I finally got my talk slides from last year's Kiwi PyCon and OSDC uploaded, and got inspired to overhaul my list of talks, including a few that were missing entirely, and adding links to video or audio of more of the talks.
If you've half an hour to kill and want some 8-bit computing nostalgia, then the video of "The Art of Writing Small Programs" from OSDC 2011 is well worth a watch.
Posted in general by Olly Betts on 2012-01-09 01:20 | Permalink
I was travelling for most of November, but managed to fix four RC bugs in the final week:
Posted in debian by Olly Betts on 2011-12-04 07:56 | Permalink
I spent a bit of time last month working towards being able to remove wxwidgets2.6 from the Debian archive - inspired by the RCBW initiative, I did a quick (and perhaps not totally thorough) tally of the Debian RC bugs I fixed in October 2011:
Probably the biggest win will be the removal of wxwidgets2.6 though - it's long dead upstream and removing it will pave the way for including wxwidgets3.0 once it is released.
Posted in debian by Olly Betts on 2011-11-25 15:32 | Permalink
(Actually, we branched six weeks ago, but I've not got around to writing about it until now.)
The development branch approach we used for 1.1.x development releases leading to a stable 1.2.0 release seemed to work pretty well, so we're adopting that again.
The main problem last time was that it took a long time to actually stabilise 1.1.x because we kept slipping more changes in. For 1.3.x, we need to be more disciplined and changes should be developed on a branch and not merged prematurely. We now have solid git mirroring, so developing on a branch is a more pleasant experience than before. We also need to be brutal sooner. It's better for everyone to (say) achieve two releases series in two years than have one release series take two years.
When I was in the UK back in May, Richard and I sat down and hashed out a list of goals for a 1.4 release series. This is what we came up with (the order is just how they came to mind, so isn't really significant):
Posted in xapian by Olly Betts on 2011-07-22 16:29 | Permalink
There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst students as to what "Status: pending" on their proposal means. Well, a state diagram explains this clearly (brief summary: pending is good):
Note: Now that student applications have closed, moving a "withdrawn" application back to "pending" counts as a modification to the proposal so you'll need to get the org to click "Allow proposal modifications" on your proposal before you can do this.
Posted in gsoc by Olly Betts on 2011-04-11 17:24 | Permalink
Student applications for GSoC closed a few hours ago. This is Xapian's first year as a mentoring organisation (though I've been involved in previous years with SWIG and Debian) and we've been blown away by the response from students.
If you'd have asked me when we'd got accepted, I'd have guessed we might get 20 applications and feel we'd done well, but counting up now we have 42. Ignoring two which were withdrawn (one duplicate, one a spam which surprisingly got withdrawn when I politely suggested such applications weren't useful), here is a graph of applications against time:
If you're an admin or a mentor, you can produce a similar graph for your own org(s) - just download this OpenDocument spreadsheet and follow the instructions inside.
Now the task of selection starts in earnest. I've gone through and marked the seven spam proposals as ineligible (that's one line proposals, proposals with no connection at all to Xapian, and proposals which are just a title and/or paste from our ideas list with a generic biography).
That leaves 33, but not all are really in the running, before our student applicants start to despair! I don't have a good picture yet, but it looks like there are something like 10-15 we'll be seriously considering.
Posted in xapian by Olly Betts on 2011-04-09 14:36 | Permalink