vendredi 16 mai 2003

Archetypes Docs Sidnei da Silva at X3ng in Brazil wrote some very good docs for the Archetypes system, which is Ben Saller's (and others) replacement for Ben's CMFTypes system. What is Archetypes? From Sidnei's intro: "Archetypes is a framework for developing new content types in Plone. The power of Archetypes is, first, in automatically generating forms; second, in providing a library of stock field types, form widgets, and field validators; third, in easily integrating custom fields, widgets, and validators; and fourth, in automating transformations of rich content." Since Sidnei wrote this in reStructuredText, and since he also wrote PDF support for docutils, there is also a PDF version. I gotta say it here, I'm a big fan of Sidnei. He's a lot of fun to work with, gets stuff done, and gets it done well. 5:25:19 PM   comment []

Documentum User Conference Someone passed along a nice link in the "keeping an eye on the competition" category. Documentum pulls in 900 users for their European conference? If true, then that's some pretty good attendance. 1:49:22 PM   comment []

Unison For Two-Way File Sync I've been looking for a cross-platform tool to do two-way sync between computers. rsync doesn't fit the bill. I hoped that sitecopy would lead not just to bliss, but to Zope bliss (because of WebDAV), but it also couldn't handle changes on both ends. It looks like Unison might be the ticket. I'll give it a try in the coming weeks. (I also hope to setup a private Subversion server on the network here.) One other note, regarding IRC clients for OS X. The Big Answer has arrived, and it's called AkwaIRC. Gorgeous Aqua/Quartz integration (e.g. translucent windows), rock-solid reliability, choice of single-pane and multi-pane interfaces, bouncing in the dock on private messages. Hmmm, yummy. That sound you hear is me opening my wallet to pay for a registered version. 12:42:35 PM   comment []

Dynamic Languages? Courtesy of ZopeNewbies, I found a link to a Tim Bray (co-creator of XML) article about programming languages. His position: maybe strong typing, the primary upside of low-level (read: cumbersome) is a subset of strong testing. And "dynamic languages" like Python give better testing and far faster development. Like ZopeNewbies, I like the quote: "C++, Java, C#, R.I.P.? Thus the big question: if the strong-typing advantages of conventional compiled programming languages are moot, do we really need them? In 2020, will everyone be a Python programmer?" Tim goes on to mention an article from Bruce Eckel and an article from Robert Martin, two of the luminaries from the strong typing universe. Are we witnessing the start of a paradigm shift in the mainstream, thanks to strong testing? 12:36:46 PM   comment []

Open Source and Collaboration Here's another item from Pilot Systems: David and I collaborated on an article for Med'HITECH, a guide to the medical information systems market. The article leads with the question: "Is collaborative work just a buzz word, or is it a productivity factor, unleashed by the open source movement?" There is also a French version available. 12:10:32 PM   comment []

eWeek Article, en francais David Sapiro from Pilot Systems (part of the Zope pavilion at SolutionsLinux 2003) sent me a link to a translation he did for the eWeek article on Plone. Thanks David. 12:00:44 PM   comment []

OSCOM 3 Filling Up The registrations for OSCOM 3 at Harvard are picking up. I think more people have already registered than the total attendence for OSCOM 2. Also, as a reminder, you need to contact the chair of the workshop that you'd like to attend on the first day. Since these are hands-on workshops, space is limited. 11:42:42 AM   comment []

Double drive debacle Bleh. I'm two days behind now because, upon my return from Padova, I had the joy of upgrading the drives in both of my computers at the same time. On the Mac side, everything went very smooth. The new 30 Gb PowerBook drive from MCE installed very easily into my antique TiBook. Although I had never done a partition and install of OS X, all went smooth. The only real snafu was that I failed to copy all my stuff off the old HD and had to crack the case this morning to put it back. (Also, it seems that Radio UserLand wouldn't serve pages unless I put it in the same directory I had it on the other drive. Including the volume name!) On the PC side, well, total, abject pain. I installed Linux first to get the partitions right. Along comes Win98 and torches all the partitions. Start over, this time I only use Linux long enough to create a Windows partition in the beginning of the drive. After installing the motherboard drivers, though, I get blue screen messages with "Cannot write data to drive C". Hmm, that can't be good. I can't download the new drivers from the website because I can't see the motherboard's network chip and I don't have a floppy. Fortunately I had one of those demoware Linux CDs. I booted into that, connected to the network, downloaded the driver updates, and wrote them to the Windows partition. After that, things progressed nicely. So, lots of catching up to do from after the Plone sprint...more to follow. 10:45:13 AM   comment []