optilude

In the series on rants…

Most days, someone will pop up at the Plone mailing lists, chat room or in my inbox saying something like “I tried to do X, but it didn’t work.”

It may be irrational, but this annoys me so much I want to be rude to them. They took the time to  ask for help, and then they included no useful information to help anyone help them. It’s doubly annoying if they’re talking about software I wrote or documentation I provided, since it implies there’s a problem with it, but gives me no chance of fixing it (or defending it, as it may be).

So, the next time something doesn’t work, ban the phrase “doesn’t work” from your vocabulary and think:

• What exactly did you do (be specific, i.e. break it down into steps)
• What did you expect to happen?
• What happened instead?
• Did you get an error? If so, describe it and supply any error messages

This isn’t terribly difficult and won’t take you very long, and it will get your issue resolved much, much quicker and gain you more respect.

Phew (again).

I may be a linguistic bigot, but please, learn this and learn it well: It’s spelled “useful” not “usefull”. Similarly, “featureful”, “vengeful”, “spiteful”, “hateful”, “mouthful”.

Phew! I feel better now…

Martin

They may have released a Core 2 Duo MacBook a couple of weeks after I bought mine, but I don’t care. It’s a beautiful machine. I bought the 2GHz version, added another 2Gb of RAM (from RamSeeker - Apple RAM markup is crazy). I’ve got a 60Gb disk now, but that’s just because the 160Gb SATA Seagate Momentus drive isn’t out in the UK yet. Various sites are expecting stock November 22nd, at which point I’ll buy one (£100 or so) and put the 60Gb disk in a USB enclosure (£10 on eBay) and have a spare external disk.

Having a brand new machine is a very good excuse to clean house though. I resisted the lazy temptation to just copy everything across, and downloaded and installed things again. I also re-organised the way I keep my Plone instances and svn checkouts organised, to make development easier.

Here are some of the highlights that I just couldn’t live without:

• Quicksilver! The very first thing I installed.
• TinyAlarm makes sure I actually leave for work in the morning.
• MenuMeters (how else would you know what’s going on?)
• The Missing Sync takes care of my Windows Mobile Smartphone (Orange SPV C600, works like a charm over Bluetooth).
• Undercover lets me sleep safely (don’t steal my Mac, or else) - oh, and TheftSensor is cool, too.
• Parallels + Windows XP + Office 2003. I don’t use this all so often, but when I need it, it works oh-so-well. Installing Windows was a breeze, and it runs better on my MacBook than on my HP laptop. I also put Ubuntu on a virtual machine to restore the balance of the force.
• Firefox + Firebug, for sanity in development (i use Safari for most day-to-day browsing)
• Thunderbird for email and newsgroups. I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds.
• RCDefaultApp to keep files opening where they should.

I’m sure there are things I’m missing, but a big theme is that I’ve put a lot less junk on my new  machine than my old PowerBook has, which is surely a good thing.
For configuration, the MacBook (and other machines with the same aspect ratio) makes a lot more sense with the Dock on the left, always visible, but small. Also turn on two-finger scroll and two-finger-tap as right click. I also have an Apple Mighty Mouse Bluetooth and a Bluetooth Keyboard, plus an iCurve when I work at home.

Oh, and now that the Plone unit tests run in 200 seconds instead of 400, my excuses for not fixing bugs are rapidly dwindling.

We’ve had a lot of discussions recently about quality management of plone.org/products - how do people who don’t spend their days on plone-user and #plone work out what products are worth betting on, where they are going and whether they’ll stay viable in the future?

A lot of really great ideas came out of the session we held at the Plone Conference. We’ve taken the ones that seemed most workable and turned them into a todo-list for the PloneSoftwareCenter.

To deliver these ideas, we need volunteers - Archetypes programmers, documentation writers, product reviewers and project manager types.

If you want to help out, please check out the OpenPlans collaboration site - add your name and thoughts to the wiki, join the mailing list, discuss, commit code!

See: http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-products

I’m moving by Blog to WordPress (at least I think I am). The RSS feeds on the blogger beta sucks, the visual editor sucks, the markup it produces is awful…

That said, it was a lot simpler than WordPress - feature overload!