Advogato blog for jaybonci

23 Jun 2002

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 21:49:18 GMT

Well today I fixed up a lot of my debian stuff, and re-presented it to a friend who does debian development, and hopefully he'll be my Advocate. I'm still looking for one. I redid the webpage, and I really like it.. http://jay.bonci.com/debian.

Other than that, it's been busy as hell. More to do, more to do...

18 Jun 2002

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 14:49:40 GMT

Ahh, the final chapter in the "spin out of control" episodes of the nodetests. The script and harness were fine, but there were two outstanding bugs:

Null titled nodes
Nodes named "0"

I'll have to look into them later, but I hand-fixed them, and everything looks good to go.

Just about completed the postinst script for ecore... It's gigantic and all kinds of smart (I think at least). I need to write debian-mentors and kinda get them to okay it, but other than that, it looks good to me.

Redhat has been checking for bad blocks for going on 12 hours. ugh. Of course I'm trying a few new things with this install of RH, plus it will give me a box so that I can build RPM's on it, which I think would be really beneficial. It's something I want to get into. Packaging software has been a great way to get to know the internals of old-style /bin/sh scripting, which has been cool in a grungy kind of way.

Oh, and after tonight, sed is officially my bitch.

11 Jun 2002

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 10:14:52 GMT

So today has been the day of squashing mild-to-huge problems.

The major problem with my perl versioning that caused all sorts of wierd errors on manifest. I tracked down and eliminated the rogue version of perl and reinstalled all of my modules. It's working well
Fixed the major memory leak in the node automation harness. It was fixed by buffering the DBI calls.
Fixed problems on E2 where searching for certain doctypes wouldn't go through.

Ahh it feels good. I also got permission from the author of Mail::Sender to package that and his other applicable modules. This means I can finish satisfying all of the upstream dependancies for Everything. More to do, more to do.

31 May 2002

Fri, 31 May 2002 23:48:43 GMT

Finished off a new set of tests for E2. Will actually need to do some grunt vision and infrastructure work for Manifest this evening, which is sad, but livable. Will also take that time to do a Red Hat install for doing RPM setups. This is a good thing. I should be learning RPM, in general. It's been a crazy few days in the "gigantic emails" department, but again I'll live.

Next on deck, better man pages. Want to start analyzing .deb packages and to see if I can perhaps write a perl module to interpret them and extract info from them automatically.

30 May 2002

Thu, 30 May 2002 01:22:25 GMT

Well the deb for maim is done, and the one for ecore needs a pile of work, but I'll be getting to it. I finally mastered the troff wierdness, and there's now a manpage for it. Glad to have that done. Created a little homepage for myself that has the information, and I'll be fixing up the man pages and the everything .deb soon.

Looking currently at RedHat packaging, need to finish the spec for Everything::Message. Currently reading .NET Framework essentials by OReilly. Just ordered the Mastering regular expressions, and the Object Oriented perl book by Conway et al.

Looking forward to reading both of those.

28 May 2002

Tue, 28 May 2002 04:35:51 GMT

Yesterday I polished off an early test run of new automated tests for Everything2 (the site, not the engine), to keep the data clean and to assist the editors in their diligant task of helping out. The changes were fairly large and obsoletes the junky sqljob stuff. What was I thinking?

When I look back over the large amount of code I've done in the last year or so, I'm pleased and delighted to continually ask myself "What was I thinking." It's been a great improvement.

Tonight I've built the debian package for maim, and will be uploading it to some kind of page really soon. More server work really needs to be done, and I need to work on the estore spec. The Everything core deb ball also needs to be more conforming, so I'll be working on that tonight as well. Documentation, documentation, documentation! Speaking of which, the Everything XML interfaces need to have themselves cleaned up as well, documentation wise. Some day soon hopefully. Man pages tonight.

26 May 2002

Sun, 26 May 2002 10:53:34 GMT

Well I contacted the author of the myAIM package, and he seems really great to work with, so I'm looking forward to that. I need to come up with a man page and a package for that distro now, but I can do that without much sweat really. So that's good.

Planetmotherhood has an account manager now, so that's still another really good thing. That means I can do up some specs for them and ship them off, talk tech, and start working on reasonable time schedules for that project.

Over on E2, I've published V1 of my spec for the new message system that I'd like to push out to perlmonks and as a pre-1.0 nodeball to superceded the old EMessage.nbz. It's up at New Message System Spec.

Tomorrow? More debian packaging, speccing again. Finishing that spec for the message system (doing the db tables, charts, et all). Hope to get the maim .deb built by then. Also need to install redhat on a spare box to start building .rpms. Silly red hat.

24 May 2002

Fri, 24 May 2002 21:39:38 GMT

The last couple of days have again been slow. I was recently mailed a new nodelet from ascorbic which really needs to be applied. It's a good idea, but it may be held off until I can implement the new APIs for messaging on the back end.

There is a breaking WAP bug on E2's WAP generation, which I've held off fixing because because of two new design goals for tickers and displaytypes. Basically there needs to also be a WAP generation API because generating all of that XHTML isn't tough to do, but on the Openwave emulator, it's slow to debug.

Checked in a two line change into ecore to remove two unused lines of code. Played Sim Golf. I'm considering posting a bug report to them, seeing as we're talking about a metic load of bugs here. Silly stuff that perhaps should have been fixed. To be honest, I'm a little disappointed in the game's overall quality. It has great game appeal, but not the well-tested polish that the other games from Firaxis have. Alas.

Also asked the maim guy if he'd be interested in a deb for his instant messaging program (which I love). No response as of yet, but oh well. Krow from slashcode gave a "sure" to whether they'd be interested in a .deb of their system (they have an RPM but who uses Red Hat, I mean really cmon =P ).

Today: E2 message system spec. It'll also be shipped off to the perlmonks crew to see if they are interested in it, and then it'll be nodeballed.

23 May 2002

Thu, 23 May 2002 07:09:10 GMT

So this is advogato, eh? Well this seems to be as good place as any to keep a development journal.

Today was a slow day, making a few minor updates to E2, but mostly working on becoming a new Debian maintainer. It seems like a worthwile goal, and I want to get into package maintaining right now. I have a working deb for Everything working, but I need to fix it up more (better documentation etc). Reading more manuals, more manuals. Blah.

At the advice of chromatic, I've looked over the Test::Simple modules and his perl testing article on perl.com, and it seems simple enough to do. Everything needs more automated tests, so I'll look into checking those in.

Meanwhile, ebug and estore are languishing because of a few technical hurdles and lack of general time to sit down and tackle them. My [groupeditor] code from E2 needs to be fixed up for general metagroup UI (I HATE UIs), but beyond that, it's been a slow week starting off.