Sunday, February 24, 2002

Little by little I'm getting it. Little by little I see Radio turning into a dream environment. When I first started developing the Zope Management System tool, I wished I'd had the ability to distribute new builds the way that they do with Frontier and Radio. You pick make a menu selection, and the new bits flow to you. For a tool developer, the most amazing thing about Dave's My Pictures tool was the way he used a Radio weblog to distribute updated tools. Which means that anyone that spends the $40 on Radio also gets the ability to develop and distribute interesting bits of code. It's not a turnkey system, like the basic Radio weblog is, but it's all in there, and there are many places to learn about the rest, if you poke around a bit. The tool distribution that you can do with Radio is not nearly as graceful (it will downlolad the entire tool again, but in an easy-to-digest form, rather than just sending the changes), but it's primitiveness actually adds to its reliability (no weird date/time issues or missed updates). Once again, this was a bit that I thought was going to be hard to add, but in the end took a much shorter time. I'm having a lot of fun. 8:41:15 PM

I've updated the current version of the Python Tool to include the ability to refresh the code (like the myPictures tool that Dave did), so you don't have to keep checking the site, you can just use the 'Refresh Code...' menu item to automatically incorporate any changes I have made. I also fixed a bug dealing with setting up the executionTemplate, so if you've ssen that error, get the new code. 5:27:26 PM

Upon reflection, it's stupid to make Python projects live in separate databases, at least in terms of playing nice with Radio. I'm thinking that what I really want to do is give the ability to import and export Python Tool-compatible files. I also need to work on importing Python source files from text. There are some things I need to understand about how Radio figures out the outline indentation when importing a text file. Normally it just "get's it right" when converting Python source to a Radio outline, but there are some strange times when it doesn't. I have my suspicions as to what is going on, but I haven't been able to prove anything yet. Once I have that straightened out, I'll put out a tool that plays nicer with established Python installations. 12:22:01 PM

For the last couple of days, I've been with the 'get a life' crowd at a Star Trek convention (Creation Entertainment's webpage is set up in a way that won't let you link directly to the description, so I'll skip that for now). Saw Nana Visitor, Nichelle Nichols, Gates McFadden, assorted Ferengi, and yesterday was the day for William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. It was fun. Better than I had expected. I only splurged on one thing -- one of the guys in the dealer room had a copy of the promo CD that Fox sent out for 'Buffy the Musical'. 10:13:16 AM

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