Author archives: Mike

One of the major wish-list items for the new billing system is the ability to set up differential charging schemes using a tabular setup, so that admins can set up a default table of charges and then sets of overrides to those charges based on a rule match (e.g. you have a given token, or ...

When you run a cable company, it makes sense to have the ability to explicitly and exhaustively define the streets and street-ranges in the town so that you can never have an invalid address entered for service. I've just finished the basic implementation of that for the better billing project, along with the other major ...

Continued work on BetterBilling this evening. Particularly started working on creating stand-ins for the eventual user-driven package-setup functions. Eventually a user should be able to compose a new package (billable thing) out of technical effects (services provided by the backend) and configurations (user choices that control the operation technical effects). For now I'm just manually ...

Other than a few hours on the (largely finished) old project (so far), I've been concentrating today on TurboGears and particularly moving the BetterBilling project ahead. I've been running into (minor) SQLObject bugs here and there, probably because inheritance isn't a commonly used feature and I'm using it extensively.

I've finally got to the point ...

Okay, key tip for debugging TurboGears SQLObject problems, add ?debug=1 to the dev.cfg URL for your database. Once you have that and you try to run a query for an inherited class you'll see the problem, but so that you don't have to set it up, here's the description of the problem and the solution: ...

Did some more work on TurboGears. Found another couple of bugs in the SQLObject SQL generation code. Now failing with the inheritance stuff, seems that the documented ability to do Child.select( Parent.field==something) doesn't throw any errors but also doesn't seem to return the results. Anyway, nothing huge, just little things I'll have to track down ...

It's not that I'm not thirsty
I'm parched to dusty stone
But the timing seems all wrong
For I've just resolved to quit
The search for cups of water
In hopes forgetting hard thirst
Will let me grow to be a man
Who deserves a cup of water

The bug in SQLObject was just a missing '+' character, it was doing:

sql = ';\n'+join_sql

instead of:

sql += ';\n'+join_sql

so the SQL for the table was getting dropped when there was "join" sql for the final content. Somewhat of a letdown, I was thinking it would be hours of plunging through deep-dark code ...

It seems that the smoothies were not sufficiently enticing to get me to actually sit down and work on the SQLObject problem. Shane's coming by in an hour to get his router re-provisioned, so not going to have a big block of time for work tonight. Maybe I should just call the day a write-off ...

Coming up on the 4th Tuesday of the month again. We'll be continuing our review of web frameworks from last month, so if you have a particular framework you've used and can review (critically) come on down and share your opinations.

As usual we'll be at our generous venue Linux Caffe, who go ...