where is the sun ... i guess i only need to open a window

Most of the work is being done to counter the effects of other people’s work: when we all agree to work half as much, the total result would be the same. (link)

i'm deep in work this days, so no time to write for my blog, but lets make an exception. lets stop working for 5min.

so here are quotes/links of today that made my day or i just found them intersting:

• i hope to found sponsor to go to washington to plone conference 2008, well anyway there is a survey about it and i enchourage to you to fill it (link)
• this just shows other that python is a great tool "Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL),.." (link)
• quoting bill gates: 'there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.' (more)
  well what can i say ... its bill gates ... as my imaginary acient africant philophist says:

  "dont brag you can fart a lot, because diaria is around the corner."

• A fourth award for PloneGov (link)
  This new prize highlights one more time PloneGov avant-garde. The PloneGov initiative, started mid 2007, already won 3 other awards:
  - Paris, Grand prix du Jury, Lutèce d'Or 2007
  - Lisbon, Finalist, European e-Government Awards 2007
  - Brussels, Good Practice label, e-Practice 2007
  The "Prime Minister Public Service Excellence Awards 2008” outlines the outstanding quality achieved by the Irish PloneGov branch.

and yes i opened a window and there was sun.... lots of it ... sometime you forget to open it and you think world is small, well its not...

my "new" car

after roudtrip to sofia (bulgaria) with my last car, were i crash it, i've bought my self a "new" car. i was looking for 2-CV model for the last 9 months, but finnaly i found it. hmm what should be my first destination, ... sarajevo then granada, ...hmm summer here we come ... here are some night photos (tnx jure for help).

goodbye macros, hello content providers

i want to refresh main content area in plone with kss. but here comes the problem. you can only refresh content providers - viewlets, portlets - with kss. making another viewlet manager and then another viewlet inside is not smelling nice. for sure there must be a better way of doing this.

[1] after a day of browsing on the net i found the solution. creating another content provider and then calling it from where ever (eg. main_template) is so simple that i think plone developers should use it more often.

content providers = zope piece of content to be shown on a page.

EXAMPLE
how to create and register content provider. packages is called "garbas.firstpage".


then you simply call you provider from any other template using
< tal:replace="structure provider:garbas.firstpage.firstpage" /&rt;


next time i'll show how to benefit from using content provider with kss. stay tuned ...


[1] http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/FAQConfigurationAndSetup#how-can-i-register-a-content-provider-without-using-viewlet-managers

ubuntu 8.04 - great success

as the older brother i'm taking care of my both sisters computers. and because my "support" is free i decide what OS i'll maintain. so for a long time (2 years), both of my sisters are using Linux as their main OS. for the last year they were using kubuntu, and the only problem till know was drivers for HP LaserJet 1005, but on the end turned out that printer is not working :) ... silly me ...

after a year i decided to upgrade their computers. i choose Ubuntu 8.04 beta (still needs 10 days to become stable, or more :) ). installation went smoothly, next, yes, next , yes, yes, ... etc. so like installing windows, with one exception that ubuntu was installed in aprox. 20min + reboot time.

i was amazed with design of ubuntu. its really nice. and when you able all those - uneccesary - effects, you can get any girls heart. well finnaly i can say that even macosx looks behind time when compared with ubuntu 8.04.

still i wont change my linux distro(gentoo), because i'm still a control freak. ubuntu team ... great work ... keep the spirit and happy future releases.

p.s. spellchecker is not working in ff3, hope it will work soon, because even i see that english above is like a crap, but hey, i'm master of bad english :)

where zope fails the most

ok, i'm not some big expert in zope, but some things are really bugging me about zope. zope is really nice tool, if you know how to use it. but mostly ppl get scared when they see zope.org. site is in really bad shape. common guys. such a nice code, but so horrible site. i'm not talking here about design, i'm talking about how a simple person (small town programmer) can find anything on that site. that site should also, by my opinion, promote all those useful - non zope related - packages (zope.interfaces, zope.component, ...). my user experience with zope.org is really bad. its really hard to find something on that site, well after time you get used to it, but still when i see the link referring to zope.org, i get scarred about loosing another hour.

it's maybe not that bad as i said before, but still i see zope.org as one of the biggest black spots in zope world.

for now i really dont like this blog post, mostly i complain, makes me feel like my friend's wife. well i guess it would be nice to write some solutions for this problem:

1. show more clearly that zope (3) is going more python way, i really like plone.org first page and that tabbed presentation of plone. it gives visitor quick overview of plone. zope should have some similar quick presentation of what zope can do.
   
   
2. documentation should be better categorized. so you could quickly found all the documentation/tutorials/howtos about you problem. there should also be a mark for outdated documentation. i'm also missing commenting on howto's.
   
   
3. i think there should be a section totally devoted to WSGI. here i mean middleware of all kinds. repoze.org ppl should be in-charge of that section. they are doing excellent work. all in all wsgi is pythons web future.
   
   
4. ok also some design work should be done, so its more clear and user friendly to use, but hey, thats only my opinion.
   

in short that would be it ... maybe i'll come up with something tomorrow, but i would really like to hear what all other zope (ab)users think about zope.org. was there already some discussion about this that i missed. i just recently (last 3 months) subscribed to zope, plone planets so i should maybe not judge this.

after a long time ... here i am

well after a long time no writing for my blog i finally found some time to write my frustrations :). what is new? well nothing special ... still working for more then 10 hours per day - yes i know that makes me an workaholic - but i hope in week or so thing will change. i'm preparing release of social networking portal written in Plone, so this will be my first big portal release. as i read on some other blog - "no guarantee, no fun". so expect announcement here.

i also discovered nice world of python wsgi. this is some other project mentioned above. wsgi really inspired me with optimistic ideas for future. i've looked into "paster serve" command that is just fantastic tool for handling.

well at least one thing is on the web. here site i deployed for one of my customer
http://www.ibu-mba-university.com

i also wrote to Plone Fundation to allow me establish Slovenian plone community (plone.si) ... i already prepared some design for this site ... as you see on the top right.

and my todo is getting bigger. i have new things to test and to write about them:
- supervisor (http://supervisord.org/)
- zopeproject (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zopeproject)
- grok (http://grok.zope.org)
- to use nginx instead of apache (http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main)

well i hope from now on i'll be more frequently writing to my blog.