I adopted a line of Miro code today. Her name is Zowwee Kahn-Greene. She's pretty cute. :)

If you want to adopt-a-line, you can do so at the Miro Adoption Center.

When I upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty, I noticed that git svn things were painfully slow. I had looked into this before, but couldn't remember how I found the answer or what it was. After skimming through thousands of lines of IRC logs, I re-rediscovered what I discovered the first time.

  rm -rf .git/svn
  git svn rebase --all

I found it at this site (oebfare.com).

I finished up some additional work and I'm at a testing stage for PyBlosxom. I want to do some more testing and some documentation then it'll be ready for testing releases.

Also, I spent a couple of minutes upgrading my blog to use 1.5 in trunk. Bumped into bunch of weird issues with the comments plugin, but otherwise it was really smooth.

Participatory Culture Foundation is the non-profit organization I work for working to build a distribution system for video and audio on the Internet that has no bottlenecks, no filter points, uses open standards, and Free Software.

Most of the software that we write is written in Python. Miro, an Internet video player, is written in Python and runs on a variety of platforms. Miro Guide and Miro LocalTV are both systems that are written in Python using Django. Miro Fullscreen is written in Python using Clutter.

Python has made it possible for a very very small group of us to tackle such a large project with very limited resources.

Earlier this week, we launched our Adopt a Line of Code, a fundraising campaign to help us fund the work we're doing. No one has ever done a fundraising campaign like this before. We think it could be a good model for other Open Source and Free Software projects to raise funds.

Take a moment to check out the Adoption Center and adopt your very own line of code! Support us in our work to make video open for everyone.

It's been a long time since the last status. PyBlosxom 2.0 had been stagnating for a year and I decided to move it out of the way, put it out of its misery, and start new progress with the PyBlosxom 1.4.3 tag. I scaled back the vision and now I'm working on PyBlosxom 1.5.

I've pulled in some of the changes that were destined for 2.0 and added some new ones:

• lots of code cleanup
• pyblosxom-cmd script that automates a whole bunch of things and gives plugins command-line abilities
• re-working the documentation using Sphinx
• doubling the number of unit tests
• fixing a lot of bugs

In the very near future, I plan to overhaul the website and fix project infrastructure issues.

That's where things are. Hoping to have an April release of PyBlosxom 1.5.

The sordid story

I, too, was contacted by Packt Press to review Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé. I finished reading the book months ago, but didn't get around to writing the review.

Then I saw the review from some person I don't know and the reply from Tarek. Tarek then went on to work through all the "bugs" and put out a new revision of the book. I still didn't get around to writing a review.

Then I saw Orestis' review. This review is pretty comprehensive. I think it covers a lot of the things I was going to say, so I'll just fill in the gaps.

The short review

The book is pretty good. It's really aggressive in that it's trying to cover a lot of ground and as such some of the chapters don't get very deep. Even so, I think the book does achieve it's mission:

1. it tells Python developers who are unaware of tools that would help them do development in Python what they're missing,
2. it tells them what tools and other things in the Python world fill those gaps,
3. it walks through how to use those things (generally speaking)

There are two things I wish had been different. The first is that every chapter should have ended with a "further reading" section that listed books, magazine articles, urls and other resources that further cover the topic. That would have really helped people the book is targeting.

The other thing I wish had been different is that many of the urls used throughout the book are "fragile": they're really long, have a lot of funky bits in them, and if the owner of that site moves anything around, the url becomes a dead link. I'm not really sure how to fix this, but maybe books should have bit.ly-like links in them that redirect through the book's web-site to the url in question. When the resource at that url goes away, then the book author can change the web-site to summarize what was there or provide a different link.

If you're interested in the book

If you think that's interesting, check out the Tarek's blog entry about the book and sample chapter.

If you still like it, then it's probably worth buying or waiting for Packt Press to send you an email to review it. ;)

I use VirtualBox OSE for virtualizing test environments for Miro development. I built a Windows XP vm a year ago and when I did it, I put it on a virtual disk that was 8 GB which turned out to be waaaay too small for my needs. It's non-trivial to build a Windows build environment for Miro so I really wanted to clone the partition to a new virtual disk that was a lot bigger, then resize the partition rather than create a new virtual disk and reinstall and set everything back up.

I pretty much did that this morning in a couple of hours.

First thing I did was download the LiveCD of Clonezilla (version 1.2.1-23) and the LiveCD of GParted (version 0.4.1-2).

Second thing I did was create a 25 GB virtual disk in VirtualBox.

Then I attached the new virtual disk to the winxp vm that I had. Thus it should show up as hdb.

I booted into the Clonezilla LiveCD, cloned the old virtual disk to the new one keeping the partition sizes the same and making sure to copy over the MBR, too.

I switched around the virtual disks attached to my winxp vm and booted into the new virtual disk--worked great!

I booted into the GParted LiveCD, launched qtparted and grew the NTFS partition so that it used the whole virtual disk.

Then I booted into the new virtual disk. It did an NTFS disk check on startup which I thought might indicate the process didn't work right. Disk check passed, Windows XP booted and everything worked as well as I expected it to.

In Miro, we've got long strings that are displayed in the user interface. I think the code that defines these strings is messy and hard to parse. For example:

def some_func():
    description = _("""\
This is a really long description that has multiple sentences and a few \
things that need to %(getfilledin)s and it goes on and on and on and on \
and I'm not really sure what's the best way to format it so that it's happy \
in editors and easier to parse.""") % {"getfilledin": blahblah}

PEP-8 doesn't address this, which is fine. I was curious to see what other projects do.

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.