fettig.net

I know it’s been a few weeks. Sorry for the silence, here folks. I’m still

around. The main reason for the lack of posts is that my local copy of

my blogging tool of choice

has been broken, as I’ve been aggressively refactoring some of the core

classes in the messaging library, as well as making some important changes

in Hep (more on that later). Also, I’ve been incredibly busy. But finally

today I have the combination of time and motivation to write a weblog entry

the manual way - by ssh’ing in to my server and typing it in vi.

Back on the 7th Thomas Weholt posted a question to the Twisted list. He was

trying to write a web server, using Hep’s code as a starting point. This had

the consequence of bringing attention to the fact that, while Hep was using

Twisted, it was not using Twisted the Right Way (you can read the complete

thread on the Twisted mailing list here).

Twisted is a pretty big framework,

and up until this month I wasn’t ready to jump in with both feet. I picked

bits and pieces of the libraries, mostly the protocol implementations, and used

the mainloop to run Hep, but I avoided relying on Twisted features if I didn’t

have to. Now, though, I’ve reached a level of confidence with Twisted where

I’m ready to do things the Twisted Way throughout Hep, and hopefully make Hep

into a good example for Twisted newbies to learn from. I’ve started this

process already, and I’m not regretting it. Twisted is really nice, and the

developers are very smart guys. There is a learning curve, but so far I’ve

found that the time invested in reading the docs and asking for help on

the mailing list and IRC is well worth it.

In the coming days I’m going to start writing some “What I’ve learned about

Twisted” posts, explaining the various Twisted features I’ve started using

in Hep. So stay tuned for that.

Checking to make sure my timestamps are correct… ignore me!

I haven’t had much time to work on Hep lately. I’ve been wrapping up a 9-month project at my day job, which has been taking up most of the time I would usually have for Hep and other fun things.

But I think the break has actually been a good thing. Like wine, cheese, and bread dough, some ideas get better after they ferment for a while. I had been wrestling with some design decisions; now I’ve come up with solutions that I’m happy with. So as soon as I get a few extra hours I can start implementing them!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet:

• Sam Ruby is doing something interesting with his comments. Take a look at this thread, and notice all the different places comments are coming from: posts, emails, trackbacks, excerpts. Posts and trackbacks are easy enough to understand. Excerpts can be pulled from other sites by analyzing the referrer log. I’m not sure how he’s getting email content in there. Hey Sam, what’s going on behind the scenes? Are you posting relevant emails by hand?

• The first public release of Haystack is available. I ran it on a Windows box today. It looks sweet, but at the moment it’s so unbelievably slow that it’s painful even to play with. I’m sure this will get better with time.