Second Week Project

It seems to me that most of my friends are the sort of busy, busy people who always have a half a dozen side-projects which they have the skills but not the resources to complete.

Today, while chatting with such a friend, he mentioned something about a project which, if he had a 2-week vacation, he'd probably be able to get to. After spending a week sleeping, doing nothing, and puttering around, of course, he'd pick up the project in the second week. Of course the likelihood that he would have such a vacation is basically zero, as is the likelihood that the project get done. (Of course, anything can happen, and some things often do.)

I propose a term. This is a second week project — a project that only takes place in the second week of a hypothetical mini-sabbatical. I feel like this could be a useful piece of shorthand for a concept which would otherwise require a few tedious sentences. Am I right in thinking that we all have at least a few of these?


Leaving Livejournal

Since the acquisition, I have been wondering if I'd leave my LiveJournal account behind. While I've been an LJ fan for a long time, Blogger has some features which make it appealing:
  • Nicer looking templates
  • More reserved "toolbar" area
  • More diverse client software
  • Not owned by the mob
  • Far more customization options and "widgets"
  • All my friends are doing it
  • Custom domain names (I've been waiting for 5 years, "glyph".lj.com isn't going anywhere...)
  • "Blog" is a distinct entity from "Account"
  • Blogs which have multiple contributors aren't a special thing
  • Nicer profile support
  • Backlinks
  • AdSense support
  • Server-side drafts
While I plan to do more of my blogging here from now on, I don't plan to completely abandon LJ any time soon because it does have some cute other features:
  • the "friends" page
  • userpics
  • moods
  • GPG public key publishing
I want to say something about their file-hosting feature, but that's always been kind of broken, so I've never used it.

Divmod: Reloaded

Hot on the heels of the Twisted release, Divmod has a new, and hopefully much more comprehensible, sight design and layout.

Check it out over at divmod.org.

I've long been ashamed of the default-Trac look and the opaque information layout on Divmod's site, and I'm really happy to have the way we greet the world be spruced up.

This is mostly the work of the unstoppable Duncan McGreggor; this is just his latest work in improving Divmod's communication with our community and our customers — and it won't be his last.

(As with any new site design, the topic isn't entirely a joke: your browser's probably cached some stuff it wasn't supposed to, so if you've been visiting our site a lot, re-load for the full effect...)

Upgrade now!

In case you haven't heard through some other channel already, Twisted 8 is out.

In addition to numerous fixes and features, this release also includes a new release system for Twisted itself; this (hopefully) means that we won't have another year-long release drought.  We're planning to do another release in less than 3 months.

This means that new Twisted features will be available faster, but it also means that if you're writing some software that uses Twisted, upgrade now!  We try very hard to make sure that each new release is mostly compatible with the one that comes before it, so that your upgrade should be painless.  Especially if you have good unit tests.

However, this compatibility doesn't extend infinitely.  There are at least a few twisted developers who would really like to drop some of our years of accumulated cruft and break compatibility with older versions.

If you upgrade now, your migration process will be gradually fixing a few deprecation warnings.  If you wait for 3 or 4 more minor releases, upgrading all at once will mean that anything which has changed will start off broken, and your tests might not even run until you've fixed a bunch of things.

Of course, by "will", I mean "should" - we're not perfect, but we'll fix upgrade issues in micro releases if you find them and report them.

Open Source 3D Massively Multiplayer Game Infrastructure using Twisted

wasn't at PyCon, but he totally should have been.

I (and others) have been working on him for years to release this stuff as open source, and he's finally done it!

Go check it out the Multiverse 3D trac site, and get the code!

Do it!

Do it now!

(and then start submitting patches to get its persistence layer ported back over to Axiom because I told Mike not to block the release on that but it should totally be using Axiom and he only switched away from it because he didn't understand quite how it worked...)