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Active Projects
Yay
A shiny language for writing configuration in.
Yaybu
Take control of your infrastructure with this Python base deployment automation tool.
Sidekick
A VM provisioning tool so a developer is never more than a
sidekick upaway from a working dev environment.Caroline
A buildbot for Sidekick using projects
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Past Projects
dulwich
A Git implementation in Python maintained by Jelmer and in use at Canonical, GitHub and Google.
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Posts
- Mar 29, 10
Isn’t writing synchronous code nice?
function do_stuff () {
do_thing_one ();
do_thing_two ();
do_thing_three ();
}But synchronous is bad! Bad, bad, bad. So then came async. The simple pattern is to pass a callback to the function you are calling. It’s not as bad in JS because we just can do this:
function do_stuff () {
do_thing_one ( function (result) {
do_thing_two ( function (result) {
do_thing_three ( function (result) {
});
});
});
}I’ve left out error handling. That really depends on the library.. But i imagine its messy. Now let’s see GIO style async.
function do_stuff () {
do_thing_one_async ( function (ar) {
var result = do_thing_one_finish (ar);
do_thing_two_async ( function (ar) {
var result = do_thing_two_finish (ar);
do_thing_three_async (function (ar) {
var result = do_thing_three_finish (ar);
});
});
});
}I like this a lot better than how i’d do it in python. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could write async code something like this?
var do_stuff = async (function () {
var result = yield do_thing_one ();
yield do_thing_two ();
yield do_thing_three ();
});Or even:
var do_stuff = async (function () {
var result = yield do_thing_one ();
yield do_thing_two ();
try{
yield do_thing_three ();
} catch (e) {
print("Exception handled");
}
});You can in python. You can in vala. And for JS? Well, I was going to say “now you can“. But while I was looking for a good Vala link, I noticed Alex already did something like this over a year ago. D’oh.
What would be really nice is if the async wrappers could be generated automatically by GI. I had a first stab at this by simply parsing the GIR xml with E4X and providing an alternative import mechanism (thanks for the suggestion jdahlin). However to get full coverage i’d have to consider interfaces and inspect every object that implements an interface as it lands in JavaScript land to ensure it is wrapped. Ew.
- Aug 11, 09
Despite the constant threat of bike shedding, the sysadmin team will be hosting a small irc meeting (on #sysadmin) in the near future. Feel free to join in and tell us how much you love us here for more details, and here to help us choose between Friday and Sunday.
Minutes from the last meeting are here.
On a related note, one of the tasks to come out of the last meeting was to try and make bugzilla faster, or at least come up with a plan. That task kind of disappeared, because the bugzilla 3 porting work is now finished. Yes, as you may have seen, Bugzilla 3 is coming!!.
- Jul 15, 09
Just a quick blog to point you at the external dependencies branch of JHBuild i’ve been working on.
The external deps branch aims to do 2 things:
- Don’t jhbuild any modules that are already system installed
- Add a new command to jhbuild to install system packages so they don’t need to be jhbuilded
It pretty much works, it needs massaging into shape to merge into master. Then we need to collect some meta-data:
- Minimum versions. How do we know if the system installed glib is new enough? I added a minimum=”" annotation to the dependency information we already have.
- Package names. Right now it’s a bit difficult to map jhbuild module names to package names. I’ve added aliases files for now, and some crude python to try and infer the aliases for Debian. Better ideas welcome.
I also need to get round to a PackageKit backend so it supports more than Debian/Ubuntu :]
If you want a jhbuild where ‘jhbuild build gedit’ only builds the least amount of stuff, help me :]
- May 16, 09
Noticed that Channel 4′s on demand service 4oD is now advertising mac compatibility. So I gave it a shot on Ubuntu Jaunty (with the full fat dirty evil flash 10). Ladies and gents, it looks like 4 on demand now works on Linux too, shame they didnt advertise that on the tele.
- May 15, 09
I’ve been playing with the master branch of tracker and i’m loving it – it looks like its finally reached the stage where I won’t just turn it straight off after a fresh install.
It now brings GNOME an RDF store with a SPARQL interface. Powerful joo-joo, but kinda scary if you haven’t seen it before. Most conversations about it lead to words like graphs, triples, ontologies… My eyes start to gloss over.. I need to learn by doing. So i’ve been playing with writing some python wrappers to hide tracker and just provide a familiar pythonic interface.
