Shattered Crystalline Matrix

A suited man smiled, said:
"It's just a matter of time;
you can have the world at your feet by tomorrow,
just sign on this line."

Hold tight, limelight;
approaching the paramount,
with the sun in our eyes;
fearing family ties, legalise, compromise.

To the practical observer,
it's just a matter of time:
you can deviate from the commonplace,
only to fall back in line.

I understand mine's a risky plan,
and your system can't miss;
but is security after all
a cause or symptom of happiness?

— Dream Theater, Only a Matter of Time

Wow, it's been far too long since my last post; and since I left things on such a dismal note, I decided to bang out a quick post.

It will probably come as no surprise to hear that I was way too busy and stressed out around the time of my last post. Since then, I've not actually paid much attention to matters of health at all, and they haven't intruded on me either; I've also spent the last few weeks with my family in Cape Town, doing pretty much nothing, just getting away from it all. Having a chance to step back, relax, and look at things from a clear perspective has allowed me to make some decisions which will probably ease my stress levels in the future, although I can't really discuss those here and now.

In other news, I've finally gotten around to the last step of migrating Dosage development to Launchpad: the source repository has now been converted to bzr. I've also started the process of going through the outstanding contributions and either integrating or discarding them, so I guess you could call that progress.

Jonathan has been doing some awesome work on a new tab widget in Methanal, which will serve as a vastly improved replacement for Nevow's "tabbed pane" widget, as soon as somebody (ie. me) gets around to reviewing the code.

And… more later.

Down the way, where the nights are gay,
and the sun shines daily on the mountain top;
I took a trip on a sailing ship,
and when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop.

But I'm sad to say, I'm on my way;
I won't be back, for many a day.
My heart is down, my head is turning around,
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town.

— Lord Burgess, Jamaica Farewell

He is my only one, now that my time has come;
now that my life is done, we look into the sun.
"Seize the day, and don't you cry;
now it's time to say goodbye.
Even though, I'll be gone;
I will live on, live on."

— Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons

I just sent a mail to the Dosage mailing list announcing my retirement as maintainer; and this marks another step in the internal reorganisation of my personal project "workspace", as referred to in my previous post. Other projects going back on the shelf include Kali (the replacement services package being developed for Shadowfire), Eridanus (an IRC bot based on Mantissa and Twisted to which I haven't contributed much besides design advice), txAWS (a Twisted library wrapping Amazon Web Services APIs), txSmug (a Twisted library wrapping SmugMug's API), and FlyingCircus (an IRC quote database based on Mantissa).

What does being "shelved" entail? Well, firstly, it doesn't mean that I'm giving up completely on any of these projects, burning the source code, or refusing to ever work on them ever again. It does mean that I won't actively be thinking about or working on any of these projects; I might be persuaded to help someone out who's interested in taking over from me, but otherwise they're getting kicked out of my mental space to make room for working on other things.

This isn't necessarily the kiss of death for any of these projects; Dosage will slowly degrade over time, I guess, but maybe someone else will step up to the plate. Eridanus never really got any contributions from me, and the existing functionality isn't going to suddenly break. txAWS and txSmug are far from complete, but if you don't need anything beyond what they already provide, they're perfectly usable, and txAWS has other developers that may provide further contributions. Finally, FlyingCircus is pretty much "complete"; there's always room for improvement on any piece of software, of course, but it's perfectly usable as-is.

So, what am I going to be working on? Well, as always, most/all of my projects make use of Twisted and Divmod, and I'll continue contributing changes to those projects based on requirements of my own projects. Methanal is another project that falls into this category; and as a dependency / spin-off of the code base I work on for my day job, it'll probably keep ticking along. I'm not planning to package any new software for Debian, but I'll probably keep maintaining the software I'm already involved with, since there's not a huge amount of effort involved.

The "big one" is probably going to be EdgeVerse. In case you couldn't make any sense of the useless description on the website, or were too lazy to visit it, EdgeVerse is a project that's basically all about tracking media: books, movies, music, TV series, whatever. This includes tracking what you already own and have watched, tracking new releases that you're interested in, and of course tracking all of your friends too. It's ultimately a pretty ambitious project, and I'm not at all confident that it'll be able to succeed, but for now I'm going to be giving it a try (hopefully).

I'll no doubt be posting more about EdgeVerse in the days and weeks to come; if you're curious about the status of any project I haven't mentioned here, feel free to inquire in the comments, or by email / IRC / FriendFeed / whatever.

tags:

• blogging
• business
• Dosage
• coding
• databases

Well, as you can see, not blogging. Colin thinks I’m missing the point of a blog; well, maybe I am. I still have better hopes for this blog than I have for some of the attempts I’ve made in the past.

Anyway, I haven’t been very active on my public projects; about the only really visible one is Dosage, and that’s been fairly stable lately. There continue to be various contributions from the community (thanks people!) but otherwise no major developments. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that, though. I’ve also been taking some time out to focus on other things to a degree; spending time with my family, for example.

Otherwise most of my programming energy has been focused on getting the replacement system up and running for something at work. The way things are going, if I don’t make it happen myself, it’ll never happen; then again, that’s also not such a bad thing. I’m quite happy with the way things are turning out, and that I’m not having to fight with my tools all the time. I’m using Python, Twisted, Nevow, and PostgreSQL (via pgasync) on this one, and it seems to be working pretty well. I would probably have preferred to use an object database, but SQL isn’t so bad.

Anyway, we’ll see how long it is until my next blogging spree (this is probably the first of a few in succession, I have some other things in my mind); hopefully not too long…