|
Sunday, May 4. 2008
I've written about my issues with Zend Studio and how it's forced me to move on to try out Komodo as my full time editor/IDE. I did eventually (one week after submitting my support ticket) get an answer that was exactly what I posted in the ticket, which was recreate your profile. I never got any support or even mention of my request for some method of debugging the startup of ZS so I could figure out which files/part of my profile was corrupt, allowing me to salvage the rest of it. So I basically told Zend in the ticket, thanks for the editor since 2003, but I'm done. kthxbye
So I've been trying out Komodo since then, which has been a couple of weeks now and I think it's time to move on. There are a couple of big issues that I'm not happy with, but overall the editor is pretty nice. Definitely give it a try if you haven't.
The first big thing is autocomplete. We don't have namespaces in PHP yet, so I have a bunch of classes with lovely long names and I just live on autocomplete. Komodo does an ok job of autocompleting after some special character. In Python for instance, doing os. will get me a list of methods in the os module. However, typing out a constant I had defined at the top of my script would not autocomplete. I've checked the preference for "complete as you type", but it won't work. It also fails on inherited classes it seems. In my script I'm working on now I inherit from the CommandLineApp and Komodo fails to autocomplete any method in the base class there. It just means I have to go load up that class and look through all it's methods to find what I wanted. It wouldn't be so bad if I could have gotten the "Go To Definition" to load up the CommandLineApp code since I easy_installed it. No go on that front as well. I did add the path to the .egg to my Python path in Komodo, but I don't know if it can open eggs or not.
The next thing is a small one, but one that drives me nuts. I could not find any way to put the code tab, the one that lists the classes in currently open tabs and lists their methods for easy jumping around, to the right side of the editor. I like to have my project files on the left, editor center, and my function list on the right.
Finally, the third straw was using the project pane for doing any file manipulations. Creating new folders didn't seem to actually create them. Copy/paste a file and renaming it didn't work either. I ended up with a renamed original file. What was very strange was that I copied/pasted the file to a different folder. I did finally get a new folder to work by using "Add new live folder" whatever that means. Sorry, but while I love my command line, and I can do a cp && mv to get the desired result, it would be nicer/faster for me to be able to do it in the IDE. I'm sure I'm just missing something here. I mean, these simple tasks must work and the options are there to do them. Oh well.
So next up I think I'll try to get eclipse and use PDT with Pydev. See if that works for me. Pydev I liked so that part should be ok. I haven't tried PDT in a while though so we'll see.
Sunday, May 4. 2008
I've been trying to pick up more Python and especially some Python web dev more recently. I picked up the Django book and finished it a couple of weeks ago. I tend to love books vs just online docs since I can go through the book, see what's possible, learn the terms, etc. Then when I get to coding I have a general idea of where to look for things.
Overall the book was pretty good. I liked that it had several "Here are some common ways/good practices to use the tools." So it was more than just a list of commands, it actually got into practical use cases which I often find lacking in my tech books. It's a pretty easy read overall and if you're new to Django I'd suggest it.
As far as Django goes, I like it so far. It's a pretty simple framework when you get down to it. There are very few files required to get a project started and things seem to have a decent home. I've never gotten to be a huge regex guy, but I definitely know they're powerful and they take full advantage of that power to handle url processing. I do like that it means I can name my various view methods whatever I want vs the frameworks that use that name to handle url processing. The ORM is pretty simple and easy to get into. I love seeing tools like that using the coolness of Python. I'd never see you defining properties within a class like they do in PHP.
So my first idea was to port over some of my sysadmin scripts I use to create/manage my MySQL based Apache Auth accounts, ftp accounts, and virtual mail accounts over to a Django front end. Hey, I could reuse a lot of the code, but turn it into a pretty GUI with a web front end. Yay!
That's then things started to go bad. (This is a long post, so I'll put the rest on the other side...)
Continue reading "Django Book, done. First impressions...good/bad"
Monday, April 28. 2008
Finally, updated to Hardy on both my laptop and the home file server. I originally had an issue where installing via the normal desktop cd wouldn't update Grub with the freshly installed OS info. I tried it in both "Shrink my gutsy install and install Hardy next to it" as well as the just blow away everything and only install Hardy. I ended up using an alternate install cd which I prefer anyway and it went fine with that disk. So I'm not sure what's up. Both disks passed MD5.
So with the install, things seem to be going well. I'm working on adjusting to the Compiz effects and such. I had to enable the Pane control in Compiz so I could get back my desktop switching with Control-Left/Right. Gnome Do definitely has some extra shininess now. Of course now it's restore time and things are slowly migrating over from the file server backup to the laptop. It wouldn't be an upgrade without one thing going wrong and this time in all my rsync glory, I forgot to dump my dev databases I use in mysql/pgsql. I'm going to be kicking myself on this one for a while. It's one thing I've never forgotten to backup during an upgrade. There are live copies of the dbs so I'm not out everything, but some of the live ones are GB in size and will be a major pita to dump, download, setup again locally.
