The realization of that had a profound impact in my life. As programmers, technically minded people that we are, we tend to focus on ourselves and rarely share our knowledge, except to show it off at conferences here and there. We do it mostly to please our ego. Dorneles was nothing like that. He didn’t present at many conferences, though he was always there as either a participant or an organizer. He didn’t write lengthy blog posts full of technical details. In fact, he didn’t blog at all since 2007. He didn’t create brilliant frameworks. Instead, his contributions were mostly invisible, through IRC, IM or Skype, directly between him and the person seeking his help. It was very common for him to carry about five parallel conversations over IM, helping people all over the world without breaking a sweat. He would happily pull out his laptop or phone at a table in a blink to teach someone a trick. The endless stream of messages on twitter following his death should serve as proof that his way was much more effective in causing an impact in the world than a horde of highly skilled programmers ever could.

As other people well put it, Dorneles could never lose that smile on his face. Nothing could make him curse or complain. He was a mixture of cheerfulness, innocence, tranquility and awkwardness that would immediately conquer people’s hearts with no effort. He was like that young little brother that makes you blush at a family dinner for being excessively goofy, but that you love so much you would never reprehend.

To me and my wife, Dorneles was closer than family. My wife suffered more from his loss than for the loss of her lovely grandma, or from her uncle that died a slow death from brain cancer a couple years ago.

In retrospect, I can now see that he did treat me like an older brother, always eager to take on my advice. When he was alone in a big empty office in Caxias do Sul, following the break with the other partners at X3ng I told him to move to Garibaldi because we could rent a similar office for much cheaper. I suggested that he should reunite with his wife and two kids, which were living with her mom, and that raising them in Garibaldi would be much better for their education and overall quality of life. I said it would be nice if he had a car so that he didn’t need to call a cab at 3am when his kids were sick (he refused to buy a car for years, since he had cars stolen several times). At a time he was having trouble getting regular pay, I suggested he should work for Enfold. I told him to go to more conferences and sprints, so that he could put faces to the names on #plone. He was easily convinced. And all of these things had a great impact in his life.

I regret not spending as much time with him as I could in the last year. But many are the good memories that we’ve shared. Back in November 2009, when my backpack with laptop and cameras containing all the pictures from my vacation in New York got stolen on our first day in Houston he calmly told me: “Don’t worry, you can buy all those things again. They didn’t take from you the most precious thing: your life.”

I regret that he didn’t find the time to visit my 3mo old twins. But I’m glad that after my visit last Saturday, he went to visit his 2 weeks old nephew and his dad on the Sunday. I’m glad that we spent a good 2h last Saturday sitting around, chatting about the most diverse subjects while I was at his place waiting for the rain to stop.

Dorneles was a sushi lover. He once walked for tens of blocks in Houston on a cracking hot summer day just to eat sushi, and lived to tell the tale. That’s perhaps the most un-American thing he could do. The first thing we did when we met in Houston in November 2009 was to go out for sushi. When Nate came to Brazil, he took him out for sushi, and that’s perhaps the most un-Brazilian thing he could do. His love for sushi passed on to his kids. For several weeks I told my wife that we should invite his family out for sushi. We were waiting for the right occasion, and it never happened. In his memory, I think we should do it anyway.

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!

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. :)

EnSimpleStaging is based on ZopeVersionControl, another great product which provides for keeping a repository of versioned objects inside the ZODB. One issue we’ve hit constantly with EnSimpleStaging was that certain methods from ZopeVersionControl depend on an actual transaction being commited to properly detect that an object has changed. While in real life this specific method will always work flawlessly due to the way using ZopeVersionControl and EnSimpleStaging works, in a test case it was very hard to test this, due to the fact that a test case is run within a single transaction which is aborted at the end of the test.

Sometime ago I’ve learnt that ZODB has a nifty feature: it is possible to wrap any Storage instance with a DemoStorage. After you do that, you can commit changes and they will be committed to the DemoStorage but not to the base Storage. That would solve not only my problem with ZopeVersionControl, but can potential solve a whole lot set of problems due to expensive setup methods in test cases.

That fact has lived in the back of my mind for longer than two years, until today I set some time aside to investigate a way to implement this cleanly in a way that could be used for my tests. Searching around, I’ve found at least a couple occurrences of other people trying to do the same. I didn’t find any solution though, so that either indicates they just gave up or that they found a solution but didn’t care enough to share it. In fact, the title of this post was borrowed from one of the message subjects, in hope that it will make it easier for other people to find a solution in the future.

