Co-Operative Bank Defending Human Rights

Just a quick note to point any UK-based reader to the last campaign from The Co-Operative Bank: you can vote for a human-rights charity that will get money from the bank. The program is developed with Amnesty International, so all charities are very worthy; my vote this year went to The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, quite a topical subject in times of televised indoctrination on the "benefits of torturing people" (oh yes, I hate 24). There are only a few charities worldwide that do this sort of work (as far as I know, the other one is in Denmark).

KDelicious 3.3 beta build

I'm going back to the old habit of uploading "beta" builds of KDelicious a few days before releasing. I had a lot of problems with Debian packages after I stopped doing that (for completely unrelated reasons), so I thought I'd summon a bit of old-times' luck... The files are in a little corner of the web. If you try them, please report any problems to me (g dot lacava on Gmail) or on the bugtracker at kdelicious.sf.net.

KDelicious documentation now online

I've just uploaded "the KDelicious Handbook", that is the documentation for all old (and new) KDelicious features.

This was the first time I used docbook to generate this sort of files, but I thought that it would have been nice to follow KDE guidelines, after all it's a KDE add-on!

Advantages of docbook: you write the docs once, then you can have as many stylesheets you want and get consistent output for different media. Using the KDE xsl files, it's really a snap.

Disadvantages: you have to write lots of markup, which can be painful; Emacs' SGML mode can help a bit there. Translation processes must be terrible, you have to re-write pretty much everything as there's no easy gettext-like method to keep style and content separated.

I've also written a small shell script to repeat the process, as I know tomorrow I'll forget everything I've learnt about meinproc and where the xsl templates are (/usr/share/apps/ksgmltools2/customization). The script also appends the Sourceforge logo to all pages meant for the web, as it's required by the SF policy (thanks to the wonders of sed). And of course it's all been put under version control. Am I "Pragmatic" or what?

Early pythons get the bird -- book PyConUK now!

I just reserved my place at PyCon UK 2008, which will again be held at the Birmingham Conservatoire on the second weekend of September (12/13/14). If you like Python and you can make it, you should: the vibe last year was great, the talks interesting, and the organisers a nice bunch of geeks. The extra-early-bird offer expires on June 9, so be quick and you could save a few pounds!
If you come, take a minute to RSVP on the official PyConUK 2008 Facebook event page; the more people there, the better visibility (and credibility) we get. Also, if you are on other social networks, you can do something similar to aggregate interested people.

Unfortunately I can't make the Friday tutorials (I'm saving days for a big trip to Japan in October), but I'm sure Saturday and Sunday won't be disappointing. See you there!

OSS development makes "surprising" users more difficult

Scenario: you have two competing products. One is fully developed "in the open" (online Trac, open mailing lists, etc); the other is 100% closed (main bugtracker/dev lists are "behind the firewall", no public nightly builds, etc). What does it happen when you introduce a new feature?

In the closed case, nobody will know. You can plan a big Steve-Jobs-like demo, or disseminate distracting rumours (and send competitors up the hills); as long as you can avoid leaks, you are in control.

With an "open" project, in a few minutes the word will be out. You can hide things in a wiki or a bugtracker, but version control checkins will "fess up" pretty fast (you could deliberately put in blank or disguised comments, but that would irremediably pollute your repository). Competitors will start efforts to match the feature, and your competitive advantage might be gone even before you had time to exploit it.

The element of surprise, with an open project, is not available. This might or might not be a big deal.

Personally, I'm finding it a bit of a nuisance, since I have a couple of new features in the pipeline for my little apps which, I hope, will be seen as fairly innovative for this sort of tools.