Hackmeetup Eight

I sat down to try understand Selenium RC yesterday night. We had a Hackmeetup, for the 8th time.

I got the simplest little example to run from the command-line, but our company app was harder. The app is a very fancy in-browser desktop interface, which might cramp the style of the frames of the default Selenium RC runner. I was a little beat by the end of the night.

Ola E was examining some amazing uses of a Twisted wrapper for SQL Alchemy. His plan of doing Reportlab stuff was silently canned.

New faces Micke and Magnus were actually building their company PHP web framework, using the Creole database abstraction layer. Ola and I were bombarding them with framework examples they could get inspired by. The guys seemed really productive, mutterlingly inspecting and explaining, and Micke said they’d finally gotten on track.

Ola said “When we have some more initiative, we should have a theme for a night such as this”. Good idea. A theme makes it simpler to “market” the event.

(By the way, installing the Seaside web framework is extremely simple these days. Its packaging is really outstanding.)

Hackmeetup poster

I am no graphic designer. The graphic designer I asked on the phone was… busy.

Having done some pushing characters around, my versions differ only slightly. But they got successively better. That poster was made from a Pages template that came with the app.

Something about the poster is crap. Can’t put my finger on it. Probably something with the body text. But, as it states its business quite clearly, I’ll go so far as to say I’ll post it publicly.

Personal notes

Hi again. Today I had coffee after work with Ola E, who’s blogless, but wants to start “unblogging”. He said something to this effect: “I want to blog, but not with a blog, I want to write down what I’ve done, and what worked, what I misunderstood, and so on. Like a wiki, but not a wiki. Structured, in a way.”

Could a more-structured Tumblelog do it? Lavish your ideas on Ola in the comments section, please.

While sipping coffee (in a so-so coffee shop at St. Knuts Torg, Malmö) we solved a few of the world’s problems:

Local media needs to celebrate Open Source folks and Web entrepreneurs. Here is a story I would want to read in the paper: area man Karl Wettin recently became a committter of stable search project Apache Lucene and its hot-hot-hot sub-project Apache Mahout project. Both are Apache projects, one of Open Source’s big bazaars of collaboration. Kalle’s hit the big time. What if that were news in our local papers? Publish those stories, please.

Networked data storage for the Mac “prosumer”: Is there a good SAN that works with OS X? Apple’s answer: XSan 2 at $999. Turning the problem around, Ola suggested buying a Bubba server. Then just using existing simple technologies like rsync to run backups. So, use a NAS instead of a SAN.

The upcoming Hackmeetup needs some marketing. I’m going to make a printable PDF. I called a friend who’s worked at a local university, and he gave some vague pointers as to where I should post such bills. He also promised to introduce me to teachers there, who could let it be known that Hackmeetup exists. Or, perhaps the myth-making is better?