Hello everyone, I’m not dead, but working like if was about to. :) We
are on the final mile for a Zope 3 project which involves SQLObject
integration and is going to be backed by Sybase (which reminds me that
I should actually test it with Sybase, IIRC!). Currently we are
deploying with Postgres, which happens to have been exceptionally nice
this far. As for myself, I’ve never used Postgres before, and I feel
like I didn’t learnt anything new except for setting up the infamous
pg_hba.conf. Not because I didn’t wanted to, but because SQLObject
does all the dirty work for me ;) All I’ve had to do this far is use
some drop table xxx here and there, when Zope doesn’t want to
behave the way it should.

School is working out fine as well, except that is boring to do so
much homework. Sometimes I really think about dropping it
alltogether. Oh well…

Yesterday, there was a seminar on J2EE, on my Analysis class, and I
didn’t liked it. IMHO Zope 3 can go much further with some whipping on
the developers. One thing that made me feel a bit uncomfortable though
was the level of documentation that there is about J2EE on Sun’s
site. Humm… we really need to improve on that.

I started reading the Planning Extreme Programming book yesterday,
and I really enjoyed it. Really smooth reading, and with a twist of
humor that is really needed if you want to catch the developer’s
attention. Though the book is not primarily directed to developers
(they say the main target are the management people), I really
recommend any developer to read it, as it also helps you to understand
why that management guy keeps pushing you more and more and how to get
him off of your neck (I have too much to do!).

Also this week, I’ve been fixing DAV issues in Plone and the Word ->
HTML transform in Archetypes, which by coincidence I had tried just the week
before. Got it running on my box and then helped some long time
friends to fix it on their Red Hat (blargh!) box, where wvWare didn’t
want to cooperate. If you have ArchExample, Archetypes,
PortalTransforms, Plone, Zope, CMFQuickInstaller, wvWare
(phew!) and a swiss army knife, you can try it out. Just get the
ArchExample package installed (using CMFQuickInstaller, of course) and
see it at work. If you setup the content_type_registry to create
an Article for .doc extension, you can happily mount your Zope in,
say, Windows Webfolder stuff and drag-and-drop a Word doc for your
publishing pleasure. Personally, I use cadaver, which seems to be the
only stable way to get some conversation with all the WebDAV
implementations out there. If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking,
don’t mind. I may probably provide an External Method for setting up
this. Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Man, you should join
the folks at Zope-PT (that is, if you can read portuguese) and grow
your knowledge with them. I’ve seen
that group jump from a mere 0-3 messages a week to a whooping 10
messages a day in a matter of weeks! I wonder if it has something to
do with the fact that the government opened the doors to Free
Software, and lots of people are looking for a Zope programmer around
here. Humm…

But the great news is that I’ve got a thumbs up from my ‘manager in
law’ to spend a weekend with the folks at Async, doing all sort of
crazy stuff, from ZODB hacking to PyGTK ramblings. I can’t forget to
discuss with them a PyGTK frontend for Zope 3, which is a planned
feature for this Zope 3 project I’m doing.

TODO:

• Buy a backpack
• Check if my brother can take me to the airport on the Wed evening
• Write a facade folder implementation for Mr. Everitt and his crazy
  requisites. (He wants to make it possible for designers to see
  extensions on the skin files from Plone — which have no
  extensions by default and that breaks stupid Dreamweaver)
• Finish security parts 2-17 of Zope 3 project
• Finish reading the XP book
• Don’t fall apart!