Planetary Ponderings

Recently I needed to simulate a serial device (a GPS, to be precise) for a Windows application I'm modifying for a client.

I don't use Windows on a regular basis, but I do have a license for it, and an original Windows XP CD from back in the day, so I loaded Windows in a VirtualBox virtual machine for the odd occasion I might need Windows, like when I build the Windows version of OpenLP 2.0.

I think most folks are probably well aware of the Windows Subversion client, TortoiseSVN. It has been around for a number of years, and is easily one of the most handy version control clients on any platform.

Recently, I have been wanting to be able to do the same thing in Linux. Simply right-click and update. Sure I can use the command line, and sure I could even use Bazaar Explorer, but I don't always have a terminal open, and Bazaar Explorer doesn't work with files as much as workflow, and that doesn't always fly.

In my last post, I talked about using Bazaar on Subversion repositories. Soon afterward, David Rubin asked me in IRC if I can do the standard branching and merging on a Bazaar working copy of a Subversion repository, and how easy it is.

Soon after I started developing version 2.0 of OpenLP, we moved OpenLP over to Launchpad.net and to using Bazaar for our version control. Over the last (nearly) 2 years of using Bazaar, I've really come to enjoy working with it, and the workflow that the Bazaar integration in Launchpad offers.

After the Ubuntu-ZA site went down, David Rubin wanted to organise to have the site redone. As a long-time helper with the site, he asked me what my thoughts were, and we agreed that a wiki was possibly not such a great idea, especially when the Ubuntu wiki contains a lot of helpful information already, and our wiki was mostly being used for news and static content. We thought that it was possibly duplicating content from the Ubuntu wiki, and therefore there wasn't much use in making the site a wiki.

I'm not an avid blogger, but I've been particularly quiet on this blog for a while now. This is due in part, I think, to the amount of project work I do, and the fact that I have a "little person" at home, and he takes quite a lot of time I'd probably be spent programming and blogging away from me.

OpenLP

OpenLP is a cross-platform lyrics projection system for churches.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the first alpha version of OpenLP 2.0! We've been working on this for a long time (since September 2008 if I have my dates correct) and decided to give everyone a taste of what we've been working on.

Read more about the release at http://openlp.org/en/users/raoul/blog/2010-03-28-openlp_20_alpha_1_released.html

Yesterday I looked at very simple theming in Pylons, and mentioned that I'd prefer loading the current theme from the database rather than the configuration file. So this evening I decided to see if I could achieve that.

For a while I've been thinking about how to achieve themes in some of my Pylons applications, and just today I was looking around in my environment.py file, and saw the configuration of the templates and public directories. That gave me an idea, can I load a theme directory from the configuration file and use it in there?

I had a bit of a false start initially, I thought that I could just use the config object as I do elsewhere in my application, but that didn't want to work. Eventually I found the solution: the app_conf object.

This is how my code now looks:

Yesterday I had to buy a new printer because my old one packed up over the weekend. Since I run Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux exclusively at home, I needed a printer I could be sure would work in Linux. This means that generally I need to get either HP or Epson printers. I've had both makes of printers before, and they've both served me well, so I have no problem being "limited" to those two.