Latest News >> 2008-08-06

Well, I’ll be at DefCon this year, and I always try to do something fun for the conferences I attend.

2008-08-01

Well looks like my rant about the state of open source feed readers hit some sites, so I should put in a few clarifications so people understand what I was looking for more specifically. I’ll do it by answering several of the questions people sent me.

2008-07-20

RubyFringe was my last Ruby conference and it was the best conference to go out on. Everything about RubyFringe was great. It was well organized, contained eclectic talks, and supported the weirdness that’s usually hidden at the other conferences.

2008-06-25

I’ve been completely fed up with news/feed/rss/atom readers these days. I use Linux as my primary operating system, and I only have a few feeds that I want to rip through quick so I can get to reading the content. Yet, trying to find a reader that doesn’t suck donkey balls has been a chore.

Well it was a busy day for me in Python land:

  • Created a project for Vellum and bzr repository
  • Used Vellum to build Idiopidae, itself, my resume, and my web site.
  • Added the ability to have condition guards that are just evaluated Python expressions. You can see in the sample build.yml files in the Vellum source and project page.
  • Reorganized Idiopidae so it puts things into a good namespace rather than polluting. Also included a bunch of missing files.
  • The Vellum builds for my Python projects automate all the stuff you need, including setup.py runs, cleaning, bzr commits, and nosetests.
  • The -F option to Vellum will make it “force” all the conditionals, so that it runs every target no matter what.

Just have to add a good recipes mechanism and Vellum should be great. I’m leaning toward a template system that lets you put a recipe on one of your lines and the required options and that will generate new lines to be run. That or a simple way to just load other files and access that file’s tasks in a namespace. Or maybe both, gotta see what I need.

I was also talking with some friends, and they mentioned it’d be great if Vellum could distribute the builds to multiple machines in such a way that nobody needs to actually enter IP addresses. I’ve always wanted this too, but never thought of doing a build tool. Now that I have a fairly complete one, I think I’ll just try making this feature. I don’t really need something like this yet, but I can see having to run tons of tests on the code in my book and all my projects. Being able to push that out to the many machines in my closet will be nice.

What I’m thinking is using PyZeroConf or Avahi so that all the machines will announce themselves and their roles, and then a master pushes the Vellum script to them and runs targets using HTTP.

So far I’m really enjoying making stuff with Python. Zapps is very useful for the little parsers I want. Idiopidae is great for writing the docs and working good for my book so far. Now “Vellum” will help build my book and all the required software in the way I’ve always wanted these things built.