Planetary Ponderings

I have recently started a new project, as an off-shoot of the Christians in OSS blog that I was part of, also called Christians in OSS. This one, however, is a mailing list-based community of Christians who want to see Open Source Software promoted in the Church and in Christian organisations.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I've finally released a new version of Project HQ, with some significant functionality added. Last night I uploaded version 0.1.3 to SourceForge.net's servers.

Yup, Project HQ is making some nice progress, thanks to Python and the SQLAlchemy database library. SQLAlchemy really makes dealing with the database very easy.

Most recently I've been implementing an access control system that makes use of permissions and roles. SQLAlchemy makes dealing with this a breeze, and Pylons makes implementing it in the application very simple and easy. I think the most complicated part will be the roles and permissions management interface!

I previously blogged about openpm.org, my open source project management system which I'm writing in Python and Pylons. Unfortunately I could not get hold of the domain name due to a domain squatter, so I decided to take the easy route and rename the project.

I recently got a permanent Internet connection at home thanks to Vodacom's HSDPA connectivity solution and my brand spanking new Huawei E272 modem. So now I sit here, happily surfing at around 1.5Mbps.

After a lot of Googling and things, I started to wonder if I'd ever get my modem to work under Linux. There were posts about the E220 and the E620, but I had almost nothing come up on the E272. However, the standard Linux Device Rule came to my aid: When in doubt, just plug it in and see what happens.

As part of our move to a cross-platform application and a more open source development environment, in openlp.org we've been evaluating C++ versus Python, wxWidgets versus Qt, and other similar issues. In lieu of that I decided to try my hand at installing Eric4, an IDE for, and written in, Python and Qt4.

I've just committed the first few snippets of code to subversion for yet another open source project. This time it's a project management app that I'm modeling after Basecamp from 37signals and activeCollab from a51 development.

Yay! We've finally released openlp.org 1.0. It's been a long time in coming (about 18 months on my cards), and I'm really glad we've finally made it.

openlp.org is coming up for the version 1.0 release. Finally. After about 2 years of development, we've finally reached a point where we reckon it is stable and bug-free enough to be released.

According to Microsoft's Security Strategy Director Jeff Jones, in his latest report, Microsoft Internet Explorer is a more secure browser because it is patched less often, and you aren't forced to upgrade to a new version immediately.