njr 3.0

Apologies to anyone who’s been getting parse errors from their newsreader trying to read my RSS feed; the PyDS upstream information Metakit database upstream.data is getting corrupted, and I can’t figure out why. Neither can PyDS author Georg Bauer or Metakit author Jean-Claude Wippler, and I’m kind of the unofficial maintainer for the Metakit Python bindings these days, so…

In other weblog administrivia, I did finally hook up the search box at right; it searches only the contents of my entries, so it should be pretty easy to use. One of these days I will figure out how to import my Radio weblog, comments and all, and redirect http://web.sabi.net/log to here. I did email the LiveJournal folks to update my feed URL, so all two of you who subscribe here, enjoy.

Trac 0.7 was released this week. As I’ve mentioned before, Trac is a great tool for small projects to use for documentation, bug management and source browsing. I’m now using it for svn.sabi.net and three projects at work (private site). The new version adds syntax coloring, a much improved source browser, and email notifications among other major features. I continue to be impressed with the quality of Trac, as well as the competence, friendliness and good humor of the folks at Edgewall. You’ll find a few of my patches in Trac 0.7, as well.

I can’t let the open-sourcing of Frontier go by without a comment, so here it is: Next to Smalltalk, Frontier has been the most productive coding environment I’ve ever used. I’d still be using Radio if it weren’t for the Frontier kernel’s instability and CPU usage on OS X. I don’t imagine I’ll have that much time to work on it, but I hope the people who do, understand what makes Frontier unique, and in time, I can start using it again. The last thing we need is yet another Python clone.

Some people suggested dumping the ODB system and switching to filesystem hosted resources—please no! You think OS X’s switching away from resources to bundles is bad? Try that with several orders of magnitude more objects.

Wes writes, “The ODB is great, but it has its problems, like how putting code in the ODB kills integration with external version control systems.” Indeed, there was never any ODB-version control integration, but with the ODB’s strictly hierarchical design, it’d be even simpler than a version control system like ENVY or StORE for VisualWorks; perhaps even easier to use a DLL interface to Subversion instead of a relational database.

The TWAIN SANE Interface is terrific at resurrecting old scanners with no OS X drivers. After fixing some SCSI problems, I got ACM’s old scanner working with a Power Mac G4; it just works, with a minimal but very functional user interface, and zero setup required.

12:32 AM | PyCS