The Third Bit

I’m at PyCon today — well, actually, Georgia Tech in the morning, then PyCon again at 2:00 or so. Look forward to meeting everyone!

Uncategorized

Rory Tulk finished his M.Sc. with me a couple of weeks ago, and has posted a summary of his thesis on his blog. It was a solid piece of research; I’m pleased to have had a chance to work with him.

Research

We are pleased to announce the release of Version 0.6 of Basie, a lightweight software project portal built on Django and jQuery. Basie is designed to replace Trac and DrProject; its main features are:

• Multiple projects per forge
• Role-based access control
• Pluggable user account management
• Per-project wiki with standard WikiCreole syntax
• Subversion repository browser
• Per-project mailing list and IRC channel
• A simple ticketing system
• Milestones and calendaring
• Cross-component search
• Dashboard summarizing project activity
• Web-based administration
• REST API for web services

Thanks to the whole team for all their hard work.

Announcements, Basie, Python

I’m speaking at PyCon on Saturday. The blurb I sent in says:

What We’ve Learned From Building Basie

Since September 2008, teams of undergraduates from half a dozen different universities have been building a Django-based replacement for Trac called Basie. This talk will present what they’ve accomplished and discuss what we’ve learned about getting junior developers who are juggling half a dozen projects at once to build production-quality code.

I’d enjoy hearing from past and present project students—49ers, GSoC alumni, and everyone else, not just those who worked on Basie—about what they got out of the various project courses I have run, and why.

Uncategorized

Cameron Neylon’s recent post about peer review is pretty damning. It’s interesting to compare his description of peer review’s faults with what peer review in open source projects does right.

Uncategorized

Jamie and Jim at Scimatic have released Samples, a tool for managing experimental results, and have blogged about what it’s good for. Meanwhile, the GridCentric team are talking more about Copper, their cluster operating system product. It’s great to see a couple of local startups creating such cool technology—best of luck to both.

Uncategorized

Mike Conley has built a little script to… “fetch a review request [from ReviewBoard], grab the latest diff (yes, found an easy way past the lack of API there), check out a fresh copy of MarkUs, throw down the diff, set it up with some Sqlite3 databases, run your tests, and voila – go to localhost:3000, and you’re running the review request diff.” It’s already helped him catch bugs that “just” reading code would have missed. Sweet.

Uncategorized

My daughter has a floor-mat jigsaw puzzle of the Solar System. It only has eight planets—no Pluto. I feel… dated.

Uncategorized

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there a tool somewhere that will automatically generate and validate all possible output variations for a Django HTML template page? We’re using Django in Basie, and have been running into problems when one branch of a conditional closes a tag, but the other doesn’t:

<li>opening text
{% if something %}
blah blah
</li>
{% else %}
Whoops, forgot to close the list element.
{% endif %}

I know that code review should catch these, but when the examples are longer, it’s hard to keep track of as-yet unclosed tags. Testing should catch them too, but sometimes people forget to write as many test as they should *cough* *cough*. So, is there something that will parse the HTML templates, generate all possible variations, and check that they’re valid? It wouldn’t have to generate all possible cross-products (at least, I don’t think it would), so runtime would be manageable.

Thanks in advance.

Python

Uncategorized