On another note, today is the start of Ubuntu OpenWeek. Make sure you check out the sessions and get involved. Now is a great time to learn who the person to talk to is, what you can do to help, and how to get started. I'll be doing a session on Friday on how to hold a packaging jam. So again, if you've held one and have any input on what went well/not well I'd love to include it.
Back to migrating things. Stupid databases. Ugh /me kicks again
Thursday, April 24. 2008
Wow is it crazy. Do Ubuntu has released Hardy. I feel horrible since this is the first Ubuntu release I didn't test in alpha or beta stages. It's just been too busy. I'm pulling out the external hard disk to backup my file server so I can upgrade it. Once that's done I'll backup my laptop and look at migrating it last.
The coolest thing about today (besides Hardy) was that the Michigan Loco hit 100 members! What great timing. We've since hit 101 so great job all. There are times I feel like for the number of people we have, we don't really do as much as I'd like. On the other hand, after Penguicon though, we simply rock. Our guys were heavily involved in the planning, the talks, and definitely the partying. I can't wait to see where we go from here. Hope to see all 100 of you guys at the release party on Sat.
Make sure you all check out Ubuntu Openweek. I'll be giving a talk on Friday on how to run a packaging jam. After the two events I've been involved with I'velearned a lot. For those of you that have run an event I'd love to hear how it went, what worked, what didn't to help me cover everything in my openweek session.
On the packaging note, I've been thinking about it a lot lately. The talk at penguicon was full, and it seems there were some competing events. So there's a really big interest in packaging. So if there's so much interest, why do I know so few packagers? I think it all comes down to learning. I mean, it's a lot of work. There's a ton to read, docs after docs after docs. So how can we make things a bit less intimidating? So being a web dev I thought, "Hey, what about online training. I mean, a web app can diff a known good debdiff from a supplied debdiff." So I wrote up a wiki page to work on the idea. I just threw up my first round of thoughts. I hope to tweak, clean up, and expand on the idea. So anyone into packaging give a run through and let me know what you think. If you're a web dev interested in packaging and might be interested in developing such an application let me know.
Sunday, April 20. 2008
Gnome Do has released 0.4.2. The PPAs are updated for both Hardy and Gutsy. So get the updates and test things out.
Sunday, April 20. 2008
I forgot to mention I copied the wiki page I used during the Penguicon packaging talk. For the most part it's a rip off of the Ubuntu Hands on docs, but I know some people couldn't follow along on the wireless and such and might want to go through it again.
Penguicon 2008 Packaging Walkthrough
Sunday, April 20. 2008
Holy cow, whirlwind weekend. I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. It's the last day of Penguicon, but I can't make it. I'll be getting Dave to the airport in a little bit. Which brings me to one of the coolest things about this weekend. Jorge and I talked Dave and Jason from the Gnome Do to come out for Penguicon. It's always sweet when you work and talk with guys online to finally have that first chance to meet up in person and really see how much alike/different they are. Even cooler was getting Jason and Dave together in person just turned every day into Gnome Do Hack Day. Which means some cool new stuff should be coming up in Gnome Do in the near future.
So aside from the house guests I was signed up to give a quick "Packaging Jam" at Penguicon. It was a bit different from the first one we had here. First, I was giving the talk. Last time Aaron Lake showed us the ropes and was the man with the knowledge. Second, this was going to be two hours long. Last time I had planned on four hours and we ran over to eight hours long. So coverage was going to have to be a bit different. The Ubuntu packaging docs on the wiki though saved the day there. They now start out with doing some smaller packaging jobs such as fixing a bug, then moving on to update a package, and building a fresh package as last. It definitely makes a bit of sense and keeping to only the first two stages should let my talk fit in the allotted time.
Now for the jam itself, it went ok I think. The room was empty right up until the last minute, but then it filled and actually turned into standing room only. There's proof that there are tons of people interested in packaging. People want to do it, it's just a matter of getting them on board and learning to do it. Hopefully my talk helped. Things seemed to go well, but I hadn't given this talk before and I was expecting a lot of questions/delays. I ended up going through the package bug fix and the package upgrade in one hour. I'm a bit nervous that I blew through too fast or unclearly. Throughout the talk people were leaving (but that did seem a bit normal for the things I sat in on) and there were very few questions on things. If you were there and have some good feedback I'd really appreciate it. I'd like to do some more packaging jam/talks in my local area and really want to improve things.
