Checking & Sharing

There has been some discussions lately about documentation in TG’s mailing list- or rather the lack of it.
The Docudo project was kick-started in PyCon to address this problem. Docudo is a tool for writing and maintaining
documentation for software projects. It relies on Subversion for versioning of documents and their properties.
To get an idea of what Docudo looks like right now, you can see a short screencast here.

What we have:
- Basic look & feel
- Subversion integration
- Document editing
- Properties management
- File listing with support for filtering options.

What we need:
- Identity integration and implement/enforce roles and permissions
(afaik. Steven Kryskalla is working on this)
- Media upload and management
- Workflow for document status
- Comments and comments management
- Indexing (pyLucene? Xapian + Xapwrap?)
- Export plug-ins for PDF,zip,tar.gz, html-single page, etc
- Feeds for the different listings

If you want to give us a hand get Subversion and pySVN, grab the latest version from the trunk:
http://www.turbogears.org/svn/docudo/trunk
and join the mailing list
http://groups.google.com/group/docudo

Here is a screencast that goes through some of the stuff I’m planning for the next version of CatWalk. I talk about “list views” and some ideas inspired by Dabble - an amazing app.

Check it out and tell me what you think. If you have some ideas, wishes or suggestions for CatWalk, now is the time to make yourself heard. Or even better- If you want to get involved in the development join the TurboGears’s trunk-list and let me know.
PS. You can get the slides as pdf here

Just finished seeing PBS’s the elegant universe. Fantastic show that embarcs in an ambitious journey along the edge of modern fysics. A lot of mindblowing ideas presented in an very accesible way.
Go see the tree hours long show for free at the nova website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html.

This year LinuxForum was held at the Royal School of Architecture.
It was kind of funny to held a presentation in a place I once spend 6 years as a student.
I have more than once failed to stay awake during and endless slide/dias based lecture in one of those auditoriums.
I hope my audience didn’t have the same problem during my talk =).
I’m confident that I conveyed my enthusiasm. Unfortunately I didn’t manage my alloted time well, and ended rushing the last part of my presentation. Worse, there was no time left for Q-A, so I kind of missed that feedback.
Anyway I got the impression that people enjoyed the talk.
At the end I got an Acu-screwdriver as a speaker’s gift. It even has a ‘LinuxForum 2006′ logo engraved/printed.
Nice souvenir and cute nifty tool.

LinuxForum has been growing steady year by year. I’m quite amazed at how well manage the whole event was, even though everything is volunteer based.
The only thing that bothered me was that the ‘expo floor’ was kind of lame. I really don’t get it. This is a venue
for ultra-geeks, early adopters, sneezers. Companies should be here shamelessly brown-nosing this guys.
But there weren’t many stands, and a couple of the represented companies had only a stack of brochures and a bored looking sales rep.

On the bright side, Polytekniske Boghandel was there with a terrific sample of tech books.
I bought Alistair Cockburn’s ‘Writing Effective Use Cases’ and Scott Berkun ‘The Art of Project Management’.
They even dropped an O’reilly T-shirt in my bag =)

Earlier today I was watching Seth Godin’s presentation at Google (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294) - entertaining and enlightening btw.
At the Q-A at the end (aprox. @ 41:05) I thought I could recognize Alex Martelli’s voice asking a question.
There are thousands of people working at Google, I guess there must be other baritones there beside him. But, after answering the question Seth said ‘thank you Alex’.
Of course it could still be another guy named Alex with a subtle Bolognian accent - anyway it’s nice to be reminded that people like Martelli are working for Google.

I have been working on my presentation for Linux Forum this week. Preparing it has been a lot of work. Phew…

It’s an introductory talk. I’m going show some of the fancy new stuff we have, in the context of a sample application.
The app is a revamped survey app, the one in the CatWalk tutorial. Instead of building the forms in Kid, I use
widgets and a TableForm to generate the whole enchilada, even validators to enforce data integrity.

Some more time spend on it will actually yield a useful application.
Heck, I even made a logo for it:

The talk will be in danish, but I plan to translate it and use it for a screencast next week (if time permits).

I’ve also facelifted the ToolBox for the occasion. I haven’t committed the changes yet, I rather wait a bit to be sure I don’t grow tired of it.
Here are some shots though.

Grig Gheorghiu wrote some days ago about Useful tools for writing Selenium tests.
Selenium is a fantastic tool for running tests within your webbrowser in a cross-platform and cross-browser way. But as Grig wrote in his post, hand writing test cases can be pretty tiresome.
This situation will probably change once the much expected Selenium-IDE is released.
Meanwhile for TurboGears projects I use Selenium4Gears which is a homegrown app that takes some of the tedium from writing tests and it’s trivial to integrate into existing TG projects.
Selenium4Gears is a TG app that you can mount into your own project by adding a reference to it in your controller and initializing the app with your model as a parameter.
You can define your test cases and corresponding commands through your browser and easily jump between the TestRunner and your test editing activities.

Here you can see a short movie of Selenium4Gears in action.
If you want to give it a try grab the zip file here. The package includes version 0.6.0 of Selenium.

I have updated the TG journey illustration to clarify the type of CC license for it.
The graph it’s under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, basically you can use it as you like as long as you remember to mention the author - that’s me =)
You can get the ‘original’ Illustrator file (CS 11.0.0) here (1.19 MB). I tried to export it to SVG, but for anything slightly more complicated than a box and a circle (non-overlapping) the SVG export function in Illustrator either fails, or create a corrupted SVG file.

A couple of days ago Stefane Fermigier posted a nice graph mapping the dependencies between different webframeworks and Python packages.
I have a week spot for infographics, and Stefane’s post triggered the idea of doing an illustration of the journey of a http request through the TurboGears application stack. You can see the result here as a large png or here as a pdf.
I *think* I got the request flow right, but please post a comment if you have corrections or suggestions.
It could be nice to see similar graphs for some of the other frameworks out there.

ps. the gorgeous TG header was made by Richard Coorb’s

Mark Ramm invited me recently to contribute to his fine initiative of providing TurboGears related courses.
This is something I will love to do and because I already had planned to spend time on an application to demo at LinuxForum,
It occur to me that I could combine the two activities by using the demo as the project application for my class. Now how’s that for DRY thinking =).