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

This Python script demonstrates the creation of a hard link, that the hard link and the original file actually point to the same place, and it also demonstrates that you can open the same file multiple times for reading and writing if you use the right flags.

The script actually uses a couple more features, like ‘FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN’, which can improve the process of reading a file by signaling to Windows that it shouldn’t try to load the whole file into the file cache.

As you may have noticed, this blog has been down for a couple weeks. Some unexplained failure took down the machine that was previously hosting it and I’m still working to recover the box. But that does not mean the world has stopped! I’m still here, alive and kicking.

But back to this post’s subject, there are some good news for the Zope Community. My company, Enfold Systems, has volunteered resources to build and mantain the official Zope Installer for Windows!

Now, why that is important? Regardless of mine and yours personal preferences for one operating or another, the reality is that the great majority of the downloads, specially from people that are trying out Zope and Plone for the first time goes to the Installers for Windows. To cite some informal statistics, as of today the figures on the Plone Project at Sourceforge are:

• Plone-2.5.1-final.tar.gz – 5412
• Plone-2.5.1-Installer-OSX-Intel.zip – 716
• Plone-2.5.1-Installer-OSX-PowerPC.zip – 1300
• plone-2.5.1-zope-2.9-6179.exe – 17577

That’s some pretty rough statistics right there. I don’t have zope.org statistics to compare but I suspect the figures would be pretty similar.

The second reason why this is important is that the Zope Installer for Windows was left for a resonable time without an official mantainer. Tim Peters did an excellent job of keeping it up-to-date for the past releases, but has recently stepped down.

We will now have a dedicated buildbot running nightly builds. That adds an extra 2 installers to the current 4 Plone Installers mantained by Enfold Systems. Chris Withers has volunteered to do some QA and upload the installers to Zope.org when they are ready.

Thanks to everyone on the Zope-Dev Mailing List for their great feedback on some questions I had about improvements to the Installer. To anyone interested in helping to test the Zope Installers, you can grab Zope 2.9.5 or Zope 2.10.0 and give it some testing. And please send your feeback to sidnei at enfoldsystems dot com.

PS: I hope to get the old posts imported back into this site sometime next week.