Brian’s Blog

At the Launchpad EPIC, Leonard gave a lightning talk indicating that we should use the latest version of launchpadlib as it contains some performance improvements. As a heavy user of the API, I followed up with him and discovered that these performance improvements are only available in the Maverick version of the package which doesn’t help everyone. He gave me a set of patches, which really affect python-lazr.restfulclient, that contained the fixes so I could work on getting them in Lucid. With the upcoming point release of Lucid it won’t be possible to get the new package in -updates right away. Subsequently, I’ve created made the package available in my PPA. If you are using python-launchpadlib a lot I recommend using the updated lazr.restfulclient. If you have any issues with the package please comment on the SRU bug.

The 4th series of The IT Crowd has started and I’m happy to see that Roy and Moss still support Ubuntu.

My wife noticed a second logo in the episode but I’ll leave that as an exercise for you.

I remember when I first started driving I had a map of Portland that I’d highlight the roads I’d driven.  Technology has made this much easier with GPSes and mapping software like Google Earth.  While I’ve been recording my tracks with GPS when biking and driving this is a bit harder to do when flying.  However, I recently discovered FlightAware which allows you to download kml files of flights with-in their service area. I’ve combined all the flights I’ve recently flown into the following.

I’m excited to see how my summer travel files in part of the map.

I was mailing a DVD to Netflix and saw the following:

Netflix stopped shipping HD DVDs on December 15th of 2008.

I know because I have an HD DVD player.

As a part of my rotation with the Launchpad bugs team I am currently working on a Launchpad Enhancement Proprosal dealing with improved bug notifications and subscriptions. As a part of this work I thought I’d work on an easy bug about modifying the string in a new bug message to say “You have been assigned” instead of “You have been subscribed”. This ended up being more complicated than I had initially thought because there are actually multiple issues in that report and I had to learn the email notification system. But this makes the fix that much more rewarding.

So now when you are assigned a bug report you will receive an email with following in the body.

You have been assigned a bug task for a public bug by Brian Murray (brian-murray):

Its more than just s/subscribed/assigned/ because the assigner is actually identified - something that was not done before. Another fix made was preventing the assignee transition email notification from going to the assignee. You previously would get 2 emails when assigned, if you were not a bug subscriber, a notification about the new to you bug report and the assignment transition.

After fixing that bug I went ahead and fixed a bug that was bothering me in 2007! I wanted, and still want, to be able to filter on bug reports that I’ve reported which isn’t possible since I’m just listed as a subscriber. This particular bug really was easy (3 lines of code, 2 lines of comments and 7 lines of test) and now you can filter on an “X-Launchpad-Reporter:” header.

Okay not really now. Due to the way email notifications are sent you won’t actually be able to see these changes until they land on the production server next week.

We recently watched the Tooth Fairy with The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, in a tutu of all things. Really what have things come to? I had read that there was a wilhelm in the movie and diligently sat through the whole thing until it appeared in Chapter 24 during the end credits.

I’ve hit a major milestone in my collection of Wilhelm screams - scream number 100! We explicitly watched Dante’s Peak to find this one. Well, I was also interested in seeing the Pacific Northwest and particularly enjoyed the scenes that included Mount Saint Helens crater. The scream appears in Chapter 31.

I am currently on a rotation with the Launchpad bugs team for a six month period coinciding with the Maverick release. While I have made some patches to Launchpad in the past my first substantial change recently landed on edge. Most of my previous work has been for the API but this is work is really quite exciting as it resulted in a change to a web page on Launchpad.

The work I’ve done adds bugs that people or teams are structurally subscribed, for example a subscription to bugs about a package, to their +patches page. For further details see the bug report. The change is really best illustrated by looking at a team with some structural subscriptions, like the Ubuntu Server team, on production and edge.

Before:

After:

Now we see bugs with patches for packages like apache2, php5 and more - lots more! Pretty outstanding if you ask me! I really believe that having a team structurally subscribed to packages they care about and having the bug mail going to a mailing list, like the Ubuntu Server team does, makes for a good work flow. Hopefully, the modified result set makes this story more compelling and is useful to them. As a part of this work I added a way to search for bug tasks using structural subscriptions and I plan to make this available via the API so stay tuned!

after c and the 2nd time you spell it on a piece of paper in Seattle.

Are those California spelling requirements too?