raoul's blog

It has been said that the best way to test your software is to use it yourself. Well, with my open source project management tool, Project HQ, I'm doing exactly that.

I've started using Project HQ to manage my open source projects. Most recently I set up an instance for openlp.org, and I've been noticing a few speed issues here and there.

Ahoy mateys!

Tis International Talke Like A Pirate Day t'day, and so I be talkin' like a pirate. Ta be even more in tha mood, I've made meself a pirate name.

For a while I've wanted to know how to dispose of my computer junk. As a geek, you can imagine that I have computers and spare parts coming out of my ears.

One of the main reasons I have collected a lot of the junk over the years is because I didn't actually know *how* to safely dispose of it. All our rubbish gets carted off to landfill sites, and I don't feel happy knowing that in 5 or 10 years time the capacitors on that old motherboard I threw away have leaked, and poisoned someone's water supply.

As you might have read in my previous blog post, my computer died the other day, and I've been going through the process of geting new hardware.

On Wednesday evening I searched through the product listings on the sites of local computer dealers, and on Thursday I placed my order for a new motherboard, graphics card, case (with PSU) and processor (my existing hard drive was quite new, and the motherboard contains all the other things like LAN and sound card).

I got home last night and tried to switch on my PC, and it didn't want to boot up. So I restarted it, and continued trying to get it to boot for an hour, but I eventually gave up. My PC has been giving me problems recently (not booting up), so this was not completely unexpected. However, I hadn't expected it to happen so soon.

Well my review finally when live today. It's a printer review with a difference... it's reviewed on Linux. I have a Windows computer at home that I log onto every now and then for developing openlp.org, but for this review I was determined not to go there. I was largely pleased with the printer, but you can read more about it in my review on IOL Technology.

Yup, Project HQ is making some nice progress, thanks to Python and the SQLAlchemy database library. SQLAlchemy really makes dealing with the database very easy.

Most recently I've been implementing an access control system that makes use of permissions and roles. SQLAlchemy makes dealing with this a breeze, and Pylons makes implementing it in the application very simple and easy. I think the most complicated part will be the roles and permissions management interface!

The ichthux.com site has been down for months due to the fact that the server it was hosted on crashed and died a horrible death. Every now and then we'd get folks in the #ichthux channel asking, "Is the project dead? Cause the web site seems to be..."

So I decided last week to do something about it, and I took over the running of the website. Fortunately, Raphaël had managed to retrieve the data from the DB, and I was able to stick it on my development server at home and build the site up again.

I've been given a printer to review, one of these fancy printer/scanner/copier jobs, with photo-quality printing. Big printer, but it looks nice... all black...

Obviously I'm going to check that it works well with Linux. I have a Windows box to fall back on if necessary, but we'll see. Which brings me to my first issue...

I previously blogged about openpm.org, my open source project management system which I'm writing in Python and Pylons. Unfortunately I could not get hold of the domain name due to a domain squatter, so I decided to take the easy route and rename the project.