I don’t usually blog about company stuff but I was a little excited today.

We shipped Confluence 2.8 today, our wiki product. My non-company-sponsored word on it is this - Its shit hot.

We have redesigned pretty much the whole UI - it feels much more comfortable and intuitive to use. Check it out over here.

Congrats to the Confluence and Documentation team - you have truly out done yourself.

Thank you to Benno, Suzie and Anya for Burrito! We love him!

For the last few weeks I have been working on a project called “Rhodes”. Rhodes is aimed to be a desktop automation scripting environment for the Linux Desktop. With Rhodes, users will be able to write small scripts to automate simple (and perhaps complex) tasks using a few lines of JavaScript.

For example, a user might want to create a script that helps them sync their portable music device. The script could prompt the user with some questions about the genre’s of the music they would like to sync and then query HAL for portable music devices and allow them to choose the device from a dialog. Rhodes will eventually provide a simple set of APIs that will make these kinds of automation tasks possible.

The current preview release does not contain this functionality yet but I’m working on it.

The APIs as mentioned above are able to be written in Python then exported to the Mozilla JavaScript runtime. Python was chosen so that developers working on API’s for Rhodes would not be messing around in C so that these API’s can be developed and prototyped quickly.

In the rhodes-python module a developer can make a Python object available by simply doing the following in Python:

In helloworld.py:

from rhodes import *

def printout(value):
	print value

def join_string(string1, string2):
	return string1 + string2

r = Rhodes() #Create a new Rhodes runtime
r.export(printout) #Exports the printout method to JavaScript
r.export(join_string) # Exports join_string method to JavaScript
r.run("helloworld.js") #Runs the JavaScript

Which then the python methods can be accessed by the following in JavaScript:

In helloworld.js:

var x = join_string("Hello, ", "World!")

printout(x);

When you run the python script (You will need to have the python-dbg package installed on your system) like the following:

james@plex:~/tmp$ python-dbg helloworld.py

The runtime will export the methods to JavaScript runtime, run the JavaScript and kindly output the following:

james@plex:~/tmp$ python-dbg helloworld.py
Hello, World!

To get the source code thats compatible with this example you can get it here.

Or if you want to have a look at the source code you can grab it using Baazar by:

bzr clone http://beta.unstated.net/~james/code/rhodes/

I’ll post more about Rhodes in a couple of days or so but for now your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome.

UPDATE: I’ve used the LGPL 3.0 license for Rhodes

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m in the need of a curses (or curses like) diff viewer for some deployment scripts I am writing.

I would like to have two panes showing different files and how they are different.

Anyone know of something that could fit my needs?

Thanks,

Lazy Coder

A most amusing bugzilla issue for the Mozilla project.

I quote:

"If profanities in source code is worth mentioning in a "negative" for a
review... I take that as a badge of honor.  If they need to dig that deep, lets
give it to them."

The recently announced Microsoft Surface looks conceptually the same as research as done by Edward Tse.

By clicking visiting Microsoft Surface website and then clicking on the “Origins” link at the bottem of the page, you can learn that beyond a doubt (ahem), that Microsoft were the sole inventor of the concept.

But no one has accused them ever of capitalising on other peoples ideas.

Tomorrow I leave my current job (of over 2 and a half years) at CargoWise edi and a week later I’ll be joining Atlassian Software Systems as their new Release Engineer.

If you don’t know Atlassian, they are the awesome makers of JIRA and Confluence - and they totally grok Open Source.

I’m really excited about my new role - it will be fantastic to face a whole bunch of new challenges and work with a very intelligent group of new people.

Usually, I don’t blog about career stuff - but today I couldn’t help myself

Hey guys! Just thought I’d do a quick shout out and remind people that tomorrow is SLUG’s first BootCamp.

BootCamp is not a geek fest - BootCamp aims to help people (not geeks!) get into using Linux.

So if your reading this and want to see what Linux can do for you - come along

HP has been kind enough to sponsor the event with approximately 30 linux demo machines (with sexy 30 inch widescreen monitors) and a wonderful venue at HP campus (410 Concord Rd, Rhodes, Sydney - map).

You can find out more on what’s on by checking out the schedule for the day.

Day Starts at 10am and finishes at 6pm - People from all over welcome

Anyone had any experience developing DOS applications for the Symbol brand of barcode scanners? I have a friend who runs an Apple Store wanting me to write some custom applications for it.

DOS was a bit before my time - so a better question would be “what can I use to develop applications for DOS?”