Win to lead

Great quote from a reader over at HuffPo:

Bush the Younger demonstrated loud and clear that you don't make the mascot the 1st string quarterback and expect to win the game.

Worklog 20090104

Early parts of the day were spent on looking at the workflow requirements for Pulse Cost and making sure that we handle them appropriately. I now need to re-design the system and get Mike to re-import the data so that the demo looks closer to the final application they require.

With the Pulse Cost demo not going ahead (I wasn't ready and they weren't in touch as we had agreed) I spent time tracking down and eliminating the issues reported by Dave.

At the moment the main focus is on the client. There were a lot of little niggling issues that got eliminated in the development version, with the goal of upgrading SolarVenti before the morning.

Also the document viewer now works swimmingly after today's efforts.

Worklog 20090103

Not as much time spent working on things as I would have liked. Main focus was on the areas required for the Pulse Cost demo, and finishing off the layout update from yesterday.

Mountains and molehills

"If you want to reach the top of a mountain, you have to start climbing - you can't just look up in awe and expect the peak to come to you."
~ Me, a forum, 2008

Worklog 20090102

This is a worklog of my contributions to WEBenableIT's flagship software - Emanate.

Today I started merging in several major changes that I've been procrastinating on for some time, as my development branches and stable branches of code were getting too out of sync and I want to show features from the development branch in a demonstration on Sunday.

Some time was spent getting properly set up with Xrandr - now I have a dual screen desktop which makes a lot of the visual work, log monitoring, and code referencing a great deal easier. I also tweaked the colours (xorg.conf values generated by GAMMApage) because lately my laptop had been giving me headaches (even with the brightness totally down) and it's a lot nicer now. Whilst Googling for details and fiddling in configuration files took a bit of time, it was worth it. My concentration seemed to gain a reasonable boost - placebo perhaps, time will tell.

Once that was out the way, the first code related task was a long-overdue change to the align property in Vexi. This has a large footprint on the codebase as a change, but the significant widget changes were more tedious than anything else (a pass through of each reference to the align property and correcting it) and it resulted in a fair bit of cleaner layout code than before. There were also several trivial bugfixes as a result of the pass through the code, and improvements to the way containers work. (Incidentally this was the only blocker on an official Vexi 3.0 release, other than documentation.)

Part way through this, I was notified by Dave (SolarVenti) of some issues, which I resolved in the trunk client. If this is not ready to go live by Sunday, I'll backport the fixes to the b4 branch and update that.

I also focused somewhat on the immediate shortcomings of the form designer - previously only one could be open at once due to the way it interacted with the surface object but, with cloning now working perfectly in Vexi, this is getting solved. With it comes a slew of improvements to the form designer code.

Tomorrow will see a pure focus on getting the demonstration running smoothly on the development branch.