An astounding variety of people have been bothering me lately about Windows support for Mantissa, which I guess is emblematic of Divmod's recent success with its new infrastructure, so good. Unfortunately I, too, have been forced into the grimy nether-world of win32 lately, so I thought I'd make sure that things actually work properly.

Surprisingly enough, after a bit of tweaking, they do.

As of today's Divmod repository trunk, install command-line SVN, PuTTY, and Python, make sure they're all in your %PATH%, and then click on this:

You should then be able to do this:


Voila.

Okay, I cheated, but only a little. If you don't comment out ClickChronicle in Divmod.pth, you'll get a slew of harmless tracebacks in addition to the useful output given there.

Just a final reminder: I still need help moving tonight. I still have some rather heavy furniture to move, so if you haven't come out yet, please consider doing so. I would really appreciate it.

Thanks very much to the crew so far, especially JP and Itamar, both of whom showed up on two days.

Did you miss my last post?

Were you out of town?

Was the notice too short?

Are you concerned that your absence indicates the fact that you are a fundamentally bad person? That by abandoning your fellow man in his hour of great need, you have thereby fallen out of God's favor, and thereby damned your immortal soul?

Can you feel the fires of Hell itself already lapping at your feet?

Don't worry! It's not too late. You still have two more chances!

Today we moved most of the knickknacks and books, as well as the TV and several small bits of furniture. Tomorrow I'm moving clothing, boxing up the books that were already moved but now located in ungainly stacks in the new place, taking apart and throwing away furniture which cannot be moved whole, and moving my bed.

On Tuesday, when my Internet arrives upstairs, I will be boxing up the router, and moving my desk and Ying's desk. This is happening "after work", which, since I can do pretty much whatever the heck I want at work (and a faster move is certainly better for productivity) is whenever people start showing up to help. I would suggest 4PM.

I have to move all my worldly belongings ... up two floors.

Ying has purchased the apartment (now condominium) unit that we live in (#1203). As part of that package we are getting some renovations done. However, in order to do those renovations, we've got to move out. The management office has provided us with a second unit to live in for the duration (#1603). However, we still have to schlep our stuff up the elevator and back down again.

Here's what's happening. This weekend (mostly on saturday, but depending on who can come and when, maybe sunday too), my friends, whoever they may be, and I, will move lots of boxes and furniture and random crap up 4 stories with the help of a small-furniture-sized elevator. There will be laying of ethernet cable. There will be much rejoicing.

Are you my friend? Because if you are, you will be here, helping me to prevent a triple hernia from moving two thousand pounds of books by myself. The aforementioned sad news has Ying flown out to Dallas this week, and possibly NYC the next; she won't be able to help with the move.

In all seriousness this is more of an excuse to get together (since we have two whole apartments to hold people!) than a huge amount of work. Our stuff is mostly in boxes already, we don't have much furniture, and there are no stairs to negotiate. If a few people show up, we should make short work of it. Considering that there is labor involved though, I do plan to provide food and refreshment of some variety for whoever shows up.

Do you have to get on a train or bus to get here? No problem! I don't think they're keeping track of who is in what apartments too carefully. I bet easily 3 people could stay here over the weekend and the office wouldn't care.

Since I often use this space to complain or talk about tragedy in various forms[1], I thought I should balance it out.

Divmod is doing awesome. I can't wait to show you all some applications! Our team is fantastic.

In the infrastructure, we have some great stuff in Mantissa, which I've mentioned in previous posts. Today JP and I merged the "Offering" branch, which sets up a structure for code that plugs in to Mantissa as a product with public functionality in its own database and private functionality that users get access to when they create their accounts or when an administrator grants it to them.

We have code which acts as a telephone server and records calls, as well as responding to DTMF signals (you pushing the buttons on your phone), thanks to Allen Short[2].

We've got a new mail server that receives email and puts it into a browser, and view the message as well as it's MIME attachments, thanks to Moe.

Amir has been keeping it all together, working on the Quotient stuff with Moe, and keeping our focus sharp. In addition to re-designing our entire customer experience for a re-launch, Amir has been exuding one of the qualities of a really good manager: not one second of the team's time is being spent in useless meetings or procedural issues - it feels like Divmod runs itself.

Finally, I've had some time to do some blogging, to talk to people on the team on a regular basis, polish our tools, and start engaging the community. After years of slogging away in the open source salt mines it's really nice to see patches which do things that we need spontaneously emerge from contributors on a semi-regular basis. There are things happening behind the scenes in the community that I'm even more excited about.[3]

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[1]: Sadly, I fear I may need to again soon - I almost didn't post this entry because despite all this great news, as I was writing it I received some bad tidings about both of Ying's grandmothers' health failing rather badly, simultaneously. I decided it's probably best not to let the bad vibes drown everything out though.

[2]: If you click on that link you'll probably notice it's taken a toll on him. The standards related to voice on the internet are not pretty things. ;-)

[3]: Hear that, Alex? Things are happening, aren't they?