Andy McKay's blog

Had the pleasure of heading down to Seattle yesterday to talk at the Seattle Plone User Group. Lovely group of people I seem to be knowing well, but was still a pleasure to put a few new faces to names. I had a talk about Content Mirror prepared. Unfortunately some people did come to hear about jquery, that was going to be the topic of my talk, but to be honest doing cross-domain work in JSONP in Plone is cool but only a 5 minute talk.

Anyway the talk went really well. I have to say I was quite pumped afterwards, I've had a string of bad talks. One lesson there is talk about what you feel passionately about. I do think Content Mirror is pretty cool and would love to use it on sites. Or perhaps just Plone as the new uber-Django admin interface.

The talk is here: Content Mirror

Plango, my quick Django front end for it is in: SVN, although this might get moved over to the Content Mirror repository.

People then kindly put up with me talking about the next version of Arecibo and that seemed to go down well too. Short on time right now, so I'll get a more coherent post together when I have time.

Afterwards a nice Thai dinner. Thanks for looking for after me folks.

After one week of being offline (apart from the cell phone), Telus finally got us hooked up. The difference between Telus and BT was so stunning to us in January, that we decided to go with Telus for our connection here.

In the UK we came back from holiday and found our internet and phone wasn't working. No idea why, so phoned BT. Three days later they came and in about 10 mins switched a box inside and left, hardly said two words. A month later we got a bill for 190 pounds. Danae was furious and wouldn't get off the phone till they had removed the charge. There was no forewarning of the charge so it was quite unreasonable.

In Canada the ADSL had difficulty connecting. Telus said they'd send someone out next day, I inquired up front of any charges "about $32 if it's your fault" they said, fair enough. The guy turned up 2 hours later, spent ages making sure it was ok, followed up with phone calls to make sure it worked. Cost zero, happy customers.

When we moved into this rental house the phone didn't work. Turns out the phone line is buried underneath the drive and is damaged, to fix it they would have to dig up the drive. This took 3 days of visits from more senior people. Today 4 people turned up dug a hole through the garden and hooked up the phone. Yes it took a week to get there, but they were friendly and helpful. Cost zero.

I'm sure for a big company like Telus there's a bunch of people who have unhappy stories. For one, I think they have a done a great job for us, twice, and it's kind of nice to say that about a company.

When I relate the story about BT in the UK they laughed and said "if we did that, we'd have no customers".

Anyone got a recommendation for a wysiwyg editor that allows you to add code? Basically I have an application that developers will write snippets of code in text areas. No it's not to ever execute, it's for a bug tracker and pasting code in is very common.

But no wysiwyg editor's seem to support this, adding in a pre or code tag seems hard. In all except Plone and Kupu that is. Sadly I'm not using Plone and support in non-Plone kupu land seems to be dead these days - and I think (please tell me if I'm wrong) that getting Kupu working from nothing is a challenge. So I've looked at:

• jwysiwyg: doesn't work in a lightbox in Firefox, no pre, but it looks like it could be added
• tinymce: no pre or code and nightmare to add (from what I here in the forums)
• fckeditor: no pre or code, could be addable, but seems to hate me for wanting to serve html and js off a different domain
• yui: reading api now

Perhaps this why so many bug trackers just use mark up text instead of a wysiwyg.

Over the last week or so it became clear that we were not going to be buying a house any time soon. We did put in an offer on the house, but it was way below what they were asking. Rather it was based on what we felt the house was worth in comparison with the other houses out there. Needless to say, they said no.

Then we started to think about upping our offer and getting into that house. It was at that point we realised that we needed to cool off and get a rental sorted. Sit this out and let the market settle. There are 30 houses in our area, in our price range. So far since the new year, one has sold for 80k under the asking price. So what's the rush. Inventory is going up rapidly, prices are going down (see here for sane stats).

So on Wednesday we got a rental sorted out. Friday we got the keys. Friday the shipment from England arrived. Saturday we got a car load of Ikea stuff. Sunday the storage arrived. Tuesday (tomorrow) we move in. Wednesday (the all important) internet will be up and running. Phew.

Doing this make me appreciate how hard this sort of thing would be without a support group of family and friends on either side.

So in a few days I might be able to get some work done. Oh and some house hunting.

Got a nice email from Joel Davis with some great improvements for Cleartrain. These included:

• Not showing all the past trainings, I checked my view and I had the query going back 20 days, that was silly.
• Showing past trainings a little differently.
• Making it clear you can do and then remove multiple filters.

One nice feature that isn't clear is that the RSS, Atom and iCal feeds all alter depending upon your filters. So a list of all say Python or Django training, is pretty easy. I need to find a nice UI way of improving that. Anyway thanks for the feedback on Cleartrain, it's been good so far, let's keep the trainings rolling in.

Another thing I found interesting is the number of trainings on Plone. Although Plone isn't necessarily the most popular project out there, plone.org does provide a very good platform for providing information on training. Something that some other projects (eg. Django) do quite differently.

Headed down for the Northwest Python Day on Saturday. Seattle really seems to be becoming a home away from home these days, I was surprisingly able to easily navigate around and knew a lot of people. I went down Friday night and stayed over and had a few beers and chat with Jon Stahl and his wife.

Despite that I still somehow ended up getting there at 10:30, most of which was figuring out that if you go into the University of Washington, one way and one way only since that way has the parking ticket booth. If you go in any other way you are left puzzling over how to get a ticket.

There were a few talks, the two highlights for me were:

Google App Engine talk was great, as I've deployed stuff to the App Engine, but held back on anything big. There's too many wierd thing's limitations and so on. It's brilliant wonderful and I love the deployment. But running unit tests is pain, dropping into a pdb is a pain and the limits worry me. I do have the impression it feels like Zope in the old days (I'm sure Guido doesn't read this, but if you do - sorry for comparison), for different reasons, but it makes using the tools I know and use hard.

The talk about Sage was brilliant had all the wow factors you could ever need. I'm not a math head, things like matlab are completely beyond me, but the stuff he was demoing in Sage looked brilliant. Clearly a bunch of very bright and intelligent people have worked on that project. Scarily so.

I met a bunch of new nice folks including John DeRosa and Ted Leung. Also nice to hear that Brian Gershon is happily building up a cool business building Django and Plone sites.

In what seems to be a mad flurry of meetings, it's off to Vancouver Python meetup Tuesday.