I’m sitting here at Canonical’s office in Montreal, where we are having another Landscape sprint. There’s a couple things that make this sprint special, one of them being that Frank Wierzbicki has joined us! Welcome to the team, Frank, and I hope you enjoy!

It has also coincided with the end of our 1.5.5 milestone, which rolled out yesterday, with some interesting highlights:

Speed!

Contrary to what other people might tell you, YES speed does matter. We’ve been slowly (ha!) rolling out improvements to page load speed, and I’m happy to say that the improvements are very noticeable. Things we’ve done to improve this range from setting proper caching headers for static resources to heavily abusing the YUI Loader. I should write more about that on a more appropriate occasion. There’s always things to improve on, so keep an eye on it!

Faster Trials

Over the last four years, the trial registration for Landscape hasn’t been… enjoyable to say the least. This week we’ve finally rolled out the first iteration of our simplified registration process, which removes a manual approval step which used to take several weeks to be done. That means you can now register for a trial account in Landscape and start using it right away! Quite a novel concept, isn’t it? :) We’ll planning some more updates to it, so that when starting the registration process you have a better sense of where you are in the process and what are steps involved.

We have more exciting updates coming up before the end of the year, so keep an eye on it. But in the meantime, hit that ‘Registration’ link in Landscape, get it like you like it, and enjoy!

After several months of silence, I finally managed to get all the needed pieces back together to build lxml again. More than once people asked over on the lxml mailing list about what happened to the said eggs. The good news is that an unnoficial release of lxml 2.2.6 for Python 2.6 on Windows is now available for testing, in 32 and 64 bit flavors. The 64 bits version was compiled without iconv support because that’s the only thing I haven’t figured out how to compile.

In case you didn’t hear about what happened, this delay was caused by a robbery that occurred on the same day I arrived in Houston, November of last year. I was with my wife and we left for a couple hours for dinner, and when we came back the place we were staying at (Robin’s Nest) had been broken into my backpack was taken, with my laptop, two cameras (with all the pictures we had taken in New York) and two cellphones. We have already replaced everything that was robbed and moved on. Thankfully Robin had insurance, which covered about half of our losses.

That was the bad news. The good news is completely unrelated to all of this: my wife is pregnant, and the babies are due in somewhere between late November/early December. Note I said babies. Yes. Twins. Apparently two girls (last ecography was a little bit to early to say, but the doctor gave us about 90% confidence). We’ve tentatively picked Laura and Rafaela for her names.

So if you’re as happy as we are about the news and want to show some gratitude, we’ve set up a Baby Registry at Babies’R'Us, and the shipping address is set to Enfold System’s office in Houston. I will be visiting my old friends there around September 10, on my way back from another Landscape sprint in Montreal to pick up the gifts and to say Hi.

Thanks everyone for your patience!

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!

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.

Joining the Landscape team is very exciting to me, not only because I will get to work with some really smart people, but also because I will be working from home and being supervised by one of the top minds in the Brazilian Python scene: Gustavo Niemeyer, responsible for pearls like `Mocker`, `Storm` and `Smart`. And on top of that, I will get to learn new ways of managing and collaborating within a distributed software development team, a subject that was theme for my graduation thesis.

Last, but not least important, there’s a long story of back and forth between me and Canonical that dates back as far as 2004. On that year, DebConf 4 was happening in Porto Alegre which is about one hour drive from where I live.

Hanging out on the #zope3-dev irc channel I’ve noticed that one guy, Steve Alexander, connected from an IP range in Brazil. That struck me as odd because I didn’t know Steve very well, but maybe well enough to guess that something hot was going on. So Steve told me he was here for DebConf, and I self-invited me to stop by and say `hi`.

Arriving at DebConf, I met Steve personally for the first time, and again had an odd sensation there: Steve and about 30-40 folks where separated from the rest of the DebConf crowd on their own room, hacking away. I also met Mark Shuttleworth there and saw him talk about his space flight. That was one of the most exciting things and very heart-warming to me since my dream as a kid was to be an astronaut.

Later on that same day I came to know they were creating a new distro: they were taking name suggestions and voting. It was not surprise at least to me when I first saw Ubuntu being mentioned in the news, though I don’t recall clearly if that was one of the suggestions being voted.

Having just finished a big project using Zope 3 and relational databases, Steve quickly asked for my input on the preliminary design of a Zope 3-based web application for managing translations, which I promptly gave. The code I was looking at right there was the beginning of Launchpad. Up until very recently, Launchpad was powered by a creation of mine named `sqlos`, which has now been replaced by `storm`.

Steve asked me if I was interested in joining the team, but I had to decline given that I had just signed up with Enfold Systems, which was only about a month old at that time. I did put them in touch with a good friend I met only a couple years before: Christian Reis (kiko). In retrospect, that might have been one of the best contributions I made to Canonical, and to Open Source in general.

So, all in all, very exciting news for me. Canonical has a special place in my heart since I basically saw when Ubuntu and Launchpad were born and have some really good friends working there. The situation is no different with Enfold Systems. I have been working with Alan Runyan since before Enfold was Enfold, and really since before Plone was Plone: when Plone 1.0 was announced I was with Alan Runyan, Paul Everitt and Alexander Limi in Paris, at SolutionsLinux 2003, participating on a Zope 3 sprint, mind you.

To summarize, I will be splitting my time between Enfold Systems and Canonical between January 5th and April 1st 2009. After that I will be working full time at Canonical but still expect to contribute significantly at Enfold Systems. One of the responsibilities I have right now and which I don’t want to drop is building the Plone installers for Windows. Hopefully I will keep doing that. Unless some Ubuntu dude sneaks in by night and erases my Windows partition, that is. :)

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!

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.

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.

According to an article last week on NetworkWorld, “Mozilla generates
the bulk of its income from ties to Google, according to the company’s
latest financial figures. For the 2006 tax year — the most recent
numbers made public by Mozilla — 85%, or about $57 million of the
company’s $67 million in annual revenues for the year, came from
Google.”

My take on this is that Google is really stabbing Mozilla on the back.
A G-Browser in my POV is much more likely to steal users from Firefox
than from Internet Explorer for a reason that should be pretty
obvious: most users that care about the browser they are using are
already using Firefox. The great majority of the remaining ones will
just stick with Internet Explorer as they have been doing all along.

Goodbye Firefox. It was great to have you here while it lasted. And thanks for all the fish.

I am amazed to see the progress he and the folks helping him had so far. This is definitely all that I dreamed for when I started with the idea in January 2006. It is great to see that even though ideas take a little longer to get implemented in the Plone community that they do not simply get abandoned, but there’s always people willing to pick up an idea and turn it into reality.

Many thanks for Tarek for all of his work. Once this gets rolled out into the new plone.org it will make the life of us developers so much easier when making releases that we will ask ourselves “how could I live without this for so long”.