Blue Sky On Mars

• KidZui - The Internet for Kids
  A browser based on whitellists rather than blacklists to provide a safe and clean browsing experience.
  (tags: browser kids software)

Linkage

• 12:28 @BryanForbes tinyurl.com/2wp73k is quite a lot of music - probably couldn’t get rights to Nirvana. Who needs a box? just buy songs #
• 13:28 trying out WingIDE for the first time in a long time. They’ve added cmd-T from TextMate, plus nosetests! #

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A few days ago I posted a brief blog entry about what I’ve been working on: SitePen Support (Dojo, DWR, Cometd)

We finished the work for the initial launch of this service immediately before I left for PyCon, so I didn’t have a chance to properly blog about it. Getting SitePen Support going has been my primary task in the time since I joined SitePen, so I’m anxious to write about it now that it’s public.

I’m going to start with some of the rationale for the service, and in another post at a later time I’ll talk about how the service is put together.

Imagine that you’re a developer who is facing a deadline or you’re a manager with a team that’s about to become stalled because of an unexpected problem. When working with most open source projects, you’ve got three mighty tools at your disposal:

1. the documentation
2. the source
3. the community

I don’t know how many open source projects you’ve looked at, but #1 is almost always not quite where you want it to be. The unusual situations that are likely to trip you up the most are also the least likely to be documented… so, there’s always #2. Dive into the source directly and check it out for yourself. Of course, Dojo is more than 100,000 lines of JavaScript. Even though it’s nicely organized, there are some tricky concepts being applied and it can definitely take some time to get to your answers.

Which leaves the community. Generally, community support is pretty good at helping you find an answer via forums, mailing lists and IRC. Unfortunately, though, you never know for sure that you’ll get a response from the community, and if you toss a really tricky problem out, project developers might not go after it if they’re in the middle of other big projects.

Now, for Dojo, DWR and Cometd, there is a definite place you can turn for help: the SitePen Support service. SitePen Support is a way for you to bring core project people into your development process when you need them most. All of the plans give you hours of assistance to track down the tricky issues or fix bugs that are important to your projects. They all have a guaranteed initial response, so that you know we’re there keeping an eye out for you. Many of our plans have a feature called “Ask the Experts”. If you can’t find something in the docs, Ask the Experts is a way to find the answer, and we’re even likely to update the docs if need be. For some of the plans, we’ll even troubleshoot and fix your application’s code in addition to the project code.

We’ve also been working on making the service as easy to use as possible. In addition to being able to exchange information via email, we’ve got a Dojo-powered interface for keeping track of what’s going on with all of your support requests.

It’s this interface that I’ll be writing more about later.

If you’re using Dojo, DWR or Cometd and would like some expert help for your projects, check out:
http://www.sitepen.com/services/support.php?packages

Software Business cometd, dojo, dwr, sitepen support

TurboGears has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code organization. Chris Arndt has put together a page at docs.turbogears.org to pull together all of the TG Summer of Code information. Congrats to Chris and the others for pulling together this year’s Summer of Code effort for TG!

Next week is signup time for students (March 24-31), so if you’re interested in getting paid to work on TurboGears this summer, check out the TG SoC info page.

Python, TurboGears

• Taffy DB : Getting Started with your first bite of Taffy
  Little client-side “database”, basically a way to structure, update and get at data for your client-driven apps.
  (tags: javascript database programming)

Linkage

• 13:52 time for some blogging… first up, about the new Support service that I’ve been working on #

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• Dropbox - Home - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.
  Wow. Awesome screencast showing off this service that lets you easily move files between computers (and have backups at the same time).
  (tags: backup collaboration mac productivity software storage sync windows)

Linkage

• 12:54 finally reached inbox zero #

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This is on CNN: Attorney: DNC violates Constitution:

Steinberg argued that the 14th Amendment, which bars states from denying individuals equal protection under the law, should prohibit the DNC from creating rules that make the votes of the residents of those four states “paramount to the rights of the voters in Florida.”

I am not a lawyer (Steinberg is), but this seems so obviously wrong. Steinberg must be a publicity-hunting Clinton supporter. The 14th Amendment “bars states”, but the DNC is not a state. The Constitution’s purpose is not to restrict what individuals can do (the laws Congress makes do that). It’s purpose is to restrict what the government can do.

So, while the DNC and RNC are quite important as far as who gets elected in this country, they are not actual government agencies. One court has already tossed this case out.

If someone is a lawyer and I’m completely wrong about this, I’d like to hear it… but from what I’ve read, this case makes no sense at all.

Politics

• 17:24 @pycon I’m on the train to union station. Had a good time. See you all next year. #

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