2009 resolution summary

Items that are crossed out are completed.

• Compete in tournaments and/or races

• Refinance the house

• Go to yet another country

• Get more people hired at NASA (Welcome Chris Adams!)

• Learn Django, JQuery, and get better at zc.buildout and CSS

• Stay with NASA another year

• Test for my 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do

• Not break any bones

• Fix up more rooms in the basement

• Take down that one tree in the backyard

• Enjoy my family more (Things are better with my parents, siblings, and perhaps my son).

• Go to PyCon, Plone Conference 2009, and DjangoCon

• Become much more active in the open source community

Help me with zc.testbrowser

I like zc.testbrowser. Toss in some BeautifulSoup to increase the accuracy of some tests and its a monstrously useful way to run tests. However...

For the life of me I can't get it to properly handle select fields (select or multi-select). Once I get the control, I can't seem to set select fields as selected.

Any help would be appreciated. This ate way too much of my time. What should have been a trivial test has caused me no end of frustration. The documentation is pretty good, and yet they don't seem to provide how to do this sort of thing.

In any case, once answered I plan to put the response in the zc.testbrowser reference card I am cooking up.

Update: Fixed the problem with some help from Aaron Van Derlip. Basically, since zc.testbrowser doesn't do JavaScript, sometimes you have to submit forms and links the hard way. I'll be putting that into my upcoming reference card.

Day 2 of the 2008 Plone Conference

I was very rested by the time I arrived. I had slept well.

So you want to be a consultant by panel

No, I'm not looking to leave NASA these days. However, I do some side consulting, and even in my day job there are good project control lessons you can learn from the consulting crowd. For example, ideas on recruiting, customer relations, and how to handle billing when you need time to boost skills. There were 5 plone board members in the panel, and much wisdom was shared. Plone board members there:

• Nate Atune
• Gaer Baekholt
• Calvin Hendryx-Parker
• Jon Stahl
• Matt Hamilton
  

What makes a great development team by Mike Robinson

He can code, he can manage, he can cycle, and he has the most awesome Irish accent, and he taught us about agile programming. And he explained why and how it works in a great fashion. I'm completely sold. I have been for some time, but he gives great arguments for it, or at least on evaluating on how to best handle this sort of thing.

Future of the Plone user experience by Alexander Limi

Limi has strong opinions and what he said may not reflect what ends up happening. He wants deliverance, strong media handling, more widgets, deliverance, better kupu, z3c form improvement, better validators, and an easier way to handle templates. All good stuff.

And he had a much, much better version of what I've been aiming at with my customer editor view in NASA Science. Great minds think alike, although I must admit his method is much better than my own.

Simplifying Plone by Martin Aspelli

He wants to do it with a chainsaw and make Plone more approachable from a developer's point of view.

Plone has a number of embarressments, with issues ranging from rich media support to import/export problems with the database. It is hard to learn and skinning is a challenge. He thanked Lennart for pointing out what Zope did wrong, and how developers expect things to be easy.

Wants to revamp much for Plone 4. Some quick bullets:

• Follow the guiding lights shown by some of the other Python web frameworks.
• Make learning follow a constant set of humps, not huge ones followed by a plateau followed by an insurmountable wall.
• make certain things real easy to do (logo, branding, content types, etc)
• Create one true way and remove the other ways
• embrace through the web but allow filesystem round-trip for deployment and collaboration

NASA Science case study by Katie Cunningham and Daniel Greenfeld

Yes! I helped present!

So we presented and apparently did very well. We had a few luminaries in the room, including a couple Plone board members. I think we nailed all the points we wanted to make, which was a very awesome thing to do. We plan to send the slides off to Alex Clark shortly so we can have them on line for everyone to see.

Please go to NASA Science and leave feedback asking to release Umlizer to the world!

Evening Agile Development workshop by Mike Robinson

Two more hours of the awesome Mike Robinson ended the day for me. He gave a rock-solid lecture and then we played a game to support his statements. It was a fun game and learning was had by all. That said, I think this would have been better done as part of a day-long class, not at the end of a long day of conferencing.

