Attention those coming to LCA!

I’m considering having a BoF (Birds of a Feather) conference during the conference relating to Bongo and stuff. I’m asking here because, well, I honestly have no idea how many are going to come. If I don’t have enough numbers, there’s probably not all that much point in putting up a request for the room. Also, if you’d like to come, if you could optionally give me an idea of when you’d like the BoF to be held (ie which sessions), so that you don’t miss out on your favorite talks! :)

To quote the programme:

This year we have a dedicated Birds of a Feather room that is available during the main conference (Wednesday to Friday). More information on running or attending a BoF session will be available when the conference opens.

I guess I could always generalise it, and possibly get a few other speakers involved. I might email this idea to chat/mel8ourne list.

Also, if you want to catch me at LCA, PM/email me. Mobile number is 0401215248.

It’d probably be useful to explain to everybody briefly what all the codenames we’re on about actually mean, seeing as there’s probably going to be much discussion regarding them fairly soon. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything.

I should probably also mention this reflects my perfect view of the world, and mine only. Some of the stuff mentioned here I haven’t really discussed with many, so it may hit the trashcan quickly. I’ll also avoid getting into technical details - you can check out the wiki and try to piece together how it works if you’re so keen, or you can catch me on IRC.

• Dragonfly: The current web UI implementation, duh.
• Crystal: What I intend to be the core for our new web bits - Flasher and Avocado (see below). Basically, Crystal will consist of a pluggable backend, message transport API thingy, and the base client made from Javascript. Both Flasher and Avocado would be able to plug into the Crystal’s client bit with their own (X)HTML and Javascript to make it look and do like whatever it needs to, while still being able to have access to all the helpers, communcation libraries, shared APIs, etc. Less duplicated code, FTW. Please note that some of the stuff on the wiki isn’t the latest version of what’s in my head/doesn’t make sense. Note to self: don’t write wiki entries very late at night.
• Flasher: Alex Hudson’s proposal for a web interface that can be accessed by users without a Bongo account (either on the current server, or generally). We want to be able to interact with them, share events etc., without having to register them. Primarily, people will gain access to Flasher in two ways: either by having a link sent to them via e-mail (e.g., an invitation), or by following a link from a website. Flasher will probably end up being a very cut down version of the calendaring component in Avocado, with some extra Flasher-only bits built on top.
• Avocado: the sexy, new web UI for Bongo (hopefully). Would have it’s own neato interface, and be mainly plugin-based. Mail, calendars, contacts would be part of the ‘core plugins’ shipped with Avocado. Developing/adding new plugins should be relatively trivial. APIs will be provided from both Avocado itself (for stuff like widgets, etc) as well as Crystal (networking, basic plugin stuff, …).

Comments, please!

More Javascript hacking!

I’ve been working a little utility class called TemplateBit that enables you to create little template things out of HTML elements in Javascript. There are several advantages for using TemplateBit instead of doing things the traditional way:

• Keeps your code seperated and neat. Don’t mix up your HTML and Javascript.
• Easy to modify and theme.
• Less code required to write your web application.

You can check out the source of TemplateBit, the demo source (useful if you want to know how it worked) and the demo itself. Be sure to view the demo JS source, as its easier for you to see than for me to explain.

You can also check out a version created without using TemplateBit here.

Hopefully we can utilise this for Avocado and Flasher at some stage.

Speaking of Bongo, I’m planning to do some Bongo work at some stage during the next week or two, and will be spending most of my break working towards the stuff I didn’t finish for M3. I’ve had been fairly busy of late, as (for those who didn’t already know), I had a lot of work dumped on my plate at the last minute, and the fact that my internet went down for a bit didn’t make things any better.

I also want to get the finalised planning for Crystal underway, probably after a meeting with probably the Chief Moo, and who ever else wants to come along. I’ll give out proper details as to when we’ll be discussing it so you can come and join the fun. I’m not sure if we should use IRC or the -devel.

I think that’s enough blogging for one day by my standards.

Hmm, it’s been a bit of a while since I last blogged anything Bongo-related.

