Since around July, I've been working on migrating MediaGoblin from Redmine hosted on the Foocorp servers to Trac hosted on our server. The project looked small enough initially, but then suffered from a series of complications that turned the small project into a big project that took about 6 months and involved writing about 5000 lines of code. Pretty nuts. I don't even want to estimate how many hours I spent on it. Oy.

It wasn't a terrible project, though. Parts of it were educational. I'd written scrapers in Java and Perl a long time ago, but hadn't written anything with Python, lxml, and cssselect [1]. I read through parts of Trac and Trac's db schema. I also read through Trac plugin code.

The best part about it is that it's done now. This gives the GNU MediaGoblin project more autonomy and also more flexibility for adjusting the project to meet their specific needs. That's good stuff---time for cake!

Turned 36 over the weekend. It's weird---the number keeps getting bigger but I still feel like me. I'm somewhat bummed I haven't achieved more by now, but so it goes.

Sobering thought: This is the last square until 49.

My brother brought up this cake last night. I always liked how Ned posted pictures of his family's cakes. This is probably not a cake his family would have made, but so it goes:

It seems rude, but I find it really funny and I have a kid, so it's technically true.

Back in October of 2010, I created a standing desk. A friend of mine bought a Sears workbench and was using that and while it was pretty cool looking, I wanted something I could more easily nail things into. I've been meaning to write about this for a while.

I bought some two-by-fours and plywood and built most of it with that and some scraps of wood I had lying around.

Since then, I built a stool to go with it and bought a shelf thing from Ikea that goes to the right of it.

I think it took a day to build the standing desk, though I've tweaked it a bit since I originally built it. It took a day to build my stool. Total cost in parts for both pieces was definitely under $100.

Result is this:

This set up has lots of horizontal space, is set at the right height for me, lets me sit when I'm weary and stand when I'm not, and has some storage capacity so I'm not surrounded by stuff.

"Wait! What's up with all those computers?", you might ask. Well, the computer breakdown is like this:

• one work laptop

• one laptop that I use for Skype/Vidyo for work

• one laptop I use for home stuff

• one desktop I use for home stuff and games

• one desktop that's the current PCF Windows build box for Miro

• one Macbook that's a backup PCF OSX build box for Miro

Then I have:

• one settop computer I'm not using at all

• one dead laptop

The dead computers should go away. The PCF build boxes will eventually be re-homed, too.

And that's the state of my desk!

Tim threw together a vagrant setup for Kitsune based on what Alex did in November. I went to give it a try but I'm using vagrant 0.8.10 and it died.

Important part of the error message was:

/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/net-ssh-2.1.4/lib/net/ssh/key_factory.rb:38:in
`read': Permission denied - /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys/vagrant
(Errno::EACCES)

Issue is documented at https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/235.

My fix was to do this:

saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys> ls -al
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Jan 11 20:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Jan 11 20:00 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  821 Jan 11 20:00 README.md
-rw-------  1 root root 1675 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1464 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant.ppk
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  409 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant.pub
saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys> sudo chmod 644 vagrant
saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys>

That fixed it for me. Figured I'd document it so that I could find it again when I bumped into it again.

While I was writing up the release blog post for pyblosxom 1.5, I figured out that I've probably been working on Pyblosxom 1.5 on and off for the last three years or so. That's pretty intense---I knew I'd been working on it for a while, but I didn't realize how long it actually was.

The last year or so of development has been fun. There's a pretty consistent contingent of friendly folks who hang out on #pyblosxom. I really appreciate their humoring me with my period, "Pyblosxom 1.5 is almost done! I just have to ..." announcements.

Details of the release are in the release blog post. If you've been waiting to upgrade, this is a good version to upgrade to.

Going forward, I'm going to take a hiatus from Pyblosxom development. I've got a bunch of other projects that I've been ignoring for a while that really need some attention. I'll continue to review patches, help out on #pyblosxom and the mailing lists, and I'll push out future releases, but I won't be doing any major development for a while.

Mediagoblin has monthly project meetings. One of the things I wanted to automate was meeting reminders that gets sent x days in advance, contain the link to the Meetings page in the wiki, and specify the date and time of the next meeting. I figure if we automate it, it's one less thing we have to think about---it just happens.

To do this, I decided to write phil. For the most part, it's sort of a throw-away project, but it was so small that I decided to go through a complete project development cycle with it and make sure it had all the bits a mature Python project should have: proper packaging, license, configuration, tests, project infrastructure, ...

I think it took about 10 hours over the course of 2 weeks. I was learning the icalendar library and python-dateutil and also figuring out exactly what I wanted it to do as I went along. For a small project like this, that's fine. For a larger project, I'd prefer to spend more time researching and designing ahead of time.

It was nice to "take a vacation" and put all the other projects I normally work on on hold to throw something together from scratch.

• Github page: https://github.com/willkg/phil

• PyPI page: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/phil