We also spent some time debating on how best to design a Tomboy replacement. Something that could exist on the web, on the desktop, and have access to via cell phone. The key though is to try to mimic the interaction and ease of use Gnome Do + Tomboy provided. A tough call. The conversation definitely has me itching to play with some code though. Some really good ideas tossed about.

Sorry for the late notice on this month's meeting. I think we'll hold the next one at the same location and bump up the date to be the Thurs before the holiday. So mark it on your calendars now. Have to block off that time to drink and talk code/linux.

It's pretty sad that Jorge got it blogged out there first, but I finally have in my copy of my Intro to Bazaar article I wrote for Python Magazine. I started editing for them a while back and it's been a really fun experience. I learn a lot reviewing articles, it increases my time spend playing with Python, and every once in a while you get to do something like write an article. I'd like to thank 'lifeless' in irc for giving it a look over so I didn't make a fool of myself along with the Python Magazine team for letting me work on my path to those riches I keep hearing writers talk about.

Wait, that's a running author joke? Oops.

The follow up, coming out in the November edition, is one I'm a bit more proud of as it has a bit more information. Make sure you get your Python Magazine subscriptions in order. There are some great authors putting out some awesome material.

I ran into this post talking about how he's always uploading files for people to see. It really hit home. In the past few days I've been uploading some custom tweaks to the Gwibber ui along with my irssi config for people to see. I launch my ftp client, upload the files, wheee. The idea in that blog post is that you could just have it things prewired to just launch any file you wanted and then return a link to that file.

That's cool and all, but I have a couple places I upload things. I have a different spot for work/home things. I also was reviewing an article on Amazon Web Services for PyMag and I got thinking, how could would it be to have the script be able to upload to S3 as a publicly available flie, and then get a link back to it.

So I started working on a new app I'm calling sendoff. It's a lot more complicated than that bash script, but it allows you to define multiple server locations, have sane defaults, and there's more to come. A lot more. I need to figure out how to display progress information, get hooks for S3 and FTP uploads, etc. Right now it only supports scp via the paramiko library (very cool btw).

It's already very cool though. I can now upload by default to my home server with

sendoff filename.jpg

and I can do it to work with

sendoff -h work filename.jpg filename2.jpg

So far it's been fun. My first time creating an easy_install-able package from something. So take a peek at it if you want, let me know if you see anything in particular. It's a lot of firsts in there so I know it's a mess and I'm working on cleaning it up bit by bit. Looks like I've found a better project for MiDeveloper meetings for a while.

What a weekend. I started off heading down to PyOhio. What a great little conference day. The place was packed and will probably need a larger venue next year. My only regret was that I didn't grab a drink before I left the hotel since nothing really opened up for a bit.

The talks were really quality stuff. I learned a couple of things that I've been really needing to play with, creating generators and decorators specifically. I loved the lightning talks while lunch was going on. There were some pitches, but also some interesting things. Mark Ramm did some great work representing the Michigan crowd by not only wearing his TG2 hat, but also channeling some Kevin for the Paver talk. All in all, it was definitely worth the drive and I can't wait for next year.

A couple of things that could be better though. The first was my fault. I should have stayed the night of the conference as well as the night before. We ended up bailing a bit before the end in order to hit the highway and get home before 11pm. Part of that is Michigan's lovely construction traffic though. The other thing I had wanted to do was get to know/meet some of the guys around. Since the talks were go go go, and lightning talks at lunch, I never really got a chance for that social interaction. It was much more classroom-ish. I think it'd be good to try to include some social time or something next year. This might be tied more with the first point where I should have stayed around longer and maybe tried to do dinner with some guys.

Make sure you mark it on the calendar when it comes around next year.

So I'm only just over two weeks late with this. I need to review the last MiDevelopers meeting. We met up at the Hamlin Pub which worked out great. We had wireless, power, and some liquid refreshment available to us. It was the first meeting and turnout was more along what I had expected initially. There were several people that had wanted to come that had conflicts in the end, but we got six of us together for the evening.

I spent most of the time trying to get the bzr-avahi plugin going so I could share my Django project with Craig who came. After finally giving up and just going the old fashioned "bzr serve" route we managed to get my repo over to Craigs EEEPC. The fun really got going then. Installing Postgres on a EEEPC seems funny, but it works! However, setting up virtuanenv on there, not so well. So no Django hacking today.

So the event wasn't a big hacking success. Several guys showed off some things, and there was a lot of discussion. So I think everyone had a good time. We ended up bailing about 10pm before the music got on stage. It gets just a bit loud.

Final vertict, it's a work in progress. We're definitely going to have another one. The last Thurs of this month is the 31st. I'd like to have this one somewhere around the Royal Oak area. Maybe over by Woodward if there's something. So let me know where there's a place that has

1. Room for about 5-10
2. Wireless
3. Beverages
4. Power outlets somewhere in there

I'm down to the last chapter of my second Django book, Learning Website Development with Django (very good by the way, a nice compliment to the official book). I've been pushing at getting it done because I have a few other Python related books pre-ordered right now. The book on SqlAlchemy is on the way so have to finish this one up soon. The other reason for crashing through it is that with my new MiDevelopers meeting, I want to get a project up and going so that I might work on it with some guys on Thursday. So I decided to rework my old spam thing. Some screenshots of the old thing are here. Basically, the idea is I quarrentine email messages marked as spam. In case of a mistake, I pull them all into a fulltext db and if a user goes asks where a missing email is, I can quickly check it, and if found, release it to the end user.

Currently the messages are parsed into the db via a Python script, and the web front end is PHP. It seemed like a good project to move to using all Python by porting it over to Django. This time I'm working on getting unit tests behind it, model sharing between the cron scripts, a new web front end, and hopefully I can implement the feature I've been wanting that will allow users to check their own messages by logging in with their imap accounts.

It's fun stuff because it's a bunch of new things. Django, using bzr full time for the whole project, and I think I'm going to try using Dojo for the Javascript on this one. So if you're going to come on Thurs and are interesting in some Python stop by and see me and we can work on this a bit. Who knows, maybe it can grow into something useful for other mail admins. After all, I hate the stupid spam folder. Ever try to scroll through the 5000 spam in your Google folder? It'd be much easier to say "I didn't see something on Tues I was expecting", and then go try to find it.