I’ve been working on a bit of wiki bling lately, and as of tonight, I think I’ve got the general layout and look pretty much squared away. Seems to work great in Firefox, Epiphany, IE7, IE6 (albeit without transparent PNGs at the moment), Opera, and Safari. I’ve also been trying to do a bit of cleanup generally around the place on the wiki. Hopefully I’ll get a bit more of that done tomorrow (and possibly some Dragonfly hacking before M3).

If you’d like to enable the theme yourself and have a play, log into the Bongo wiki, click open your preferences, and scroll down until you see ‘themes’. Select the “bubblegum” theme from the list, and click OK. Tada!

Of course, this wouldn’t really be a proper blog post from me without a screenshot or something, so here’s what the skin currently looks like:

Please remember that this skin won’t necessarily become the new wiki skin; we’ll sort that out shortly, probably with a vote or something if there’s any disagreement.

If you notice any rendering issues or have any suggestions or complaints, please ping me on IRC or email me.

For those of you who have been running off trunk for the last couple revisions, it’d probably be useful to clear out your prefs for Dragonfly now that we have working code back in SVN as of this afternoon. If you haven’t - this blog post probably doesn’t apply to you. :)

Basically, you’ll just need to delete your /preferences/dragonfly file in the store. Instructions are provided with this entry, so if you’re reading this post via a Planet, you’ll need to click to ‘read more’, if you need to read them.

Awesome, or what? :D

I should probably mention that if you get a pony, it is indeed redeemable for a beer. :)

Doing what I do best, I’ve taken a good idea and stolen it. =) OK, actually I really did build upon it, honest!

Basically, I’ve come up with a system that lets you recognise the people who work on Bongo. You’re given ‘Pony power’ which allows you to either add or remove a Pony point from a Bongo contributer, say, for example, they’ve added some awesome new feature that you’ve been waiting years for, or they just screwed up an agent. After a certain period of time (possibly at the end of the year), I’ll get the top few contributers, and send them all their very own Little Pony - you too can be this happy.

So, without further ado, I present to you all: OMGPONIES. If you contribute to Bongo (yes, packagers and the like included), go on, sign up! To everyone else, give pony points where they’re deserved!

Edit: changed the way the entire post sounded.

Im in ur bongo, finding ur bugz. Jonny and Chris Lamb at Lug Radio Live 2007, hacking on something (it better be Bongo).

Edit: apparently not. Seems like the Lambs were reading emails/working on Debian.

Congratulations to all Bongo contributers/coders/clowns on the big TWO ZERO ZERO! While probably more than half of these make up missing files from my commits, it’s great to see Bongo heading in such a great direction after such a short amount of time. A great community at work, folks!

I’ve just commited a patch to enable the use of Hawkeye under Apache. You’ll need to setup Apache as per the wiki.

I also think I may have fixed the double-login issue that was occurring, where you’d have to enter your login information twice before you could gain access to Hawkeye. If you’re still getting this problem, email me/comment so I know I still have some more work to do. Otherwise, hooray!

Now, to utilize the exposed user-management interface! Note for packagers: Fix src/www/bongo.conf.in to use similar values as those from wiki.

We now have a shiny new admin panel in trunk, commited last night! Woohoo! Since we all love pictures, here’s one of the login:

Thanks to so_solid for fixing my nasty Mac OS line endings, and some of my Python coding.

After spending a few days tweaking the Hawkeye layout, it seems to be coming along rather nicely. Here’s a before and after, the left being the mockup, the other the current implementation (in Epiphany):

The Python code calculating the current memory usage is a nice touch. Plus it works fairly well in most browsers, such as IE7, Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, and Konqueror, unless you’re running IE6, which we discovered looked completely yucky (thanks Jonny).

It should also be simple enough to fully deck out the admin interface with the different tasks - the real issue is going to be getting agent pages dynamically entered into the system, and possibly getting the task group panes fixed up a bit more by sorting them into a tile view.

I’ll hold off on a patch until tomorrow, when I can hopefully get one or two more issues sorted, then hopefully post it to -devel.

A final thanks to Alex Hudson for adding me to the Planet - and to the Bongo devs for working on such a great product!