I'd also really appreciate it if anyone has a picture of the room, preferably when it was all full. 
Then last night we had the ars technica room doing lightning talks. I did a quickie on using iPython to do some quick scripting/testing where you might otherwise do some time wasting manual editing/tweaking. I'm not sure I had the right audience for it, but oh well. What was great was when someone tried to show how to duplicate my example in one line of perl code. After trying to match up all the ticks and quotes and back slashes, it didn't go. Of course I didn't help things with my remapped control key. The first thing I do on my machines is swap caps lock and control. Ha! Take that perl!
All in all a great time, long day, and it was awesome meeting so many guys I've never actually seen. I now have some faces to go with the irc nicks for the ars #linux channel and the #gnome-do channel.
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
I wasn't going to post this, but the results were interesting to what the heck.
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
2184 ls
1631 cd
560 sudo
486 svn
430 ssh
343 dsh
281 cat
273 vi
201 bzr
164 rm
Monday, April 14. 2008
I normally use Zend Studio for Eclipse as my IDE of choice. It's been nice since I installed Aptanta and Pydev for doing the html/css side of things as well as Python work. Having one IDE with the same color schemes/shortcuts/etc is really nice to have. It's a heavy-weight, but I'm ok with tossing ram in giant piles at it.
Last week though, my profile got corrupt somehow. I submitted a ticket to Zend since I've paid for support and even when launched from the command line, Zend doesn't output any debug info I could see. So my support ticket was "please tell me how to go about debugging where in my profile the issue is so I can launch Zend". Their response was "In order to solve performance issues, please make sure ..." Ummm, yea...performance issues. Maybe we should fix the launching problem before we talk about performance. Since then I've gotten no other reply which is frustrating and made me want to try out something else for now. It's so much work to get my profile going with plugins and such.
So I wanted to give Komodo another shot. I tried it once before, but had some issues with Gutsy when it was in Beta. I went with the free editor vs the IDE for now. So far I've got my things I like and things I don't like. Any tips/help is greatly appreciated.
Let's start with the issues
1. It doesn't auto complete build in php functions (edit: ok, it does, but it's so slow I never noticed it before) The autocomplete isn't nearly as nice as Zend. You can add comments to code with Zend for type hints, but didn't see that with Komodo.
2. No way to close all tabs, or close all others but the tab you're on
3. File names in the project list go xx...yy. I'd rather they just get chopped not turning the middle in '...' where those could be good characters to tell the file name from
4. Along the same lines, no horizontal scroll in the file list which sucks because often I'd like to move it over and work in a small section for a length of time
5. VI key bindings don't take Ctrl-C as an alternate to the escape
Now the good stuff.
1. Color schemes! It's not nearly the pita disaster Eclipse is for setting up colors. There are even a few schemes available online
2. Thank you split view. Finally use up that vertical widescreen space nicely and keeping decent line length is paying off
3. The ui is pretty nice and light. The default dark color scheme is great and the tab location visuals is really nice
4. Plugins seem cool idea, but they don't seem to work that great. It has potential though. The textmate style snippets here didn't work out. I love my Zend templates and want some method of them here.
http://community.activestate.com/forum-topic/better-textmate-style-macros-templates#comment-4740
and the view source tree plugin was cool, but I couldn't figure out how to move it to be on the right with the toolbox instead of a tab with the project file listing.
I've not decided what I'll do. I'm trying to see if I can do without the code completion so much, but PHP has a mess of inconsistent functions that I rely on the code completion to keep me straight.
Thursday, April 10. 2008
I got in a cool new toy today. I rented a Canon D5 with a 580EXII flash and a nice lens to go with it all. See, I got suckered in. I took pictures at a wedding with my old job's Rebel XT and they came out better than the photographer hired for the wedding. I enjoyed playing with the camera, but I don't know a lot. When I got my new job I lost access to the nice SLR and I just dreamed of one day talking my wife into one for our own house.
In the meantime another cousin of mine is getting married on a limited budget and they asked if I could take pictures just with whatever camera I could find. Well, I wanted to help them out. I mean, all that I have of my wedding now are my photos. Well, the wife is still around, but you know what I mean. The day goes by in such a blur, I'm really glad we got a bunch of really nice photos. Those are the things we'll look back on. So I asked around, and guess what? You can rent camera equipment. I rented the gear from Lensrental.com for a reasonable price. For a few hundred dollars I've got a week with all this gear. Now hopefully I can use this stuff to take some B rated pics for my cousin.
Now I have one week to figure out how to take amazing shots and convince my wife we need a major camera upgrade. I've got test photos going up here if you want to see how things are coming. Warning though, lost of boring pics of the same thing as I play with different settings on the same image and such. Also be warned that my test subjects are mainly the pets around the house.
|
