So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them. There’s good news and bad news 🙂
The good news is that they thought our application was very well done, and it was basically because they don’t have room for everyone that we didn’t get in: it sounds like we would have been acceptable, it just wasn’t our roll of the die.
… today is World Water Day. There is a flashy 2007 website too, not sure why.
Planet Debian has been a trove of green discussion today. Russell Coker and MJ both linked to a story about Spain getting most of its energy from wind, for the first time. 27% of their energy came from wind, 22% came from nucular power and 16% from coal power (where the other third came from, I’m not totally clear on – possibly imported?). Overall, in the last year, almost 10% of their energy has come from wind.
There has been a little bit of Bongo hacking. In an ideal world, Pat would get with the programme and get himself a blog. People should keep bugging him on IRC to start blogging, and he could be writing some of this stuff instead of me 🙂
First up, the big connio-on-GNUTLS patch has landed. Pat has worked extremely hard on this, and while I’ve helped out on some setup stuff, it’s basically his work.
Last weekend I started looking at Hawkeye, prompted mostly by the need for people to be able to change the config for Bongo while we’re putting the new config system in place.
After a bit of hacking last night, it’s finally at the stage where it does something useful! You can run it under bongo-standalone (previously this wasn’t possible), you can log in as a user, and you can enable or disable agents from startup.
There’s nothing which divides hackers so much as HTML as a format for sending mail. However, a recent discussion on another mailing list makes me think that there is hope for it.
I should state up-front that I’m very much in favour of HTML as a mail format. I outlined a couple of the technical reasons why in my posting on the subject, but it can be summarised mainly to:
For a while, I’ve been intending to put a list of inspirational articles on our wiki. Not really so much that I think everyone should read them – though I think they’re all worthwhile reading – more so that I can find them again when I think about them. Of course, the last time I actually remembered I wanted to do this and had some spare time, the wiki was down.
It has been a little while in the making, and the construction signs are still up, but we’re almost there. After our community IRC meeting earlier this month, we decided that the uncertainty was a problem, and Bongo is the result.
I think this is working out well for a few reasons. We’ve seen more activity and participation this month than I think probably in the previous six or more beforehand.
Sorry – another slightly technical post. This is yet again another visit to the subject of locking, which I briefly described the problems with a while ago, and then wrote some new code to help alleviate the problems.
One thing I didn’t explain at all, looking back at those posts, is the different reasons for locking. We can simplify this down to two major reasons:
Internal database consistency. SQL databases are usually “ACID compliant“, and SQLite is no different.
Well, it was last weekend, but I meant to write about it before now. It was nice to have probably the biggest meet-up of Bongo Project contributors that has ever happened, and Project polo shirts are now in the hands of everyone. The weekend was mostly spent looking through the talk schedule (some of which was interesting, some of which was less so), wondering if Nat was going to say anything about Hula, and chatting about Bongo – we didn’t go to too many talks, but the Selenium one was probably worth the weekend alone.
