Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | August 4, 2009

Landscape Dedicated Server Announced!

This is a really short announcement, since it’s almost 4am here in Brazil and I should actually be sleeping, instead of building installers for Plone (ha!). But hey, this is exciting enough to keep some people awake all night.

Today, Canonical announces the availability of Landscape Dedicated Server!

So what is it?

One of the many things the Landscape team at Canonical has been working on since early this year is a version of Landscape that can be run on a local network, as opposed to the hosted, Software-as-a-Service version of Landscape that is available to the general public at the moment.

Many people have left us feedback saying that this would be desirable for them, and would actually make Landscape an option in environments where data cannot leave the local network boundaries due to strict policies. So if you’re one of this people or you have evaluated Landscape in the past but decided it was not for you due to this specific reason, this is the time to give Landscape a second look!

So thanks to everyone that has submitted ideas and requests for new features. We’re listening! Even more feedback-driven features are being added monthly, free of charge for existing customers, and the user interface is being polished and fine-tuned for managing large installations. Stay tuned for more announcements!

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Posted in Announcement, canonical, landscape

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | June 5, 2009

A Look At The Landscape, After Five Months

Over the past few months, friends and family have been very curious about how my new job is going, and it’s been hard to stop for a moment and go into detail about it. I’ve been simply nodding and saying “It’s fine”.

This is an attempt at summarizing all the activity that happened in the last five months, though it’s far from being a short summary. If I had to pick a two words to describe my first five months at Canonical, it would be “Pure Awesomeness“. For a more detailed view, grab a cup of joe or your favorite other beverage and keep on reading.

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Posted in Conference, canonical, free-software, landscape, open-source, python

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | December 16, 2008

A Change of Landscape

No, this is not a blog post about the kind of landscape you’re accustomed to, though it might trigger a few ‘I want to be a Landscape Architect’ thoughts from a person or two.

The news this time is that I’m going through a landscape change myself, and to me it’s still a bit scary just to think about it.

The last such change in my life happened roughly ten years ago when I left my job as PHP Programmer and Systems Administrator at a small ISP to start my own company with a few colleagues from university. At that time, leaving PHP behind to learn this new (to me) fancy things called Zope and Python felt really weird, not to mention the fact that I was about 20 and knew no-one of my age that had successfully started a web development company (I mean, I live in a very small town, this is not Silicon Valley).

So cutting to the chase, I would like to let everybody know I will be joining the Landscape team at Canonical starting January 5th. I will not be leaving Enfold Systems though. We keep working together part time at least until April, where we expect to make at least one big release of a fully eggified Enfold Server based on Plone 3.2 in that timeframe. After April, I will still be doing work for Enfold Systems, but the time available for that will much more constrained.

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Posted in Announcement, Brasil, canonical, enfold, landscape, open-source | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | December 6, 2008

Python 3.0 is out… and we are pretty much ready for it!

As pretty much everyone I know has announced, Python 3.0 is out. Pop your bottles open! Fireworks!

What’s more important to end-users though is that third-party libraries are usable with Python 3.0, and not many of them are right now. One particular library has a special place in my heart, and is getting pretty close to being fully compatible with Python 3.0: PyWin32, the Python for Windows Extensions.

I first asked Mark about a year ago if he ever thought that PyWin32 would be ported to Python 3.0, and he was very pessimistic about it. Things changed recently though, and with the “2to3″ library getting more mature, so did the chances of PyWin32 being ported to Python 3.0 increase.

Mark sent a status update with a detailed explanation of the process mid-November (http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-1) and another two (http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-2, http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-3) more recently. I recommend reading those to anyone thinking about porting their libraries to Python 3.0, there’s a lot of great insight there.

To summarize, the great news is that PyWin32 will soon be capable of running on Python 3.0 without being forked: a single installer will work for Python 2.x and Python 3.x thanks to the “2to3″ translation library!

So many thanks to Mark Hammond, Roger Upole and Vernon Cole for their work. To me, the fact that a gigantic and complex library like PyWin32 can be made to run on Python 3.0 at all is the best validation that the Python Developers could possibly get for their work. You did a really amazing job!