My solution (with a test do demonstrate that it works) was based on Jim Fulton’s suggestion to look at zc.selenium. I’ve simply adapted it to the Zope 2 reality, using ZopeTestCase’s provided hooks and `Zope2.bobo_application` (which is the Zope 2 equivalent of the publication object from Zope 3).

Hopefully this will be of use to more people, specially to the folks that were seeking for ideas about how to implement this. It would be even better to just add this to ZopeTestCase proper, I think. Maybe someone will be interested in doing that.

If you’re interested in Plone, and involved in Education, you can’t miss this one.

There will be another two events, on the day before and after.

Make sure you register soon, there are only 146 tickets available right now. Registration is FREE!

I don’t want to convert anyone to using Windows. Nor do I want to argue that some OS is better than other. I just believe in using the right tools for the right job, and most of my job consists on getting stuff done on Windows these days, so I’ve been able to rediscover it, and learnt to love it in the process.

This is a lenghty summary of my roughly 10 years of involvement with computers in general. I hope you don’t get bored from reading it. Most people might identify themselves with the narrative, and others might just ignore it. But it’s my story, and most of what happened through those years serves as a justification of why I came to be who I am today.

For a long time I was a Mac OS user. It all started around 1997 if I recall correctly, when I bought my first laptop, a tangerine iBook. It was about the same time that I started using Linux. Not on the desktop, no. On the server.

I had just started working on an ISP, my second computer-related job. The first one was about maintaining some applications written in Clipper, which I then started porting to Visual Basic 5.

But back to the ISP. My job was to do, erm, everything. I started by learning about this new thing called PHP on my first day. Then I learnt that there was this database called MySQL that you could use with PHP, and that it was really fast and easy to use. For sure it made me forget about my bad experiences with DBase.

I remember the pain that it was to setup Apache + PHP + MySQL back then. Package management existed, but PHP and MySQL were so new that packages did not exist for them. Or at least not the versions that I wanted to install (my memory fools me sometimes).

I was very young at the time, and I remember the pleasure that I had when I ripped off that last NT4 server.

But for quite some time, that was pretty much all that my experience with Linux amounted to. At the same time, I was responsible for doing some design work, and most of that was done on my iBook, with Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

I also had a desktop running Windows 95 with the basically the same applications, but the machine was so old and slow that it pretty much served only as a jukebox, with Winamp and thousands of mp3 files.

For almost two years, that’s what I used. I had a really bad impression about Windows 95, because that machine that I used was so slow and crappy, it would constantly hang or crash. On the other hand, OS 8 and 9 got the job done, and the Linux servers lived on. We got hacked once, cause I forgot to turn the telnet service off. And a disk failed once, and after a painful time with fsck, some 300 email accounts had their guts sprayed through lost+found. Ooops.

Then I left the ISP, to start my own company, X3ng. Some Linux distributions started supporting the PowerPC, so I gave it a try. I got YellowDog Linux into the iBook. I remember it was a very awkward process to do it by the time. There were no bootable CD images at the time I think, and all the HOW-TOs described the installation process using floppies. Floppies on an iBook in 1997? No thanks. :)

Somehow I stumbled upon some documentation describing how to telnet into the OpenFirmware (!) and then net-boot (!!) from a disk image served by TFTP (!!!). Wow, that was wild. Not for the faint of the heart, no.

It was about the same time that I’ve learnt Python, the hard way, through Zope. I believe there was a Python package on YellowDog, because I don’t recall compiling Python itself. Or maybe it was so painful that my mind blocked it. Who knows.

I don’t quite remember what editor I used at the time. I believe it was Quanta. And my email application was KMail. I remember how excited I was when KMail added every new feature. And how slow it was. Poor KMail. Quanta wasn’t exactly the best HTML editor around either. Compared to Dreamweaver, yuck. And I used Konqueror I believe. Constant crashes. Then Firefox came along, and more crashes. I also used XChat.

But YellowDog wasn’t exactly fast at updating packages. And the constant crashes begged for constant updates. Around that time Debian started supporting the PowerPC. I believe bootable CD images existed at this time. And to boot (no pun intended), I needed more space so I replaced the iBook internal drive, and put Debian on it.

Life was much better on Debian. There I discovered Emacs, and mutt, and fetchmail, and ion, and irssi. I turned into a command-line monster. And applied for being a Debian Maintainer. Then gave up. I think that’s where I started to realize that I was spending more time tweaking and configuring my system than doing actual work, but it wasn’t a strong feeling, just something on the back of my mind.