General Socializing

Where to begin? I had great fun with so many incredibly awesome people. The quick and dirty list:

• Vernon Chapman
• Tarek Zaide
• Alex Clark
• Amy Clark
• Matt Bowen
• Jon Stahl
• Nate Aune
• Katie Cunningham
• Gary Burner
• Joel Burton
• My whole agile development "team"

If I missed you, let me know!

Day 1 of the 2008 Plone Conference

The 2008 Plone conference actually started on Wednesday, and Monday and Tuesday were training days. I'll be blogging about those later. Unlike the last conference, set in Italy, this is set here in Washington, DC. Since I am not being a tourist, I'm doing most of my posts here in my technical blog.

First off, Tuesday I had suffered from my periodic insomnia the night before so this day was a matter of a lot of water, light eating, and trying to keep cool in order to keep myself alert.

Registration

I had volunteered to work the registration desk as part of my effort to contribute to the conference. I arrived at 7 am. Others followed shortly and soon enough plonistas began to arrive. In no special order I got to meet or badge the following people:

• Ian Bicking
• Martin Aspelli
• Alexander Limi
• Bradley Kuhn
• Tres Seaver
• Nate Aune
• John Stahl
• Most of the KSS team

I was not alone as a volunteer for registration! Also there was:

• Emma Campbell
• JoAnna Springsteen
• Steve?
• Paul Boos
• Amy Clark
• Matt Bowen

Keynotes

I drifting a little in and out, but mostly I was focused on the registration. I figured I could just catch up on plone.tv. Not perfectly ideal, but volunteering is good for the soul. ;) Then it was off to the talks!

Feed the Masses by Paul Bugni

This was about Vice a Plone 3.x syndication tool that lets you output types in RSS 2.0, Atom, and even RSS 1.0. It handles recursions and enclosures and much more. It looks like a wonderful tool for our efforts, but its not quite yet production ready. I may spring on it.

I like the Zope Component Architecture approach! Awesome!

I played timer guy for the nefarious Matt Bowen.

Theming a Plone Site from Start to Finish by Rob Porter

Rob Porter of WebLion presented on material I had just taken a 2 day class on, so in retrospect I should not have gone. On the other hand, I got a few gems and perhaps getting a reinforcement on the class was good. Again I played timer guy for the nefarious Matt Bowen.

Software in the Cloud Speech violates freedom by Bradley Kuhn

Awesome speech! The cloud is dangerous, because really, who own our emails and twits when we use gmail and twitter?

Usability by Ginger Butcher and Katie Cunningham

I did not go but visited. I have to say that I was impressed watching those two for just a few minutes. They NAILED it. They talked well, energetically, knew their material, gave good examples, and were having as much fun as two little girls in a sand box. They did an awesome job and got kudos from Alexander Limi himself.

Plone Conference 2008 starts tomorrow!

I posted my bit of melancholy about the location on my personal blog under the ploneconf2008 label. Expect to see my more technical side here under my pydanny ploneconf2008 label. Hope that makes sense!

What will I be doing there? Let me see...

First two days will be Joel Burton's class on Plone Theming. Why theming? Because our team needs more skill in it!

I'll be volunteering to help out with the conference in the role of registration helper and general gopher.

I'll be helping our NASA Science team present on our big project, NASA Science!

I'll be attending talks and taking notes until my fingers bleed.

I'll be working in sprints.

I'm not sure about my social activities. We have a tight house budget.

Pluggable Authentication System for Plone

It took me a little to get started, because the paster template for Plone 3 Pluggable Authentication System (PAS) products doesn't work for me. Not sure why, so I submitted a ticket.

Anyway, once I figured out that it was the template, and not me, things went very fast. PAS is rather straightforward when you get the hang of it. The quick summary of how to do a PAS plugin as how I've done it:

• Grab the gmail auth plugin and use that as your base.
• In your 'content type', import and register the appropriate method and in the content type's class, create the appropriate method.
• Follow the PAS documentation on Plone.org for different actions you might need to do.
  

Yeah, very basic. I also figured out how to detail properties that can be set via the ZMI. Easy, but the documentation is not as easy to find as it should be.

