Enthought: November EPD webinar: Envisage

Envisage is a Python-based framework for building extensible applications. The Envisage Core and corresponding Envisage Plugins are components of the Enthought Tool Suite. We’ve found that Envisage grants us a degree of immediate functionality in our custom applications and have come to rely on the framework in much of our development.

For November’s EPD webinar Corran Webster will show how you can hook together existing Envisage plugins to quickly create a new GUI. We’ll also look at how you can easily turn an existing Traits UI interface into an Envisage plugin.

In order to better serve the Linux-users in our audience, we’ve decided to begin hosting our EPD webinars on WebEx instead of GoToMeeting. This means that our original limit of 35 attendees will be scaled back to 30. As usual, EPD subscribers at a Basic level or above will be guaranteed seats for the event while the general public may add their name to the wait list here.

How do I… use Envisage for GUIs?
Friday November 6, 2009
1pm CDT/6pm UTC

See you there!

Reinout van Rees: Handy two-page restructedtext cheat sheet

A while ago I stumbled upon a real handy two-page PDF with a restructuredtext
(rst) cheat sheet. If you work with rst and need to look up things from time
to time: recommended! The link directly to the pdf:
http://github.com/ralsina/rst-cheatsheet/raw/master/rst-cheatsheet.pdf

Made by Roberto Alsina. The source
for the pdf is available on github.

Kenneth Reitz: More Google Wave Invites! Get ‘em now!

My Google Wave invite manna was just replenished!

If you’d like an invite, leave a comment and be creative!

Don’t believe me? Then see for yourself!

Update: As of 5PM (EST), October 30th 2009 10 invites remain!

Christian Scholz: Malthe about “Otto” (Plone Conference 2009 Open Space Session)

Malthe Borch organized a session about “Otto”, his and Jeroen’s approach to make Python Web Framework programming fun again mainly be reinventing the wheel. But give it a listen yourself:

[audio:http://mrtopf.de/files/otto.mp3]

(Download MP3)

(It started by Malthe explaining that repoze.bfg was born out of forking Zope3 packages to make them work in your environment and then noticing that you don’t need them and throwing them out again or something along those lines)

Kenneth Reitz: GitHub + Strategy

GitHub is currently down. And that is very sad. However, they have an Awesome Angry Unicorn.
And this unicorn makes me smile, even though I can’t get to any of my projects.

If you’re going to make a web application, give it some personality. This will not only keep your userbase entertained, but will serve as a nice insurance package when you let them down.

Thomas Vander Stichele: Developer Productivity Presentation

Dear interweb,

recently I’ve been doing a bunch of thinking on how to have productive developers. We’ve been having some discussions on the topic on the business side, and there are things that I take for granted that aren’t always as obvious to the more commercial side. Things like, ‘flow is the most important part’, ‘context switches should be avoided’, or ‘a 3 month deadline for development with 1.5 months of testing/deployment/… can be given double the development work with only 50% more time’.

So I started thinking it would be nice to be able to give a quick presentation to those people, explaining some of the basic concepts they should consider, and references to back it up (studies, papers, …) that give some weight to the argument beyond ‘trust me, I know because I’m a developer’.

I went out googling for something like this but I didn’t find anything, possibly because I don’t know what to look for. It seems like something useful for any kind of technical/dev manager.

If you have an idea, please let me know!

Why bother upgrading perl?

While I am really happy that perl moves forward, things get fixed or
deprecated and later removed but I know several companies that are
still using 5.6.x and even older versions of perl. The gap
is widening for many companies and I am not sure what …

Paul Everitt: I admit it, Deco looks pretty nice

This post has the jaded volume turned to eleven but even so, I’m impressed.

I watched the video of Rob Gietema’s presentation on Deco, the “new way to manage page layout, composite pages and rich content in Plone 4″. I approach the entire topic with cynicism, dread, and exhaustion on a number of fronts.