About 3 years into that, I got hold of an used Powerbook Pismo, which was just a little bit more powerful than my iBook. Just enough to boot OS X in a reasonable time. Oh, and how I wanted to run OS X. I really wanted to.

But the machine was just not fast enough, so I made a partition for ‘ol Debian and left OS X on a corner, in the hope that I would go back to it eventually. But there really wasn’t much intersting stuff to do on OS X at the time. I created the first Plone installer for Mac OS X at some point, and that was pretty much the only useful thing I got done on OS X for quite some time. I tried Fink, which gave me that warm feeling of using Debian, but it wasn’t the same thing. I remember that I tried to install some package, and the box went on, churning for some 20 hours until a binary popped out on the other end.

To make a long story short, and this is one of the longest ones I’ve written, I started working at Enfold Systems. And the goal there is really to make Plone work and be a nice and well-behaved Windows citizen.

For quite some time I tried to stay on Linux, but at some point it just didn’t cut it anymore. I would write tests, and they would fail on Windows. I would have to debug something, and it would be running on Windows. I wanted to try some cool new technology, nope, Windows-only. And I, stuck on Debian PowerPC. No Java 1.4, no Flash. Really stuck.

So I bit the bullet. First I borrowed a machine from X3ng, and put Windows XP on it. Then I got a desktop from Enfold. Got good ‘ol Emacs going, and dropped mutt for Gmail. Got used to cmd.exe, it’s not that bad when you get used to it. In fact, every time I go back to bash I miss that tab-completion style. I heard that zsh works similarly, or that it was borrowed from zsh, not sure.

Many open source applications are available for Windows these days. I’ve mentioned Emacs, but notable apps include Firefox, Gaim. Evolution is quite close from working on Windows. I installed it, but it crashed right away. I heard Gimp works on Windows too. There’s some great stuff on SourceForge. Checkout ‘console’, it’s a tabbed terminal written in .NET. Really neat stuff.

I haven’t missed much of the stuff I used on Linux. I was really used to mutt and was hard to give up on it, and irssi, but that is pretty much the only two things that I really miss.

I was stuck on Linux, at least on PowerPC. I didn’t have good Java browser plugin, or Flash. Now I’m on Windows, and I’m happy. I’ve got to keep some of the tools I was used to. And they work on Mac OS X too. I am able to checkout some of the latest trends in technology, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight. I have iTunes. And now Safari too. And Gaim. And Emacs. And even Mono. And they all happily work.

I don’t feel stuck on Windows. I now have a Macbook. The little beast is pretty darn fast. I ordered it with Parallels and Windows XP pre-installed. In retrospect, I haven’t used Mac OS X much since I’ve got this Macbook. Which makes me wonder why I haven’t moved to Bootcamp yet.

Parallels is quite fast. Sometimes I completely forgot that I’m running Windows XP on a virtual machine. One such case was when I installed Skype. Download, setup, login, made a call. Then I realized, “but wait a minute, I’m running this inside Parallels!”. It was *that* transparent. Parallels is really a miracle on its own.

From time to time, I install some new “app du jour” on OS X. Just to then forget about it completely. I sort of have a similar feeling to OS X than I have to Linux. That when I’m on OS X I spend too much time playing with an app here and there and never quite get my job done. I really try to use OS X, but can’t get used to it. Maybe it would work best on a larger monitor. Those large fonts just take too much space on my screen. And lots of windows. I don’t know, just haven’t got used to it.

To be fair, I feel a little bit stuck on Windows at this time. But only because I wanted to move to Vista, but I can’t just yet because I want to wait until Bootcamp supports the x64 bit version. Then I will be a happy camper.

Blogged with Flock

We recommend you download this update and run it on your server as
soon as possible.

The update adds a product named “Hotfix_20070320″ to the Enfold Server
“Products” directory. After running the installer, you must restart Enfold
Server for the patch to take effect.

This security vulnerability involves the Zope application server, one of
the key components underlying Enfold Server. More details are on the
Zope community Web site.