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, PyWin32 is now hosting a Bazaar mirror on Launchpad (https://code.edge.launchpad.net/pywin32), and that’s where Mark is hosting his py3k-integration branch too. Go Launchpad!

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Posted in Announcement, porting, python, windows | Tags: , , , , ,

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | October 27, 2008

Python’s Future is in the Clouds?

Microsoft just announced their Cloud Computing platform, named Microsoft Azure at PDC. Haven’t looked much into the details yet, but one thing jumped out right away when I looked at the ‘what is Azure’ page: the Python logo is in there. It should be no surprise for those following closely the evolution of IronPython and the amount of effort being put on Dynamic Languages at Microsoft. how_it_works_slide_3

Now with Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure, Python will be playing an important role in the two biggest Cloud Computing platforms out there. Guido should be feeling really proud of this.

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Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | October 15, 2008

Double Plone Release: 3.1.6 and 3.2.0a1

For those not paying attention, there are two new Plone releases out. They have been made during the Plone Conference 2008, so some people might have missed this.

The good news I want to announce is that the buildout-based Plone Installers for Windows have been updated, and a few bugs have been fixed in the process. Namely:

1. Running ‘bin\buildout.exe’ would not show any output. That was because it was generated by running ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘pythonw.exe’, so that a command prompt would not flash on the screen. I added an extra step at the end that re-runs ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘python.exe’. So a command prompt will flash quickly, but at least it works right.

2. The version of ‘setuptools’ being shipped in the buildout installer was still ‘0.6c8’, which did not work with Subversion 1.5. At least one person was affected right away by this, and I only found about it because I was watching the #plone channel closely.

To fix those problems I had to make two extra releases, because they came to my knowledge after the release was already uploaded. So if you downloaded an early build of the Plone 3.1.6 buildout-based Installer for Windows, go and fetch the latest build. Otherwise, if you are willing to play with Plone 3.2.0a1, go and fetch that instead.

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Posted in Announcement, installer, plone, windows | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | October 10, 2008

It’s Alive!

Even though our GSoC students didn’t had as much success as I hoped, they did contribute some valuable patches that pointed on the right direction.

This week, with the Plone Conference 2008 going on in Washington and the fact I did not attend this conference, I finally made enough time available to get my hands back into Zope again.

So it’s my pleasure to report that after about a week of hard work and a handful of workarounds that will need future cleaning, Zope 2 does now startup under Python 2.6.

My expectation with this now out of my way is that other developers will start looking at adjusting third-party applications (hint: Plone) to run on Python 2.6 as well.

The code is available on the gsoc-python-2.5 branch of the Zope repository, and the lucky guys at the Plone Conference will be amongst the first to hear the good news through Matthew Wilkes, which registered for a stealth Lightning Talk which should get at least some people puzzled. I would love to be there and see their faces when Matthew unveils the surprise.

Big thanks go to Tres Seaver for helping me figure out a change needed in Zope’s private version of ‘medusa’ and to Ranjith Kannikara, our GSoC student through the Zope Foundation, and his friends which did a good chunk of the hard work, namely figuring out changes to the C-based ‘Acquisition’ module and cleaning up string exceptions.

NOTE: This is not intended for production yet, it is just a technology preview to get developers to try out and start porting their own projects. Many bugs still exist, some of which might take up to a month to get fixed. Most importantly, the RestrictedPython implementation has not been fully audited for the new builtins and language constructs introduced since Python 2.4.

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Posted in Announcement, google, plone, python, zope | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Sidnei da Silva | September 3, 2008

Masochistic usage of Operating Systems

Man, some Linux Users (or lusers as some like to call them) really like pain and suffering.

These days, user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu make it easy for even a novice to get a desktop installation up and running smoothly. However, try to get an unusual piece of hardware working, or use a less stable distribution or piece of software, and you’ll probably face a few “challenges”. Now, someone who just want to do some word processing might refer to these as “problems” or “reasons to go back to Windows”, however, I personally find them one of the most exciting features of the operating system. Every time I have a problem, it takes some work and liberal use of everyone’s best friend Google to get over it, but each time I learn a little more about the software I’m using.

(from: 8 Reasons Why Every Computing Student Will Love Linux)

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