The Allure of Allura at GRPUG

Posted on April 19, 2011 by brousch

In the computer world, a decade is a long time. In the world of the Internet, it’s an eternity. So when plucky new code hosting and project management services like GitHub and BitBucket started eating them for lunch, SourceForge decided it was time for an overhaul of their decade-old “forge” platform. The new version of their project hosting and management platform is called Allura. It’s fully Web2.0 buzz-word compliant, open source, and written in Python.

Dave Brondsema is one of the core Grand Rapids Python User Group (GRPUG) members, and he also happens to be a Sourceforge employee. He has been working his butt off on Allura, and now that it’s released he volunteered to give us a tour at the April 18, 2011 meeting. I’m not going to go over everything here – you can check it out yourself at the Allura project page or get a good overview from this ginormous poster. I am going to talk briefly about those features that will get me off of GitHub and back to SourceForge for hosting my projects.

Personal Projects: I never liked putting tiny projects or piddly little one-off scripts on the old  Sourceforge. Irrational though it may be, it always felt like overkill and I was imposing on them with my pathetic little projects. Allura has a personal project section in which I can stuff my wonderful little code nuggets without the hassle or perceived imposition of a full project.

Email Everywhere: In Allura, you can use email to do a lot of things that traditionally have to be done through a web form. This is a big WIN in my book because I hate having to visit a web page just to make some tiny addition or note.

URLs for Everything: I also hate having to drill down through multiple levels of web pages to get to the thing I want to do. It’s especially annoying when you have to explain to someone else how to find something. Allura has a URL for pretty much everything, so it’s easy to make a bookmark or link to whatever I need.

Project Plugins: Each project has a set of features you can enable at your whim. These include a wiki, discussion forums, git, mercurial, and bug trackers.

In all, it’s a good looking, easy to use, and powerful rewrite of SourceForge’s platform. The developers should be proud. I think a lot of people will move back to SF once they see all that Allura has to offer them.

We had a couple of new faces at the GRPUG meeting. I hope they enjoyed themselves, learned a few things, and will join us again in the future. It was great to have some new participants and viewpoints at our after-meeting dinner party. At the meal, we talked about everything from beginning with Python, IDEs, experiences with Linux, CSS3 and web development. If you’re curious about Python, you are also welcome to stop by a meeting, ask questions, and chat with us afterwards. The next GRPUG meeting is scheduled for May 2, topic TBD, so watch the web page or mailing list for updates.

Posted in grlug, grpug, internet, java, linux, planet-ubuntu-users, python, tech, wmlug | Leave a comment

Ubuntu Michigan Jam and Unity

Posted on April 5, 2011 by brousch

Ubuntu 11.04 Beta running Unity on EeePC 901One of the current controversies in the Linux world is Ubuntu building Unity, their own 3D accelerated interface on top of Gnome, for their upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal release instead of defaulting to the upcoming Gnome3.  I’m not going to bore you with the details - Mark Shuttleworth’s recent blog post is as good a place as any to catch up if you’re interested.

I’d been trying to get Unity and various Natty Alphas running without success, so I couldn’t really give it a fair shake. One of the old Netbook Remixes was supposedly similar and I had mostly enjoyed using that. I had also been trying out alternatives to Gnome, like XFCE, in case Unity and Gnome3 both sucked. In general I was disgruntled, mostly because I couldn’t get the new hotness running to try it out.

This last weekend I attended the Ubuntu Michigan Local Community‘s event for theUbuntu Global Jam. About 20 of us met at SRT Solutions in Ann Arbor and spent half a day installing Ubuntu Natty Betas and running Unity on the laptops and netbooks we had brought. Two Canonical employees, Jorge Castro and Jason Smith, were among the 20 attendees. Jason is an actual Unity developer, so we got to regale him with bugs, annoyances, and opinions thought the event. He handled the pressure with good humor and aplomb while Jorge helped us log and subscribe to bugs in Launchpad.

The vast majority of attendees were able to install Natty, and more than half of us were able to get Unity running. For those able to use Unity, the complaints were mostly discoverability issues, which always seem to come about when you change a user interface. Jorge pointed us to this AskUbuntu post with a list of keyboard and mouse shortcuts for Unity, which I found very intuitive after a few minutes of use.

For those who could not get Unity 3D running due to old hardware or issues with accelerated graphics drivers, Jorge pointed us at Unity 2D, which is a simple sudo apt-get install unity-2d away. It is basically a less-intense backport of Unity designed for older computers. The 2D and 3D versions operated so similarly to each other that I couldn’t tell them apart. This allowed many more people to give the new interface a go.

Both Unity 3D and 2D were surprisingly stable in these trials. My general impression is that Unity is similar in look and function to my daily use system, OSX. In short, quite nice. Call me an Ubuntu fanboy, but I am now looking forward to Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity. Great job guys, keep it up!

Ubuntu 10.10 West Michigan Release Party

We’ll be having a release party for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal in the Grand Rapids area at the end of April. I will have Unity installed and running for anyone to try out at that event. Stay tuned to the Ubuntu Michigan, GRLUG, or WMLUG mailing list for more details.

P.S. You don’t have to live forever with your choice of Unity 3D, Unity 2D, or regular old Gnome. In fact you can choose which environment you’d like to use each time you login. After selecting your name at your computer’s login screen, a drop-down box appears at the bottom of the screen that offers you Unity, Unity 2D (if it’s installed), and Ubuntu Classic (Gnome).

