Sinzui

I spent my last two weekends working with ancient web technologies. Anne decided she wanted to update her Happy Faces web to attract more face painting business. I agreed to create a form for customers to inquire about rates and availability. The hosting service only offered Python 2.4,  CGI, and sendmail. I really did not want to [...]

I not only hack on Launchpad, I use it everyday for my personal projects and for the 1100+ projects I maintain as a registry administrator. I see hundreds of pages each week where my first question is “what has this user or project done recently”? Launchpad cannot easily tell me that, and what it does [...]

I recently updated pocket-lint to require gjs instead of seed because the latter has been 100% broken for 6 weeks. The best thing I can say about this experience is that I am very happy there are two competing implementations of GObject Introspection bindings for JavaScript. I am disappointed that the two implementations are not [...]

I gave a presentation for Ubuntu App Developer Week this week about using gedit for development. I use gedit to write python apps ranging from the enormous (launchpad) to the tiny (pocket-lint) You can read the PDF of gedit-developer-plugins summarising my presentation (and it includes pictures).

I updated my Macbook to OS X Lion over the weekend and had a nasty scare. I could not boot back to Ubuntu, nor could I see my Ubuntu partition. That is the moment where you think, “Is everything baked up? What will I loose?”. I remember that I switched from Evolution to Thunderbird last [...]

I recently created https://launchpad.net/lp-release-manager-tools for some videos I am making about how to use Launchpad. One aspect of creating a release is to upload the source tarball and a detached gpg signature verifying it. This is somewhat ironic, since lp-release-manager-tools exists to automate repetitive tasks that release managers do in Launchpad. I really do not like creating the [...]

Or: “Why I don’t classify bugs as medium” The process of triaging issues (bugs, features, and tasks) has one crucial principle: Prioritise the work according to need and certainty. Work is prioritised because there are not enough engineers to do all the work. Some features will never be completed, some bugs will never be fixed. Triage determines [...]

I looked at Launchpad bug #523189 today. This bug cannot be fixed until Launchpad abandoned YUI-Font rules — percentages have unpredictable results when pages are constructed from fragment. Canonical own Web guidelines specify the use of pixels. Launchpad uses YUI-Font to normaize font sizes across browser and OSes. It stipulates that all font sizes must be expressed [...]

I met with Vish at UDS-N to discuss encouraging contributions to the One Hundred Paper Cuts project. The issues he raised demonstrate that the page design is not meeting the requirements we set in the Launchpad 3.0 UI designs. You will see a common layout in Launchpad pages where a wide narrative block is above [...]

While attending UDS-n, I was invited to two separate and contradictory conversations about Launchpad Answers. Jorge Castro is considering Ask Ubuntu as the official Ubuntu service for managing user questions. It is a nice service. The question refining and member reputation features are compelling. I think there are two changes that need to happen to [...]