Enfold Systems News

Spring 2007

In this issue:

• Server 3 improves Windows intranets, extranets
• Proxy 3 squeezes better performance from servers
• Desktop 3 saves clicks, time … and now money
• New team member to benefit clients’ projects

Server 3 improves Windows intranets, extranets

Enfold Server 3 is production-ready, with a variety of
improvements to make intranets and extranets on Windows servers
faster, more stable and more flexible:

• An upgrade of Plone to Version 2.5, targeted at the
  authentication and scalability requirements of large and
  mid-sized organizations
• More than 30 fixes to create even better integration with
  Microsoft’s Active Directory
• A new FileTemplate feature for creating common documents
  quickly
• Ability to integrate your content management system with
  just about any relational database using Open Database
  Connectivity (ODBC)

Get details and a free 30-day trial.

Proxy 3 squeezes better performance from servers

The just-released Enfold Proxy 3 is the fast, easy, affordable way
to speed up Plone and many other Web applications running on
Windows. It includes powerful new features to help users squeeze
better performance from existing Web application servers:

• Request distribution across multiple application servers for
  scalability and increased uptime
• Wildcards for flexible purging of cached resources

Proxy 3 also includes dozens of minor improvements over Version 2.

Get details and a free 30-day trial.

Desktop 3 saves clicks, time … and now money

A new price structure lets buyers save 50 percent or more off
previous prices of Enfold Desktop 3, the application that saves
clicks and time for content authors and editors.

Enfold Desktop 3 is still free for use on up to five computers,
and now licenses for each additional five computers are available
for $125.

Get details and download the free version.

New team member to benefit clients’ projects

Organizations with advanced intranet and extranet needs can expect
to see even better on-time and on-budget performance with Enfold
Systems’ new director of professional services.

Arthur Chong recently joined Enfold. With 17 years in the software
industry, Arthur has extensive management and technical experience
delivering successful projects for a variety of organizations.

Enfold developers continually create and refine new Plone add-on
products, and they draw on this ever-growing library to deliver
clients’ projects more efficiently. If you’re considering a
project that will empower your team to collaborate on content for
a high-performance Web site, intranet or extranet, please e-mail
sales at enfoldsystems dot com to set up a call to discuss your needs.

Yesterday I had a small problem with the Python module ‘tarfile’ not being able to unpack some of the eggs that are now part of Plone. So what I did was to change the tarfile module to skip over those files, which end up being some Mac resource forks or whatever those are called these days. Those fancy files whose the filename starts with ‘._’.

And if you missed the post yesterday, or it turned up garbled, Enfold Systems has released beta versions of two of its main products yesterday, Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 (data sheet, download) and Enfold Proxy 3.0 Beta (data sheet, download). For more information check out the official announcement.

Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 ships with Zope 2.9.6, Python 2.4.4 and Plone 2.5.2. Both products have been through a long testing cycle, and still have a few days in its beta cycle ahead, before hitting a final release. We are already using those products in production, but recommend you to test them on a separate environment, or keep a backup handy.

We do take your feedback seriously. So try out those betas, and report your good (or bad) experiences in our support section, or even by leaving a comment on this post. We do appreciate. Help us make the experience of using Plone on Windows even better!

Worth noting is the fact that we do not require user registration anymore for downloads. That’s right. You can now download a fully functional, 30 day trial version of Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy straight from our website. No form-filling. No complexity. Just click the link and be done with it.

There are more exciting news coming out from Enfold in the next couple days. Stay tuned!

Remember, Enfold Server is the best way to deploy Plone on Windows. With built-in Active Directory, Single Sign-On through NTLM and IFilter integration, it provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience that integrates straight to the heart of your intranet.

Enfold Proxy is our generic caching solution with built-in load-balancing that ties into IIS. And it’s not Zope-specific! We’ve been using it successfully with several third-party applications, from Vignette to TurboGears.

And if your interested in desktop integration, check out Enfold Desktop 3.0 (data sheet, download), our extension to Windows Explorer that puts your documents just a drag-and-drop away from your website.

tarobj._extract_member(member,dst) # XXX Ugh
File "C:\src\ees\build\community\3.0.0\external-Python-2.4-source\lib\tarfile.py", line 1440, in _extract_member
self.utime(tarinfo, targetpath)
File "C:\src\ees\build\community\3.0.0\external-Python-2.4-source\lib\tarfile.py", line 1572, in utime
raise ExtractError, "could not change modification time"
tarfile.ExtractError: could not change modification time

That # XXX Ugh right there certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence. Who knows what the author meant.

In the meantime, while we sort out that issue, I want to share some exciting news with you. Enfold Systems has released beta versions of two of its main products yesterday, Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 (data sheet, download) and Enfold Proxy 3.0 Beta (data sheet, download). For more information check out the official announcement.