Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really.
I’ve always said that the appeal of any operating system – for me – is that I can fire up a terminal window and tinker around. When I say that many people look at me like I’ve got rocks in my head. But I’m glad I am not alone.
I just read a fascinating article by Ed Smith called “Are We Too Professional?” which, although it is ostensibly about cricket, covers too many interesting topics to disect here. But it did prompt a couple of observations.
One is that he is bang on the money and that some of the best performances – at work, play or scientific endeavour – come from those who don’t always follow the proscribed practices. But this then lead me on to the thought that professionalism, especially in the contexts that Ed quotes it in the article, is often just used as an excuse to implement restrictions on people who are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and shouldn’t need them. But for whatever reason those in authority don’t trust and think that without these controls there will be chaos. This is illustrated by the example he quotes of teachers having to plan their lessons in 3 minute chunks. Some of my favourite teachers at school often couldn’t plan how to get to their classrooms from the staff room, heaven help them if they had had to go into this level of lesson planning.
The other observation is that, as with many other things, the devil is in the details. Professionalism itself isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t confuse it with being good at what you are supposed to be achieving. Sure, having a “mission statement” can be a bad thing. Especially if it is as bad as –
“ICI’s vision is to be the leader in creating value for customers and shareholders through market leadership, technological edge and a world competitive cost base.”
After reading that I still don’t know what it is that they do. What is wrong there is not trying to define the purpose of the organisation, it’s how they have gone about doing it. Maybe they should have gone for “Be the best chemical producer in the world”. Just a thought.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, go and read the article.
This last weekend I released version 0.3.5 of gerald.
The major component of this release was to add a ‘User’ class to the oracle_schema module. This is similar to the ‘Schema’ class but whilst that shows all of the objects a database user owns the ‘User’ class contains details of all of the objects they can access, including those owned by other database users. This was requested by the sqlpython project to enable them to use gerald for database introspection.
The only other change was to ensure that the NotImplementedError exception is raised in all of the super type methods that are just stubs. This is mainly in the Schema.py module and thus meant that I had to add a set of tests for this module.
Development, bug and issue tracking and the project wiki are available on the project Trac site. Source code and distribution files are available at the sourceforge page.
The next release will be 0.4. Exactly what will make up that release is still evolving. To see what is in the release and to track progress take a look at the version 0.4 roadmap.
Everyone, say hello to version 0.3.1 of gerald. This is a minor update that fixed some issues introduced in release 0.3 In summary these are:
Development, bug and issue tracking and the project wiki are available on the project Trac site. Source code and distribution files are available at the sourceforge page.
The next release will be 0.3.5 and will introduce the concept of a ‘User’. This is similar to a ‘Schema’ but will reference all of the objects a database user can see even if they don’t own them. You can track progress for the release using the version 0.3.5 roadmap.
I had a bit of an epiphany over the weekend. Luckily I managed to clean up afterwards. Actually, it was whilst I was cleaning up that I had the thought.
As I removed the plastic wrapper from the latest set of phone books, dutifully placed it in the bin and then took the books themselves and put them straight into the recycling I realised that I haven’t used a phone book in nearly ten years.
I don’t need phone books any more. I have White Pages, and Yellow Pages. In this country both of these web sites are provided by Sensis, who also publish the paper books that land on my doorstep only to be put straight in the bin. But then I realised that I don’t use those sites either.
If I want the number for a business I Google them and look for a number on their web site. Because these days everybody has a web site, right? If they don’t have a web site they generally don’t get my business. Which is harsh, but who wants to open up a big book and find a business, or even worse figure out what category to look up and find an advert for an appropriate business on one of several pages in a directory.
For people my approach is just as simple. If I want to call someone I generally have their mobile number. Failing that I’ll have their email address and I’ll send them an email asking for their number.
Thinking about it I rarely ring more than a handful of people on their home or other fixed line phones. There are people that I’ve known for years who’s home telephone numbers are a complete mystery to me.
It would seem that I am not alone in this either. There was a big story in the Fairfax press only a day after I had chucked my phone books away – Millions set to disconnect their fixed-line phones – and even the Telegraph in the UK had this issue as number 8 in their list of 50 things that are being killed by the internet.
As I think about this I struggle to think of any reason why I would need a printed phone directory ever again. Is there a way to tell Sensis not to send me them any more?
On a recent project a number of interface files were defined as “ASCII encoded DOS files with CRLF (ASCII code 13 and 10 respectively) end of line markers and the field delimiter is | (Pipe character – ASCII code 124)” or in plain language, pipe separated values files.
Now the casual observer would think that these are the same as CSV files, but with a different delimiter. And you would almost be correct -as long as you aren’t relying on popular desktop productivity software to produce your files.
The reasons for this exact format are lost in the mists of time but these files are supposed to be easy to produce by anyone with a computer. The assumption was that most of the people producing these files would be running Microsoft Windows and Office.
This leads to the assumption that you can enter your tabulated data into Excel and save as a pipe delimited CSV right? Wrong. It is next to impossible to do this in Excel unless you change some system wide settings. To which my first response was WTF?
Luckily, Python came to my rescue and all I needed to do was this:
>>> import csv
>>> old_file = csv.reader(open('blah.csv'), dialect='excel')
>>> new_file = csv.writer(open('ANDY.csv', 'w'), delimiter='|')
>>> for record in old_file:
... new_file.writerow(record)
Of course, this doesn’t help the average person in the street who doesn’t have my l33t Python skills. So I’ll be changing the interface format as soon as I get a chance.
I have packaged and released version 0.2.6 of gerald. This is an update that doesn’t change any functionality but has involved a major re-factoring of the module unit tests. Rather than wait I have released the package in it’s current form to give a base for some major changes coming in release 0.3
Gerald is being considered for use in the SQLPython toolkit. For them to get full value I will need to make a number of changes to the code. Luckily for all of us these were on the development roadmap anyway, so I’ve just moved them up the priority list.
As other people have shown an interest in the tool I have also invested in a little infrastructure and have fired up Trac for the sourceforge project. Gerald now has a wiki and, more importantly, a ticketing system for bug reports and feature requests. I’ve put the changes coming for release 0.3 in a number of tickets and you can track progress for the release using the version 0.3 roadmap.
I have packaged and released version 0.2.5 of gerald. This is another minor release with a couple of bugs fixes and one important administration update. You can find all of the details in the CHANGELOG.txt file that comes with the source distribution (or view it here) but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;
The last change was at the request of the SQLPython project, if you haven’t taken a look at that wonderful utility yet, please do. To support them it is likely that the next release of Gerald will support SQLite.
Please download, install and enjoy. Bug reports. tumultuous praise or cash bribes to the usual address please.
I sent an email to a colleague earlier today. I just read the out of office auto reply that I received in response:
“Note: I will be on a holiday until 5th January 2009. Please resend your important emails after my return date as I will delete all email sent before that date. Perhaps put a calendar entry in your diary. See you all when I come back.”
Who said customer service was a dead concept?
Dear Lazyweb, what should I put in a website style and branding guide?
When I’m developing software applications I am used to producing a number of guidelines that should be followed during development. These usually cover:
I’m currently building a web site and struggling to find good examples of the last part. We have graphic designers engaged on the project but they don’t have any templates to work from so we need to come up with our own. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel so can anybody recommend a good template for a web site style guide?
I have found a couple of examples on the web, from Monash and Penn State Universities but would be interested in looking at any more that anyone can suggest.
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