Will's blog

I volunteered at ROFLCon yesterday and today. The whole experience was really surreal but fantastic! I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions I attended while "on duty" and the new friends I made. I also came home with a sticker that says "Bacon is a vegetable". That sums that up.

A couple of days ago, I did a dist-upgrade on my server which runs Debian. I'm not sure what version I had prior to the upgrade, but after the upgrade I'm at 1.6.2. The problem is that the wiki syntax is different, so my wiki data was mildly hosed. I ended up spending 45 minutes to an hour trying to figure out how to migrate the data.

The magic script is /usr/share/python-support/python-moinmoin/MoinMoin/script/moin.py . You need to run it like this:

$ ./moin.py --config-dir=/path/to/wikiconfig.py/dir/ migration data

The other problem I had is that I had no meta file in my data directory and so the moin.py script would die with a stack trace like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./moin.py", line 24, in ?
    run()
  File "./moin.py", line 15, in run
    MoinScript().run(showtime=0)
  File "./../../MoinMoin/script/__init__.py", line 138, in run
    self.mainloop()
  File "./../../MoinMoin/script/__init__.py", line 251, in mainloop
    plugin_class(args[2:], self.options).run() # all starts again there
  File "./../../MoinMoin/script/__init__.py", line 138, in run
    self.mainloop()
  File "./../../MoinMoin/script/migration/data.py", line 44, in mainloop
    curr_rev = meta['data_format_revision']
  File "./../../MoinMoin/wikiutil.py", line 472, in __getitem__
    return dict.__getitem__(self, key)
KeyError: 'data_format_revision'

I assumed that I had some version of 1.5 previously and so I created a meta file with this in it:

data_format_revision: 01050800

After doing that, the moin.py script worked nicely and all my wiki data is in the correct syntax now.

Updated: 4/26/2008 - Fixed some grammar to make the meta file creation step clearer.

I'm trying to get Ubuntu Hardy support for Miro. I installed Hardy Beta 1 in a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The install went fine. I had problems fixing the resolution, though.

Hardy starts off with an 800x600 resolution which is too small to run Miro. To fix it, you have to:

1. run sudo displayconfig-gtk from a terminal
2. click on the dropdown for models and choose LCD Panel 1024x768
3. click on the Test button to make sure it works
4. click on the OK button to apply that one change
5. log off
6. log on again

DON'T change the monitor AND the resolution of the screen at the same time. If you do that, you see no errors, no changes get made, and you'll spend a while scratching your head wondering what happened.

If all went well, you should see the resolution you were looking for.

Note that since Ubuntu Hardy is beta software, this could all change tomorrow.

Updated: 4/19/2008 - It looks like they took displayconfig-gtk out of the menus in the Hardy release candidate so I updated the instructions above.

Sold the first guitar I ever bought today. I'm a little bummed about it because of the sentimental value it had, but I have to get rid of things to balance out getting new things. I'm trying to use mark and sweep garbage collection on my stuff. The unfortunate part is that I'm a very very slow CPU and it takes ages to do a single pass.

I spent the better part of my youth doing Oddessey of the Mind (which has gone through some difficulties and splintered as near as I can tell), programming, bicycling, and playing D&D.

D&D was both entertaining and also wildly educational. I was in a bunch of campaigns and we were studying architecture, history, military campaigns, meteorology, the middle ages, math, economics, sociology, philosophy and a variety of other topics to create worlds that were fresh, inventive and believable. As such, I, too, salute Gary Gygax on his way to the other planes.

As a side note, it's interesting to see the overlap between programmers and related people around my age and D&D players.

I got married last May and changed my name to my wife's name. This had two interesting consequences. First, it surprises many people when they find out and I have to have my memorized explanation ready to go. Second, changing your name is really scary. I've been waiting for a period of time where I'm not involved in any governmental anything including flying because I don't want to confuse someone because I'm half-way through a name change and get labeled a terrorist for the rest of my life.

I started the name-changing process a couple of weeks ago. I'm now William Kahn-Greene. I kept Guaraldi as my "maiden name"--I have no idea what the equivalent term is for men. I've spent the greater part of the last two weeks without "proper documentation"--that's been scary. Thank goodness for telecommuting!

As an aside, I can't wait for my idiot government to get over this terrorist panic. I can't imagine the next fear-craze to sweep the nation. I secretly hope it's global warming or something similar that has more useful consequences like energy usage overhaul and fewer consequences like transforming into a police state and war-mongering.

The company I work for is looking to hire a few able Python developers. Instructions and details about the job are on the PCF jobs page.

This is the best job I've ever had. I get to telecommute which really works for me. My co-workers are all able fantastic people. The mission is really important and affects everyone. The work that we're doing is FOSS and we're working with and contributing to other FOSS projects. I've covered the board in terms of projects from bug fixing, to adding enhancements, to debugging upstream components, to Ubuntu packaging (which I need some more practice with), to test systems, to Firefox 3 patches, to Firefox plugins, ... I've also had my hands in Bugzilla adjustments, infrastructure, build systems, ... It's been challenging and interesting ever since day 1.

I've also been meeting a lot of people I otherwise wouldn't have met: Chris Blizzard and John Ressig at Mozilla, SJ at OLPC, Holmes Wilson at Downhill Battle, Asheesh at Creative Commons, and others. It's exciting.

That's my experience at PCF in the last 6 months. If you're looking for a telecommuting Python development job, think about applying.

I spent almost my entire January adding better support for RSS/Atom enclosures to Firefox 3. I wrote more detail on my work blog.

I overhauled the PyBlosxom web-site so that it's now being statically "compiled" using PyBlosxom's static renderer. The whole thing is checked into SVN, too. That's a huge improvement from the previous situation, but the web-site could use user-interface and navigational work.

In doing that, I did a lot of futzing with static rendering using the code in trunk and fixed some issues. I also thought through the filelist implementation and re-worked it so that it handles sorting and truncating better. The results are really nice and I think it fixes all the major problems previous versions had.

GHOP was a big help. PyBlosxom had several tasks that were worked on and the results speak for themselves:

• Testing plugins #1 - testing comments, comment-openid, nospam or spamquestion: completed by klossalex
• Testing plugins #2 - testing pyguest, weblog-add, tags: completed by CanadaBear
• Testing plugins #3 - testing filter, latest, autoping: darkmessenger88
• Testing plugins #4 - testing pycategories, pygallery, contact: completed by CanadaBear
• Memory footprint - investigate memory footprint of PyBlosxom: completed by josiahw
• Writing plugin #1 - write a new entry cache plugin using pickle for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #2 - write a new entry cache plugin using shelve for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by jdzolonga
• Writing plugin #3 - write a new rst formatter plugin for PyBlosxom 2.0: completed by cracka80

It was a huge help that these people did for PyBlosxom. I haven't fully absorbed their work yet, but it should happen before PyBlosxom 2.0 is released. Many thanks to those of you who helped out and many many thanks to Google and the GHOP, PSF, Titus, Doug, Georg, Leslie and all the others who helped make this possible. Thank you!

There are a few big things that still need to be done for PyBlosxom 2.0. I'm moving through it slowly and methodically. I was hoping to have it done by the end of December, but I'm thinking now it's going to be the end of March or thereabouts.

I mothered the Miro 1.1 release earlier today. Then I decided to push out PyBlosxom 1.4.3 which I have been sitting on for a month. Then after talking with "paulproteus", I decided to go for the hat-trick and released Lyntin 4.2 as well.

w00t for releasing three software thingies in one day! Boo for sitting on two of them for extended periods of time.