First Avogato diary entry.

Let's see... what's going on. I'm in the middle of several hairy customer projects for ZC which all involve in one way or another managing and creating documents. This is somewhat unsurprising. What's amazing is how unlike one another they all are... it often feels like we reinvent the wheel for every project. I think this is mostly because the projects are different from one another in subtle but important ways that makes it hard to share generalized code across them. This is somewhat disappointing, but since we always seem to be in such a hurry, there's not much I can do about it.

I'm also collaborating a bit with fdrake on a software configuration system named ZConfig (see CVS, in particular the zconfig-schema-devel-branch branch). This is a pretty neat system which is a bit like Python's ConfigParser, but allows you to create hierarchical data structures using a format much like Apache's config file format. Unlike ConfigParser, ZConfig will allow you to define a "schema" for a config file. When the schema is violated in some way (if someone places an unknown key or section somewhere, or if a key value cannot be converted to something that makes sense like putting a string where an integer is supposed to go), the configuration parsing stops and an error is raised. I created a prototype of the system in the 'chrism-install-branch' branch of ZConfig, and the zconfig-schema-devel-branch is Fred's reworking of the use cases serviced by the prototype. It's not quite "there" yet, but we hope to have Zope configured using ZConfig by Friday, followed shortly thereafter by ZEO.

Went to visit the Simpsons (Evan, Penney, and kids aka 4am) in Texas, and had a wonderful time. I did nothing whatsoever and it was pretty marvelous. Stephanie and I got the Simpsons a Tivo for Christmas, so we futzed around with that for a while and had quite a bit of fun. We also played a board game named Hoopla which is evidently made by the creators of Cranium. It's a cooperative game that has elements of Charades and Pictionary. Unfortunately, at one point I was required to draw a slumber party. That didn't work out very well. ;-)