Any object type that tracker knows about will be available in python via the wonders of introspection. All properties of the class are available, with docstrings explaining the intent of the property and its type. Obviously you can get, set and delete and do simple queries. And behind the scenes are SPARQL queries in all their glory. Theres a lot still to do, but enough done that I can synchronise my address book to Tracker with Conduit (see my tracker branch).
So far it looks something like this (but its subject to very rapid change):
import tralchemy
from tralchemy.nco import Contact# add a contact
c = Contact.create()
c.fullname = "John Carr"
c.firstname = "John"
c.nickname = "Jc2k"
c.commit()# find all the people called John
for c in Contact.get(firstname="John"):
print c.uri, c.fullname# subscribe to any contact changes
def callback(subjects):
print subjects
Contact.notifications.connect("SubjectsAdded", callback)# Will probably be just:
Contact.added.connect(callback)While get() is a nice way to do simple queries, what if you wanted to do something a little more complicated. It always feels messy when you have SQL or SPARQL nested in other code. Existing SQL ORM tools are a great place to start at avoiding this, but i quite like the LINQ style generator-to-SPARQL. Something like:
q = Query(Contact.firstname for Contact in Store if Contact.nickname == 'Jc2k')or
q = Query(c.firstname for c in Store if c is Contact and c.nickname == 'Jc2k')Hmm decisions. Hope to implement similar abstractions in JavaScript, C# (via LINQ) and Vala (via Magic). Anyone wanna share their cloning tech?
- May 03, 09
Jelmer just pinged me to show me a new fangled Mercurial plugin. Thats right folks – pulling and pushing between Git and Mercurial! It uses the dulwich library that I worked on with Jelmer (was the basis for my “git serve” crack and is also used for pushing and pulling between Bazaar branches and Git with bzr-git).
Coolness.
I look forward to seeing some new dulwich patches (they are using a patched copy right now).
- Apr 27, 09
When GNOME SVN was migrated to Git all your commits were attached to a generated e-mail address in the form username@src.gnome.org.
If you have a GitHub account you can go to your settings and add that e-mail address. Now all the old commits you made will be associated with your account when viewed on GitHub. If you’re a fan of the cute GitHub graphs, you’ll love this too.
- Apr 17, 09
Owen just announced the formation of formal sysadmin team which I will be coordinating on an interim basis.
Want to join the team? Want to get your pet peeve fixed? Everything will unfold on the gnome-infrastructure mailing list, so sign up there if you want to get involved!
- Apr 15, 09
Tomorrow we move to Git! If I could offer you one piece of advice, git config would be it. Just a simple:
git config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here" git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com
on every new machine you use Git on. Otherwise the history is going to look like crap (look at the email address).
commit 9dea54aab2c97181f8d8c67a8cdce956baa30d05 Author: Gnome User <gnome@ubuntu-desktop.(none)> Date: Tue Apr 7 10:17:13 2009 +1200
That is all.
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Info
- SummaryDevop. Advocate of continuous deployment, buildout and other deployment automation tools.
Python developer, core dev on yay and yaybu.
Former Developer for a small firm specialising in embedded linux consumer devices, providing expert knowledge in GNOME Mobile, MeeGo (then Maemo+Moblin), RDF and the semantic web.
Active GNOMie and contributor to Vala, Tracker, JHBuild, Conduit and more.Specialties: Devops, Linux, GNOME, Python, Vala, C#, C, C++, svn, git, autotools, Synchronisation, Poky, Tracker, RDF, SPARQL.Experience- Nov 2009 - PresentSystems Specialist / Isotoma LimitedWeb application developer with a growing Devops role helping to keep our sites deployable and testable.
- Jun 2008 - Nov 2009Developer / CodethinkConsumer embedded device development with an emphasis on synchronisation, RDF and the semantic web.
- Jul 2007 - Jun 2008Junior Developer / Isotoma LimitedWebsite development on open source platforms such as TurboGears, Plone and Twisted, primarily on a core inhouse Twisted platform.
- Jul 2005 - Jul 2007Finance Support Assistant / Doncaster MBCDeveloped automation and reporting infrastructure. Helped improve business processes. Staff supervision and development.
- Aug 2003 - Jul 2005Benefits Support Technician / Doncaster MBCMaintained FlexiTime recording and reporting system and undertook other development activities. Provided first line IT support.
EducationAdditional Information-
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Interests:programming, new technology, cooking, languages, music
