Beyond time
Saturday, 4 August 2007
Posted by austin in: Ruby, Ruby PDF, comments closed
In Twitteriffic today, I hit the wrong button on a message sent by Nathaniel Talbott and it took me to his blog, which had his entry about handing off test/unit to Ryan Davis. It has taken me a long time to reach this point, but it has to happen: I no longer have time to maintain PDF::Writer and most of its support libraries. I need a successor. Over the last year (since RubyConf ‘06), I have been talking with several people, but no one has actually submitted patches for me to review so we could push out some fixes.
I don’t really want to give up PDF::Writer or its ancillary libraries, but I owe it to the community to find a maintainer who will be more responsive and put more effort into it than I have. There are some issues to sort out regarding the pieces of the projects, and some changes that I would like to see someone implement. There are basically three projects:
- Transaction::Simple. This has improved significantly since the last release, but I have not yet implemented the Ruby 1.9 Marshal.load block trick that Matz implemented for me after a minimal case for a
#become-like behaviour was shown. - color-tools: This involves someone else, because after some preliminary discussion last year, I moved the color-tools codebase to the Color project on RubyForge and restructured things to be a bit smarter. There’s also some work that should happen hear regarding colour profiles, but that’s manageable. I basically want to work with the current owner of the Color project to hand this entire project off to someone who is interested in the math behind colours, and has the expertise to do something with it.
- PDF::Writer. The big one.
I need someone to take care of this.No, the community needs someone to take care of this. I’m more than willing to share some thoughts about the code, but it’s a bit of a mess, and there are better ways to do what I did. The code can’t support the ultimate goal of reading.
None of this means that I’m giving up on Ruby, or on PDF generation; if I find time, you may yet find a different set of PDF tools from me in the future. But PDF::Writer is here and it needs someone to help maintain it.
Could that be you? Comments open on this post for interested parties to let me know. Be warned: I’m not just handing off PDF::Writer. I’m going to be looking at code samples; wanting patches. I need to know that you’re going to give the care the PDF::Writer needs and deserves before I hand off the virtual keys to the project.
Changes Coming
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Posted by austin in: HaloStatue, comments closed
So far, I’ve had two abortive attempts at personal blogging; I still want to blog, but I have to figure out what I want it to be about, and how much I want to talk about work (if at all).
I’m going to be playing with some new themes for WordPress and some new plug-ins while I work with this. In the meantime, I will be disabling new user registrations (at least temporarily, and possibly permanently) and comments on existing posts that aren’t disabled (they should all be, but I haven’t verified). I may take Joel Spolsky’s advice on not having comments enabled, but I’m not sure. I will be deleting all currently registered users, too. There’s been a slow but steady tend of spam-users being created. They can’t do anything, but it’s still annoying.
I’m also looking for a single webhost to give me a reasonable yearly price for good performance (the hosts at OLM and 1&1 have been slowing down, and while I liked Linode, I find that I don’t actually want to manage everything that way) with shell access and compile rights (so I can put Ruby on their system if they haven’t). I might like a Linode-like system where I don’t have to manage everything. I don’t care about email; all of that needs to be directed through my Google Apps account. I’d like to consider running one of the Ruby/Rails blogging packages (and I’m not sure which one, to be honest), but I want it to be reasonably complete and easy to use with plug-ins like I can get for WordPress (I’m going to be adding twitter integration soon, via plug-ins). Any ideas? Email them to austin at zieglers dot ca and let me know.
