October 30th, 2007 — Weekly Summary
I’m pretty excited this week because I finally got started on the frontend-backend stuff (you might have guess by my spam on the devel list). It’s been going as well as can be expected. I created a frontends.html
package and have been moving code in there piece by piece. So far I’ve moved the logging code, shutdown code, context menus, and started on the auto-update code.
I’m not exactly following the plan that I put on the wiki, because I often start trying to refactor one thing and realize that it depends on another. But things seem to be chugging along. There is probably more things that need to be moved than I expected, but each task has been easier than I planned for.
I spent a bunch of time with last minute 0.9.9.9.9.9.9 bugs. Those took a good chunk of my time, probably half or so. Hopefully next week will be 100% refactoring.
In my spare time I’ve been doing some web work and I really want to release the sqlhelper code I wrote for the channel guide, since I’m using it in this other project. That brings up the topic of releasing the channel
guide code too. If we have time can we discuss these things on the dev cal? It’s definitely lower priority than 0.9.9.9 stuff though.
October 25th, 2007 — Weekly Summary
(This is getting posted a little late because I was too lazy to figure out how to get to to the admin page…)
This week I fixed a bunch of 0.9.9.9 bugs (can we please call this thing 1.0-alpha or something?), but the main thing I worked on was thinking about big changes we can make for post-1.0.
The main one was frontend-backend integration. I wrote up a wiki page for it:
https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/FrontendBackend2k7
Talking it over with other people on IRC actually makes me think it’s not too bad of a project. Clahey says that we should try to break it down into very small steps and I totally agree. I added a list of steps to the wiki page and it seems managable to me.
The other thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is our database system. I sent a message to the plans list about it, but after talking with nassar and NPR I think a lot of those changes will be put on the back burner. The frontend-backend stuff is more important and seems like it should be done first anyway. Also, there are several smaller database pieces that we can implement soon. The main one is using sqlite columns to store our data instead of pickling everything.
All this post-1.0 stuff is really exciting to me. Maybe I just like designing systems more than fixing bugs, or maybe I’m just fed up with certain parts of our code. In any case, I can’t wait.
October 9th, 2007 — Weekly Summary
This week I worked on a lot of bugs and several features. The features were the things we talked about on the phone last week. Most were very simple, one has me a bit worried.
The scary one is adding channels on the top of the tabs. When I first implemented that, it seemed very easy, then Janet pointed out that it caused OPML import to insert things backwards. Once I fixed that, I realized that it also messed up us creating the default channels. Now there are several more tickets in the tracker, should we just give up on this minor UI tweak?
On the subject of scary fixes, I’m a little worried about this one: On windows, we were having a problem with opening torrent files using Miro. I checked it out and realized it was because we were handling file:// URLs incorrectly, and in fact a lot of things were only working because of blind luck. Fixing that bug required a lot of changes in places that we’ve had problems with in the past. I think that we had to make the fix, it just scares me to make changes that big this close to 1.0.
On the bright side of things, I finally fixed this crazy bug in windows where none of their tabs would show up. A lot of people posted this one in the forums, then I made a build that logged a bunch of data where I thought the problem would be, and I got a response that told me exactly where the problem was. Yeah community!
In closing, burritos are very tasty.
September 25th, 2007 — Weekly Summary
I spent this week working on a bunch of tickets, doing some more with the movie data utility, and thinking about caching issues with Paul.
A couple of the tickets were bugs, but most of theme were the tiny UI tweaks that we talked about last week. The only one that we should think about is adding feeds to the top of the list. This one has a couple of unintended consequences, since we always assumed that creating a new feed means that it’s on the bottom. When we imported OPML files things appeared upside down, as well as when we added the default feeds. I fixed both of those bugs, but can people think of other situations where we add a bunch of feeds like that?
I’m feeling like the movie data utility code is pretty much complete. Clahey has things working on linux, using both xine and gstreamer, which I think is very cool. The windows code is working about as good as I think it can be, although I guess there’s some problem with .flac audio files.
My 0.9.9.9 bug list is empty right now, but I have a ton of uncategorized ones that I can look at. I also might do that last mini feature we talked about on the call. But basically I have a bunch of slack next week if things need to get done.