I might document things in more depth since in some ways this took much longer than it should have considering the simplicity of the end code. I'm sure the Plone folks would love a detailed set of PAS examples to reinforce the current documentation, and I seem to enjoy doing that quite a bit.

Heh, while I'm at it, maybe I should finish my KSS documentation that I left hanging since the Naples Plone Conference in 2007?

Anyway, my quick review of PAS is that its really powerful. That each element (Authentication, Authorization, Challenges, etc) is seperated into its own plugin/module means that you can switch out components without jeopordizing the security and role system that might already exist. So, for example, if you want to use LDAP for authentication and SQL for authorization and a Smart Card to handle security challenges, you can do that without having do rewrite the core Plone engine. Another big bonus is that to do the actual replacement of individual plugin/modules is really easy once you figure out how. And that is pretty damned hot.

Umlizer lives!

Still is an early alpha release but nevertheless it lives! At this moment it currently handles all the formats I want for version one and has been tested against all target Plone versions. In other words, it meets the requirements I set for this tool, and now what remains is cleanup, documentation, and more testing.

What is Umlizer?
Umlizer is a Plone 2.5x/3.x package that introspects your Zope Object DataBase (ZODB) and then returns a view of your database in the specification that you want. Currently Umlizer provides the following formats for its view:

• DOT for rendering into UML via graphviz
• UML in JPG rendered via graphviz if graphviz is installed
• HTML list for easy reading
  
• Comma Seperate Values (CSV)
• 3-d animated graph rendered via ubigraph

Before you ask this is a very Plone specific tool. Django already has a similiar tool called DjangoGraqhviz.

Why Umlizer?Umlizer was designed to represent the complexity of the Nasa Science site architecture, which was originally a rather complex UML diagram. The XMI for that UML diagram became corrupted, and we did not have a backup. Training people on the database has thus been a chore since, whether they be developers or content editors. In a couple other projects I've noticed that going through Plone code to figure out an architecture can be a pain. So what about a pretty diagram?

For nearly a year I tooled around with different iterations of this effort. In general, each of these iterations relied on protected Python scripts in Plone, which are limited and forced the user of the tool to make many steps before getting a view. These scripts were fragile and arcane, and just plain sucked. Different views of the data were impossible to generate. The latest version of this hack had really nice code, but was a hack.

So I thought, why not try to make it a Zope 3 style Plone package again? My previous attempt in September of 2007 tanked, but my skills in this arena had really improved thanks to training, a cancelled Zope 3 effort, and lately my co-worker Reed's insistence on using it and my need to maintain and extend his work.

Also, in the Plone community, thanks to Jens Klein we have ArchGenXml which is why we used UML in the first place. When I met him in Italy in October of 2007 for Plone Conference 2007, he told me about a pet project of his called Genesis. From what he said at the oldest pizzeria in the world is that Genesis is ArchGenXml with a very modular architecture. So I was determined to make this as modular as possible, trying to work outside the confines of Plone and isolating individual pieces as much as possible.

After about a week of playing with this along with my other duties, Umlizer is working at an alpha level!

Where can we get Umlizer?
That is a very good question. Because of our internal need for documentation this was done under the auspices of NASA. One of the things on my schedule tomorrow is asking for permission to release Umlizer as an open source package. Since there is nothing sensitive about Umlizer, I don't see anything preventing its release.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for:

• My wife and son
• My students
• Everyone who helped out when my bike got stolen
• Only two minor injuries this year
• My friends
• My family
• My crazy coworkers
• The trip to Italy
• My NASA customer
• Python
• The Plone and Zope communities
• Good training partners
• Good teachers

KSS or Plone4Artists sprint choice

I'm interested in both. I think I might do better at the KSS sprint because they really need a good set of tutorials and documentation. But Plone4Artists would be good for me to do because I would get stronger on Interfaces and Subtypes, however, my ability to do them some good is limited by the fact that the HTML/CSS trick I want to do I haven't figured out how to do yet.

Hrm...

After some thought, I'm going to do the KSS sprint until I get to a point, then switch over. I'll be able to take the skills from one sprint and bring it into the other group.