Posted in grlug, internet, linux, planet-ubuntu-users, tech, ubuntu-michigan, wmlug | 1 Comment

Moving Back to WordPress

Posted on March 26, 2011 by brousch

I’m moving my blog back to WordPress after a couple of years on BlogSpot. One reason I’m moving back is that my involvement with the Grand Rapids Web Development Group has revealed that WordPress is much more flexible and better looking than Blogspot. I’ll be able to more easily style my blog to my liking, and add I’ll be able to add a few simple features I’ve been pining for. There is a lot of WordPress support in the Grand Rapids area, so I’ll be able to find help when I need it. I’m also moving from the ambiguous Ishmilok to one of my favorite though mostly unused domains (ClusterBleep) with the hope that it will become the center of my online presence.

Stuffin' my face at the HTML5 Meeting of GrWebDev

Stuffin' my face at the HTML5 Meeting of GrWebDev

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately is that I find BlogSpot annoying. The editor is annoying, the style is restrictive, and adding photos and videos is fiddly. I think this move to WordPress will alleviate some of my annoyances and I’ll get back into the happy blogging spirit. Along with my participation in many local user groups, I’ve also taken a leadership role in a few other organizations. I’d like to use this space to spread the word about these things more frequently and at greater length.

Hopefully I won’t create a big mess when I transfer my old posts. If I do, I apologize in advance. I’ll add this blog to the various planets I’m involved with after I have the old posts moved and a I have a few new ones up.

Posted in grlug, grpug, internet, planet-ubuntu-users, python, tech, ubuntu-michigan, wmlug | Leave a comment

Stufflings

Posted on November 26, 2010 by brousch

The recent trend at Thanksgiving has been to stuff various animals inside of other animals. So I got to thinking about how I could stuff other Thanksgiving foods inside of each other, and I came up with this recipe for what I’m calling “Stufflings”. The basic idea is to stick stuffing inside of a croissant, and maybe even stick something else inside of the stuffing.

Ingredients

  • 3 rolls of croissant dough (8 croissants per package)
  • 1 package of stuffing mix (makes ~4 cups of stuffing)
  • 1 small can of cranberry jelly

Directions

  1. Make the stuffing according to the package instructions.
  2. Unroll the croissant dough. Separate them into rectangles made of two croissants stuck together.
  3. Spread the cranberry jelly on one side of the croissant rectangle.
  4. Place a ball of stuffing about two inches in diameter inside of the croissant rectangle on top of the jelly.
  5. Fold up the corners of the croisant rectangle and ping the dough together at all of the seams until the stuffing is totally encased.
  6. Cook according to the croissant package instructions.
  7. Makes one dozen Stufflings

This is the first time I made this experimental dish, and it turned out pretty good. I used Pillsbury croissants and onion and sage stuffing. I think it can be improved by putting something else inside of the stuffing. My initial thoughts are some sort of fruit, like a plum or slice of apple. Other people have suggested adding more herbs and spices to the mix to liven it up a bit.

If you give this recipe a try, let me know how it turns out. I’m especially interested in what others will put inside of the stuffing to add extra flavor.

Posted in personal, recipes | Leave a comment

GRPUG at The Garage in Zeeland – Recap

Posted on October 20, 2010 by brousch

The Grand Rapids Python Users Group had the opportunity to meet outside of our usual academic location at Calvin College when the winsome Aaron Schaap of ElevatorUp invited us to partake of their coworking facility in Zeeland known as ‘The Garage’. Due to our growing Holland/Zeeland constituency, we welcomed their invitation and used a Doodle poll to help us set a date to try out these fancy new digs. Since the new meeting place is about half an hour from downtown Grand Rapids, many of our usual members took it upon themselves to arrange a car pool.

We had a bit of trouble finding the appropriate entrance to the the Colonial Clock Building – the historic former factory which houses ‘The Garage’ – but once we were inside we were impressed by the spacious and well-furnished facility. The hallways were lined with vintage clocks of all styles and sizes which spawned a pleasing dissonance of chimes every quarter hour. Creaky wooden floors and exposed, unfinished beams complemented the otherwise modern decor, while enormous steel fire doors left over from the factory’s original purpose seemed ready to slide shut at a moment’s notice.

I was given a quick tour of the offices by Mr. Schaap himself, who left shortly afterwards for a romantic rendezvous with his spouse. Due to the facility’s flexibility of purpose, we easily re-configured the room’s furniture and fixtures to better suit our group as members arrived. Our meeting commenced with the usual amount of presentation mixed with helpful suggestions and off-topic banter we’ve come to enjoy.

I showed the early stages of an XML-RPC interface I plan to put atop some aged databases so that I can transition to a new infrastructure. The other members of the group generously provided me with advice and insights from their years of coding similar projects.

The prolific Dave Brondsema demonstrated the beginnings of a data diff project he is working on. Many of the meeting attendees were interested in the utility and thought they would find it useful in their own endeavours.

After the meeting, we all headed down to The New Holland Brewing Company for dinner and drinks. Despite the establishment’s favourable distinction, many of us had not been there before. New Holland easily accommodated our group and it was quiet enough to converse amongst ourselves without yelling. They had a variety of uniquely interesting beers and foods on their menu, and many of us experimented with them. Though the service was slow, I think everyone enjoyed their choices.

After experiencing the casually urbane meeting venue and the high quality food and drink nearby, I think we will be having more gatherings at The Garage. If they’ll have us, of course.

Posted in grpug, python, tech | 1 Comment