Chomping at Chandler

I think..

I just realized today that not everything has to be a block. Attribute editors are really just (relatively) lightweight wx widgets. So the email address field/overflow indicator thingee that has been causing me so many problems doesn’t have to be two separate blocks that talk to each other. I can put both wx widgets inside a sizer and hand that off as the “control” for the editor. i.e. the CreateControl() method can return the sizer.

Now, when that sizer is handed back in later methods, I will need to get the two child controls out of the sizer. Hopefully that won’t be too hard.

I was playing around with the new iTunes 7 interface before heading to bed, and ran across this album artwork for my OSAF meeting mp3’s.

click to see 1330×451 version

Hah, I don’t even remember doing that. But I must have.

i’m failing two functional tests:

TestTriageSectioning crashes on quit
TestRemoveFromTrashOnImport fails with this report:
  SUITE ChandlerFunctionalTestSuite FAILED
    TEST TestRemoveFromTrashOnImport failed
      ACTION Check_ItemInCollection (On collection search)
        REPORT (On collection search)

Now to check the unit tests…

I was replying to mail Priscilla sent about the OSAF wikis and a few times I thought about just closing my email and forgetting it - it was mostly a negative, griping message.

I stopped myself from closing the mail because I kept remembering that this was my “ofice chatter” bandwidth, and I need to keep it flowing.

1. My ability to chat with people at work is limited, so I push myself to send mail/instant messages/IRC comments more often.
2. However, I’m keenly aware of people’s time and avoid consumption of it if possible.

These two ideas are at odds, but because I work remotely, I need to pay more attention to the former than the latter.

It is better to be a bit of an online windbag than to be an isolated techno-hermit.

click for larger image This month my calendar looks especially busy because I have both the Toronto International Film Festival schedule in it, as well as the fall line-up of TV shows!

click for larger image

It isn’t usually quite so busy, since I turn off calendars I’m not using, but for these few days, I have them all on in their full glory, so I thought I would capture the moment.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in there.

(make your browser window wide enough to see the 778-pixel-wide picture below…)

AttributeEditors.py class hierarchy Can you tell?

I was in a meeting about stamping where we discussed certain items in the detail view (notably the “from” and “to” fields and what is legal to put in there. I kind of threw a wrench into things when I mentioned people using email addresses without “@” in them inside large companies. Reading page 7 of RFC 2822 makes it clear that an “@” sign is required for legal email addresses. So I think it’s okay to say that email addresses need to be formatted like user@bar.foo.

One thing that caught my eye is the “sent by”/”updated by” field, which is a read-only field. My first thought was that this should be a (perhaps subtle) popup that allows the user to access the history of the item. e.g. a popup might say:

sent by rae@tnir.org Mon Sep 11 2006, 11:56
updated by luisa@luisa.org Tue Sep 12 2006, 13:45
updated by rae@tnir.org Tue Sep 12 2006, 14:23

and selecting any of the past versions would change all the fields to show the old version. This allows the user to revert to an old version easily. It’s kind of Wiki-ish. And since the history is linear like this, someone else can re-revert back to the previous version, and we can have our own Chandler-wars a là Wikipedia-wars.

Hah!

I thought I’d post about how I work on Chandler day-to-day a bit.

I use the Mac program TextMate most of the time. It has a feature where you can hand it a list of directories and it puts them in a sliding drawer for easy access to any file you might want to peruse. I usually start it via the mate command which TextMate installs, inside the directory chanddler/chandler like this:

mate application parcels/osaf util repository ../internal/chandlerdb/chandlerdb

This usually gives me access to any Python files I might want, like you see to the right.

TextMate also has a lot of context-sensitive power. TextMate automatically figures out what kind of file you are editing and by clicking on the “gear” mini-icon at the bottom, you can select one of any number of context-specific functions. Here you see the Python-specific functions, but also you can see some of the other contexts TextMate knows about. Its best guess is what you get when you click on the gear, but you are free to move your mouse up and down the menu.

Honestly, I haven’t investigated these functions at all. The ones you see with a darkened grey background with a combination of text and an arrow are macros you can execute by typing the text and hitting tab (thus the arrow). So if I type “try” and hit tab, it will spit out the following (I’ve substituted “_”s for spaces:

try:
____
except:
____raise

It also puts your cursor at the end of the second line, which is very likely exactly where you want to be.

This isn’t all that new, and there are more powerful features in Emacs I’m sure, but I find this much more usable.

Now, I’m kind of sorry that I use TextMate, since it’s not an Open Source or Free Software program. However, I am keeping my eye on contenders out there, like Smultron (which is showing promise).

When you edit an OSAF wiki page, the left and top bars go away. Below are pictures of the wiki before and after editing.

Before editing (click for larger version)

After editing (click for larger version)

The oinly way to fix this is to delete the cookie made by wiki.osafoundation.org: