Andy McKay's blog

This looks like a tiny change in the user interface, but represents a larger change behind the scenes, adding in locking. When you hit the edit page a WebDAV lock is placed on the page. When the browser leaves the page the lock is removed. If the user just closes the browser the lock times out. Having the page locked means it cannot be edited by anyone else.

The lock is visible in the Zope Control Panel under WebDAV locks. I haven't spotted anywhere else in Plone that shows the locks and allows you to clear them or see what's locked when, if anyone does, let me know.

Quite often in applications I've wanted to show just a warning or some information back to the user. In older Plone's there was one choice, that bright orange box that screamed "idiot!". Now you can give your status message a level and there will a suitably bold message.

Choices are: info, warning or error.

There's talk about some of the big changes in Plone 3, but lots of little things that were changed in the UI as well.

In Plone 2 there was drag and drop re-ordering on the folder contents page. That was implemented by clicking and holding on the item. To access the item you just clicked. That was the theory but in at least one release of Plone IE had a real problem with this, meaning the click to access the item didn't work. Plone 3 makes this much more obvious by clearly seperating out the click to access from the drag to order. The latter is now those 2 colon's on the right.

Just released Clouseau for Plone 3. Most of the changes had happened during the beta, with thanks to roeder and wiggy for those. There's still of course a few long running bugs that need to be solved, but on the whole little change.

Download: Clouseau.0.8.zip

Plone is released. This is probably the biggest release in a long time and from an end user point of view, the largest number of visible changes and tweaks. Well done to all the team involved.

On the top end most visible are the ajaxification of most of the content editing and the addition of versioning. Behind the scenes its all the Zope 3 stuff and rewriting of all the architecture. I don't understand most of that stuff, so I can just hope its all a good thing. But if you haven't tried Plone in a while, should take another quick peek at it.

Yesterday, stepped off the plane back into Vancouver for the first time in 9 months. It's taken me until now to sink in that I really do like Canada, there wasn't that sort of immediate "ah i'm home feeling". Probably due to the intense tiredness of the long day, the girl's that wouldn't sleep on the plane and the sorting ourselves out.

Today was more relaxing, walking our dog Bob, who I do miss a huge amount, sorting out car insurance and the like. Walking Bob took me down through some wonderful woods in Deep Cove, out around the cove and back. We dinner out at the local Sushi place, my favourite one was closed, but the sushi was good. Now I'm sat looking over Belcara and Indian Arm.

I do like Canada, especially Deep Cove. Twenty one days left before the flight home to England.

Just renewed by UK road tax on line and saw this URL:

http://www.vehiclelicence.gov.uk/EvlPortalApp/?SKIN=directgov

And I read the EvlPortalApp as EvilPortalApp.

It's all tagged in SVN and ready to roll out on Tuesday, once all the installers and press releases are done. I know its a cliche, but this truly is the biggest and best Plone ever with lots of new features that absolutely rock if you haven't seen it in a while.

I particular liked the center of focus bang smack in the middle of the flower on this one. Got to find out what all these flowers are called now.

I had a long post on this in my head. But it's all gotten incoherent and out of sorts. The short answer is:

Free is bad and cheap isn't any better unless it brings you an income stream somewhere else

It's region encoded. Dammit why didn't I check that. Meaning if we moved back to Canada we'd have to buy a new Wii to play games bought in Canada. I've currently got 3 Canadian DVD players (computers), 2 Uk DVD players (one computer, one actual DVD console). And now 1 English only Wii. Perhaps if I move I'll be selling the Wii and buying something else. Very annoyed Nintendo would do this to me. Even more annoyed I didn't check first.

Over at Montreal Tech Watch there's an article on Vancouver: Canada’s Greatest Start-Up City?. I've been a huge Vancouver fan for many years, there's so much potential there. All the companies mentioned I know and makes me feel sad I'm not there. It's a prime location for pulling in talent, the lifestyle there is way better than say San Jose.

I'll keep saying it to Google people, open an office in Vancouver to suck in all the talent who can't get US visas. Microsoft have just done it.

The one ommision of this article is probably the greatest Web 2.0 success, Flickr

I met Andre Charland for lunch about a year ago when his company was called eBusiness Applications and mine was called Enfold. A nice, exceedingly bright chap - building a company out of providing quality Ajax tools. At the time he told me he was writing a book whilst building a company. My reply was something like "poor you, you'll be glad when the book is out". It is now out congratulations Andre Charland.

Read this article in the Guardian on Saturday about the high numbers of children in US jails, jailed for life without the possibility of parole. The case of Nicole Ann Dupure seemed particular sad. Her boyfriend at the time and her were accused of murdering and robbing an old lady for $30.

But shortly before he went on trial he changed his evidence and put Dupure alongside him at the scene of the murder. In return, the prosecution agreed he should be given the lesser charge of second-degree murder and avoid lifelong incarceration. Under cross-examination, he conceded to the jury, "I never had intentions to pin it on her until I ran out of options."

Blevins got 20 to 50 years, with the hope of reducing his sentence through good behaviour. Dupure got life without parole, with no forensic evidence tying her to the crime and entirely on the strength of Blevins' testimony.

Jailed at 17, she will never be set free and can never apply for parole. The idea of justice as persecution has never seemed right to me, it must be about reform. But that seems impossible in this system:

The US is among a tiny minority of countries (Somalia is another) that have refused to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that expressly forbids the practice. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, only three other countries - Israel, South Africa and Tanzania - mete out the sentence and they have collectively just 12 prisoners serving it.

Technically, a child of any age could be incarcerated for life in Michigan for first-degree murder.

An Amnesty International report on the same issue reports:

An estimated 26% of child offenders were convicted of "felony murder", which holds that anyone involved in the commission of a serious crime during which someone is killed is also guilty of murder, even if he or she did not personally or directly cause the death.

And:

A survey found that 59% of the convictions were for first time offenders.

Yes the acts have been terrible, but this punishment is wrong. It's hard to think back to when I was 14 (as was Matthew Bentley in the Guardian case) and think how little I knew about what I was doing and sometimes my lack of empathy for others. Over the course of a lifetime people change and whatever forms of retribution are needed by society must paid at some point.

For our wedding anniversary on Friday we went to Bistro 26 a restaurant we stumbled upon by accident in Lancaster. What an excellent find it was. We were the first there, but the place soon filled up some of whom were clear regulars.

I started with Crayfish and rocket salad, Danae skipped starter so she could have desert. Main course for me was chicken breast in a mustard sauce with potato and asparagus. Danae had pork wrapped in parma ham stuff with sage. It was all excellent. Desert was a raspberry brulet and hot chocolate pudding. A lot of the things on the menu were local produce found by the chef.

We aren't restaurant reviewers or connoisseurs, but eating out a lot in Vancouver, we've gotten used to good food. I'm so sick of expensive and terrible food eating out in England, it's not always that way, but it is still the norm. I no longer mind paying money for good food. This was excellent food, decently priced (for England) - around 50 pounds (including wine and beer). No searches for restaurant in Lancaster turned them up, so here goes.