Well, color me intrigued. I’ll probably clutch tightly to my bitter, curmudgeonly outlook. But I must confess to being impressed, in a number of ways. I think they’ve done a good job thinking about the problem. It looks like they’re going slow and being unafraid to refactor ideas and implementations. It also has, already, a nice visual appeal along with some clever simplifying assumptions to keep the congitive overload under control. Finally, this is a hard space to work in, technically, and it seems like they have some mad skillz.

There’s still a lot of challenge ahead. The biggest is what I view as the chief paradox confronting Plone. On one hand, a significant portion of people are fed up with how some of the features are implemented. But on the other hand, they’re burned out by a legacy of undead overhauls and don’t have much patience for revolution. (Sidebar: my opinion is, I sympathize but The Time Has Come.)

Additionally, while it’s a lot of work to do the product, it’s a lot more work to do the “whole” product: documentation, bug fixing, ongoing compatibility, performance, and other stuff over the long haul. Letting Deco have a long gestation period outside the core would be advisable. The more baked it is, the more legitimate it will feel when added to Plone, and the less resistance from the undead-overhaul-worriers.

So good luck Deco. If even 2/3 of the features are implemented, but implemented superbly over the long haul, then Plone will have something sweet to hang its hat on. (All of the above applies equally to Dexterity, the new content type system.)

Paul Everitt: Congrats new Plone Foundation board

Per the announcement, congrats to the new board of directors for the Plone Foundation. I really, really like that lineup of people. It’s amazing, though, that there were at least five others in the election that would also have been strong to have on the board.

A particular thanks to Hanno Schlichting for once again conducting the election. I have utter confidence in the things he does, be it Plone Foundation process stuff or gradually untangling years of technical cruft as part of his Plone 5 release manager duties.

I saw the minutes of the Plone Foundation annual member’s meeting (thanks Maurits for the writeup.) Toby reported that, after spending half of the original CA donation of $100k, the PF in one year has its bank account back to the original amount. This is primarily due to the sponsorship plan that Jon Stahl helped kick off, tied to the excellent work the Plone.net team at Pilot Sytems (plus Reinout, plus others) have done over the years.

The price point for sponsorship makes it easy to get companies in, and the allocation of funds (e.g. release managers, promotion) makes it very easy to justify. Since the price point is a yearly fee, I suspect that you’ll see another $50k come in during the next half year, meaning…

…the Plone Foundation is a very successful community-managed outfit. Congrats to the previous board for orchestrating this turnaround on finances, and here’s to a good 2010 for the Plone Foundation.

Sean McGrath: No PDFs?

No PDFs! is not the answer. The answer is to make data available in a variety of formats and explain the relationship between them. In such a world, PDF becomes one format amongst many. That is good.

The problem with a lot of the “just give us XML!” exhortations is that it is easy to over-simply the issues that arise with legal and regulartory materials.

In an XML L&R world, PDF has its place. So too does Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, TIFF, custom-schema XML, industry-standard-schema XML, JSON, RDFa etc.

The whole point of using XML “upstream” is to allow a multiplicity of transforms downstream. However, care needs to be taken when the documents are critical – like legislation…It is critical that the normative copy is made explicit. The ideal normative copy is one that can partake in author/edit cycles. However, the normative copy is (typically) the result of a printing process because paper is signed by empowered officers with an ink pen. On the way to paper, there are umpteen points of intervention in the typical paper printing workflow. Camera-ready or direct-to-plate workflows in print shops involve page imposition and all sorts of pre-flight work that can – and often do – render the upstream content suspect with respect to the final printed pages.

Legislative artifacts – especially bills – need very close attention to line/page numbers because of the time honored way in which legislative amendment cycles work. Most knee-jerk “structured” XML approaches fall flat on their faces as a result. With legislation, line/page numbers are not throw-away artifacts. They are as important as the words themselves…

None of the problems are insurmountable but they involve a lot of care and thought. Throwing out PDF isn’t the solution. Simply plugging in a structured XML editor with a custom/industry schema won’t work either. The solution involves combining structured XML technology with wordprocessor technology and DTP technology. The key is recognizing that a multiplicity of formats/techniques are required in order to serve the needs of the complete legislative workflow; and to be absolutely clear – every step of the way – what the normative copy of the digital text is.

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