Older blog entries for jaybonci (starting at number 3)

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.

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published V1 of my spec for the new message system that I'd like to push out to perlmonks and as a pre-1.0 nodeball to superceded the old EMessage.nbz.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.

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.

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.