Friday, February 26, 2010

Mach-II 1.9 Milestone 1 (mach-ii.com)



Mach-II 1.9



Hot on the heels of the Mach-II 1.8 "Simplicity" final release, Team Mach-II is proud to announce the availability of Milestone 1 (M1) of the 1.9 "Integrity" release.



As we've mentioned a few times before, starting with Mach-II 1.9 we are moving to milestone releases in order to get fully completed features in your hands as soon as possible. This helps us better organize and complete the development tasks involved with the release, and our users can help us by testing the new features as they're completed instead of waiting for the full final release, or potentially having numerous partially completed features in nightly builds.



Mach-II 1.9 is code-named "Integrity" because one of the main focal points of this release is adding validation capabilities to the framework. An integral part of validation is internationalization, so i18n is another big piece of Mach-II 1.9. We've made great progress on these features and they'll be available in future milestone releases. You can read about some of our plans for i18n features on the Mach-II wiki.



In keeping with our smaller, faster release cycle, we started with some low-hanging fruit for Mach-II 1.9 M1, including:


  • Boostrapper "loading page" option - #195

  • Add 'prepend' attribute to the view-page command - #420

  • Improvements to the logging package

    • Use for M2 logger output when on Open BD - #439

    • Allow for MachIILogger use IP list to show debugging output - #329



  • Improvements to the HtmlHelperProperty

    • Add support for nested "inline" JS in asset packages - #469

    • Add option to add JS before HTML body in HtmlHelperProperty - #230



  • Miscellaneous improvements

    • Add ability to use a module event as default event - #382

    • Add helper methods to ViewContext and BaseComponent for environment related functionality - #467






Grab the Mach-II 1.9 M1 zip now and help us by starting to incorporate new Mach-II features into your development cycle right when they're available.



As for our plans for future 1.9 milestone releases, we're a completely open book. You can read about all the milestone plans on our roadmap, and please let us know if you have feedback on any of the great features we have planned for 1.9. And we can't wait to start sharing our plans for 2.0.



As always, thanks for your support of Mach-II! Our users and community are what make Mach-II great, so we truly appreciate everything you do for Mach-II.



All I can say is that the entire team is excited. We're already working towards milestone 2. Get it now.

Was joint custody a mistake? (Salon.com)


When Simon was 3, he used to call the time after the lights were out and before he fell asleep "the talking dark"; it was one of those pitch-perfect childhood phrases coined to describe an experience not found in grown-up parlance. In the talking dark, Simon talked himself to sleep. In the talking dark, bad guys were defeated, weather was commented upon, stuffed ducks waddled into ponds. He also got two of everything that year: two bedrooms, two sets of toys, two different jammie rotations. Dad's house and Mom's house were very separate places in his consciousness, a firewall built between them so thick that once, when he was with his dad and ran into me on the street, he introduced us to each other. "Mommy, this is Daddy. Daddy, Mommy." But he had one talking dark. One consciousness to inhabit and one narrative machine with which to invent stories out of the tracks of his days.



Although I was much older than Simon at the time, I am a child of divorce as well. I too drifted between two households. During that time, I very much felt like I was living two separate but equally important characters in my two families. Still, I existed in my own world between the two and those lines are gradually blurring over the past years. From all of this, I had a good chuckle at the distilling down of Simon's consciousness to the causal "introduction" of his parents on the street described above. The rest of the article is rather funny as well so I encourage you read the whole thing.

Monday, February 22, 2010

The Bloom Box (60 Minutes) - Absolutely Fascinating





Cleaner energy? No power grid? This "fuel cell" could make a difference. Only time will tell.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Why I'm Proud To Be A Dirty GNU Hippy (GoingWare)


By earning my bread through writing software, I made a pact with the Devil. In seventeen years spent working as a software engineer, I have been required to sign a non-disclosure agreement by everyone I have ever worked for. I have never been allowed to write Free Software. All but a tiny bit of the source code I have written in seventeen years of hard labor is now kept a jealously guarded trade secret by those who paid me to write it. Many of those companies are now long out of business, yet I could still be sued or even imprisoned should I release any of the source code I wrote for them.


So true and probably why there are a lot of people trying to figure out how open source can pay the bills. I'd be one of those as I like sharing my work, but if only it would pay my mortgage.


Open CFML Advisory Committee -- Resignation Letter

Since my involvement in the Open CFML Advisory Committee is public knowledge, here is my resignation letter I shared with my colleagues on the committee.



Dear Colleagues,

My personal commitments  and professional endeavors have changed a lot since I joined the committee in May of 2009.  The demands on my time have increased in the past year and it has become increasingly difficult for me to contribute sufficiently to the CFML specification process. After much thought and internal debate, I have decided to tender my resignation from the Open CFML Advisory Committee.  I have enjoyed working with all of you this past year, and I appreciate everything I have learned from the process. I wish everyone the best going forward with creating a CFML specification.

Best,
Peter J. Farrell



 


Edit July 24th, 2010:


I had some additional thoughts to add now that the Open CFML Advisory Committee has disbanded.