Why Aren’t You Writing?

A few people have noticed that I am not blogging much these days. In short, work has been keeping me busy. And, we are moving. Packing and cleaning takes time. My weak heart handles exercise and work very well, but moving boxes just kills me. I experience a deep and enveloping fatigue. Perhaps that would happen any way – it’s hard to know what to attribute to the weak heart.

We also have some personal commitments to keep. Last night, my nephew, Jeremy, graduated from high school. He was the class valedictorian. Great speech, Jeremy! Jeremy also had an outstanding high school career – he is poised to do very well in university if he can keep this up.

Tomorrow, my kids have a little graduation ceremony of their own. Madison will be going into grade 2 next year. It is going fast.

Blogging will become part of my life again, but, time is in short supply. I expect to be writing more about Turbogears in the future – my buddy Scott and I are investing time in a project that depends on Turbogears.

During the summer, I want to bike as much as possible, especially in the Gatineau Hills. I love to cycle, and one of my big concerns when I was first diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy was that I would no longer be able to go on long bike rides.

However, I am convinced that biking is helping to save my life. I feel stronger and better able to perform in other arenas of my life, but biking takes time, too. The kids take time, and they should. My wife and I need time. The new house will take time . . . but, I will blog again.

Using VMWARE To Evangelise

I have been telling clients and coworkers about open source for a while. Now, I SHOW them. I have a preconfigured version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine containing open source equivilants of all of the tools we use. I use these tools every day, and I willingly give anybody who asks a copy of this virtual machine to run on their own computer.

This represents a small commitment for them. They need to download the free VMWare Player, and then they can run a copy of Linux under windows without giving anything up.

My virtual machine has the full lamp stack – python, PHP, MYSql, PHPMyAdmin, and Apache. In addition, I provide NetBeans with Tomcat, a fully loaded version of Eclipse including pyDev, Aptana and PHPEclipse, and the Mono stack as well. Lastly, I provide Open Office, and a few other basic tools.

It is important to evangelise and to share both knowledge and tools.

 

Turbogears And Views

I have been using Turbogears for a personal project. I have read that this framework, and others, do not support the use of views. I thought this was nonsense. I have run the following test, and found that I can select from a view very easily – Turbogears thinks the view is a table. The key is the following:

class vw_type(SQLObject):
. . . . class sqlmeta:
. . . . . . . . table="vw_type"
. . . . . . . . fromDatabase=True

I am not sure I want to select from a view. I know that my models will perform more slowly than stored procedures against a database, but, you never know – it may come in handy. Sometimes, a view might just be faster that a sql statement that is build by the framework on the fly. It’s just good to know that views can be used.The reason I am using the an mvc framework is that I want to preserve the ability to use different database back ends without changing my code much. I also considered Ruby on Rails and PHP Cake. I settled on Turbogears because there are some Python libraries I very much need to use for this project. I am not pleased with the documentation that comes with Turbogears, but I bought the excellent book.

If I had not needed to use specific libraries that are only available in Python, I might very well have settled on Ruby on Rails. First, RoR is supported by a large community, and there are some great resources out there. The documentation is very good. In the end, though Turbogears won out. My impression is that the project needs help with documentation, and I think I am going to try to find a way to help, if I can. We’ll see.