Whoah.

What a weekend - so I decided that I needed some way to track my bugs. That and Qmail has been driving me crazy for some considerable time now (a) I can't get Spam Assassin to work in it, no matter how esoteric a series of commands I type in and (b) I just get so much malformed rubbish spam that should be rejected at the doorstep that I decided that it just had to stop. Qmail hasn't been worked on by its creator for some years now and everything else is monkey patching, so I decided to change. A friend had recommended Exim so I looked at that, and although I initially balked at the configuration guide, configuring it and setting it up for virtual domains (I have 6 email addresses on this box) was pretty easy. Installation was as well.

Trac wasn't so easy. Not only did I not know anything about Python (and proudly, still don't), I had SuSE 10.1 32 bit on my VM and went through the pain of installing Python 2.5, pysqlite, sqlite, ez installer and a host of other things. It tooks me several hours to work my way through all of that, but the nightmare was to come. Deploying on 64 bit linux. The coveners of openssl, Python, mod_python and apache just simply don't seem to use 64 bit linux - the hours I have spent looking for esoteric configure flags to ensure all those bits work together is just unbelieveable. But I finally managed to get it all up and going and I now have a Trac instance to track the bugs and feature enhancements that are required to run this and two other web sites. The framework (Synkronicity) is actually used on a further four sites, but they are down at the moment as they and Jetty simply don't get along.

With the weekend over, I have to go and get my China Visa (I'm joining the CodeGear evangelists in China in the middle of April to learn as much as I can and teach as much JBuilder/Java/J2EE as I can get out without exploding some brains), get some art stuff for Rewa and then dive back into sorting out making sure I can get orders to CodeGear as effectively as possible.

Finally for this post - I am showing Delphi for PHP at the PHP user group this coming week! It is on the evening of Easter weekend so I don't expect attendance to be very good, but it is nice of them to let me show it off. Jose and team have done a great job with this product!

So I promised myself that I would not build any new applications for the Windows platform ever again unless I used ECO (Enterprise Core Objects), anything else would seem like self flagellation. So now that I "work for myself", I am struck by a need to sort out the ordering system we use with CodeGear.

Currently we have to fill out an Excel spreadsheet and let me just say, it is fiddly. And time consuming. But I recently found out that I don't actually have to do that, they don't need a spreadsheet, only the data that is on the spreadsheet (in the same basic format). Cool! So in I go - build the basic data model in ECO, denormalise the pricelist so I can import it, and build some ECO forms to let me manage the products a little, create the orders, PDF them and away we go. Road block.

The components that ship with .NET are sufficiently... feature poor that I really need to go and get some others. DevExpress seems to be recommended but which version actually works with D2006? None of the versions actually say that I can use them with D2006 .NET so I suppose I will just have to try them out.

I'm one of those people who actually needs something to work on to learn how to use a tool - Rails, PHP, relearning Delphi Win32 are all on my agenda. I have to migrate the Rails InterBase driver to a plugin. I need to do something about using/running PHP but I am struggling with finding something to do in it, especially as PHP frightens me from a security perspective. I am told it is simply because it is popular, which seems fair enough, but that doesn't make me feel any better... But if I am going to expect my customers to use it, then I really need to take the plunge and learn what is necessary to deploy a secure, maintained PHP website. Delphi Win32 - thats where I came from. I don't want to write anything new in it simply because I made that promise to myself above - ECO for new Windows GUI apps. If ECO supported Mixed Mode development (calling from Delphi Win32) then I'd use it like a shot! I'll resurrect an older application I wrote for someone using it. See how that goes. With Delphi 2007 just looking so sweet I have to find some reason to use it!

Ok, so I take delivery of my new laptop yesterday - an Acer travelmate. Nice looking laptop, 17" screen yet only 1440 x 900 maximum resolution (which is just bizarre by the way).

So in the first four hours I have managed to crash Vista once (total lockup except for mouse movements while trying to connect to my wireless network) and have it turn off on me once without letting me know that the battery was critically low.

Joy.

If you haven't spotted it already, these products have now been announced! Man, Codegear has a rock'in R&D group - they are just working really hard to get some really cool stuff out - hopefully you will be able to come to our seminars in the city closest to you

I am also working on gathering Case Studies for putting up on this website to remind you all just how successful you have been and continue to be with Codegear's products. I'll post a list of the stuff I am working on and have ideas for one I have some time!

So after getting permission from the boss to subsidise the meet ups, I have formed the Auckland Ruby group (thanks Justin!), created the Meetup group for the Auckland Java group (James organises this) and the Delphi user group. I decided not to hold a Delphi user group meeting in March as we will be having an event in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for Delphi.

The Ruby and Delphi groups will meet in Annie's Columbus Ellerslie location. BEA are paying for the location hire for the Java user group, so James will be sorting out that location. PHP meets somewhere in K'Rd, I am looking forward to getting slightly lost.

One of the weird things about meetup.com was the HTML for using their promotion buttons (see right panel, they change) are not valid XML. They do an <embed .... /></embed> - I should comment but I cannot be bothered.