Web logins will be dead
[en] Scribbles	rant, software, development, c3, 2010-02-03

Just read the interesting if somewhat abusive http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/02/subscriptions-are-the-new-black.html article. This tiggered me on the idea that people have problems keeping all those passwords for each site. And many sites could do perfectly without. Thanks to openId and OAuth. Still wrapping my head around the latter, but it sure is interesting! I guess it will take a decade before lagging web-sites+developers wake up to these techniques... but.. hey... that's a given.

Managing changes on a win server: patch to zip script
[en] Scribbles	sose, software, c3, 2009-06-25

Situation: I work with a version control system for development. I roll-out your changes daily (or more frequently) to the production system. Changes are always plaintext script files. However the production system is a windows box and you cannot install any version control system on it. Windows doesn't come with the patch program.

Moving the whole directory over for each change is not an option.

So how to get the changes to the machine, and maintain some control?

Here's my solution:

1. Get the version control system to publish the changeset as a diff and save that changeset at patches/my_change.patch
2. run patch2zip that will create a zip in the same directory structure with all the changed files.
3. Send the zip to the windows box.
4. On the windows box, compare the directory with the zip, creating a back-up for each file before coping over the changed file with the new version from the zip.

It's ugly, manual and scales badly for changes that touch many files. However nothing needs to be installed and works well for small changes.

Here download the patch2zip command. It should work with the zip command available in the path. Stand in the directory with the source files and point to the patch file. It will generate the zip file with the files next to the patch.

The issue trackers I've been talking about.
[en] Scribbles	bugs, software, c1, 2009-06-09

• http://bestpractical.com/rt/ -- Kick ass bug tracker for people that have entreprise issue-tracking needs. I've implemented this a few times with good results. It's a nice system, it used to be bit of a pain to install.
  
• http://roundup.sourceforge.net/ -- Very intresting software. It comes as a relatively simple bug tracker, but is actually more of a framework to build issue/case-tracking solutions. I wonder how it would perform as a non-document-centric case management system.I currently use this privately, it's a 15 minute install+configure.
• http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/ -- Havn't used this one but I saw the demo and it certainly does some intresting things. It's more a project management tool then it is a "issue tracker".

Opensource becoming OCP?
[en] Scribbles	opensource, sose, software, 2009-04-23

So, sun is being bought by Oracle. If that's a good thing for the Opensource projects run by sun still has to be seen. My guess is that MySQL might have become a lot more then it now ever will be .

One thing is sure, the projects are now complete parts of the maneuvering giant IT corporations, just like normal product lines are. They buy and sell companies based on the projects they start, support and promote.

Whatever happened to the catedral and the bazaar?

What was the main selling point of Linux systems, when it was just being laughed at... What was it... ohhh ya... It was that the system never ever went down, solid as a rock. If linux went down, it was because it had failty hardware, end of discussion.

And that was the big deal. It showed the competition for what is was: nicely polished but profoundly broken product. And why was Linux like that? What magic make Linux kernel so much superior?

The Mantra of "Release early, Release often". Seeing early on how the product performs in the cruel and unforgiving world outside the lab. And care for quality. Developers saw a kernel "oops" and took it personal. Their system should *not* do "oops", ever.

The difference was not that the code available it's the process that makes the difference.
 
In "Traditional" open source the priorities are set by people that are personally involved with it. Those that will suffer when the software suffers. The developers, administrators and users. They know that they will need to maintain, support and use the beasts they create and adopt.

Compare that with Open-Corporate-Projects. They are Opensource, in name and license and especially in marketing. But it does not go much further then that.

In a OCP, the choices on what to develop, how the design should be, what features to include in the next stable, and what is "good enough" to ship and how to handle security issues are corporate ones. Those are often decided for internal reasons: politics, budgets, sales, marketing forecasts, market segmentation, bonuses and the competition.

All of which has only very, very indirectly to do with quality, usability or maintainability of the product.

Using a forum maintained by payed support is not a substitute for following the developer mailling list, where the features are discussed as they are being implemented. Having an issue tracker is no subsitute to be part of the project's design as a peer. Phoning home at each start-up is not something a opensource project would do. Nor should it try to detect a license.

A OCP will degenerate to the same state as closed software. With all it's tendency for low quality, feature bloat, poor design... But there is premium support and someone-to-yell-at!

Nice polish on a broken process, soon leading to broken products.

More then just "access to the code" maybe we need to rescue respectful software. Respectful of resourses and the time of people that need to work with it.

I guess I should go back to refering to free software. Opensource is too tainted by OCP now. :-/

Sending Buildbot status results to twitter.
[en] Scribbles	python, buildbot, twitter, software, 2009-02-08

Just finished a little contribution for getting buildbot to work with twitter. All it does is report the result of builds to followers of the twitter buildbot twitter user. You can get it from http://protocultura.cl/hg/buildbot-twitter/file/tip

It's based on the mail.py class that comes with Buildbot. For this to work correctly you will need to:

• Create a twitter account. I guess best practice is to create a seperate account for this
• Install python-twitter (hint: easy_install python-twitter)
• Make the bbtwitter.py file available to your buildbot.
  
• Add the following to your master.cfg somewhere after: c['status'] = []
  

import bbtwitter
c['status'].append(bbtwitter.TwitterNotifier("Your-Twitter-user", "Your-Twitter-password"))

It works for me with buildbot 0.7.9. I have only tested it in the sense that it now works for me :). As always YMMV.

Release: dict_compare 1.0.2
[en] Scribbles	dict_compare, release, software, 2009-01-11

Yesterday I released dict_compare 1.0.2. This new version can now report differences in dictionaries as unified diffs. Agustin send me a link to http://www.aminus.org/blogs/index.php/2009/01/09/assertnodiff where this idea was proposed, so I just added it to dict_compare.

This new version of dict_compare 1.0.2 was uploaded to cheeseshop can can be downloaded from there: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dict_compare .

Problemas con SVK
[es] Scribbles	svk, tools, software, 2008-02-23

Cuando hacia una "svk sync -a" de mis repositorios, el error que generaba uno era:

"Bad URL passed to RA layer: Malformed URL for repository"

La solucion estaba indicado aca: http://www.rufuspollock.org/archives/229 o mas específicamente acá: http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-October/001065.html

Tuvo que modificar el archivo: /usr/share/perl5/SVN/Mirror/Ra.pm en mi equipo Ubuntu. Ahi siguio funcionando correctamente.

Protocultura.cl -- Ldap to Mailman
[en] Code	mailman, ldap, software, c1, 2007-04-01

Ldap2Mailman is a little software I wrote to solve a particular problem. I was maintaining mailing lists for internal use. And all of the users where already defined in the company LDAP database. They even had the same groups definitions as we needed people in the mailing lists.

Strangely enough, mailman doesn't seem to be able to use LDAP as a base for the subscribers to it's lists. So i sat down and wrote a little script that does exactly that, it keeps the LDAP users in groups synchronized with lists of the same name.

Protocultura.cl -- Ldap to Mailman
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