Something wrong with my wiki

I haven’t used it in a while, what with Christmas and procrastination, but my wiki (formerly at http://wiki.one-shore.com) isn’t lettting me post. I was going to add an entry for mailman and several categories for email, email servers, web mail, mailing lists, spam & AV. There is no edit link, create this page doesn’t work, and I’ve lost the aaron password again.

I’m diving into Bugzilla

I subscribed to dev-apps-bugzilla@lists.mozilla.org.

I’ll check out from head and start working on bugzilla web services and eventually UI. The first thing I’ve been asked to work on is converting CGI scripts into perl modules. Then I’ll work on using the modules to create web services. I’ll create an alternate template layout and try to better allow CSS theming and componentization of UI elements. I’ll resurrect the bugzilla sidebar.

I’m on IRC.MOZILLA.ORG#mozwebtools now. First thing, I’ve got to find out where to check it out.

Blog, Forum, Wiki, About, Contact, Services complete and RESTful

The One Shore blogs are set up and working. With the correct URLs. As are the forums and wiki. And the about, services, and contact pages. All the menu links work (except demo) as well as a few extra. They are RESTful and pretty (mostly) and are bookmarkable and seachable. They have content. The wiki still has a lot of subjects to fill in, however. http://one-shore.com and http://www.one-shore.com behave the same. They are all under the same document root (through aliases) so migrating from dev->test->prod shouldn’t be as much work. VirtualHosts for wiki, forum, blogs, and demo exist but have been deprecated. I’m not sure I like that, but based on Kelsey’s opinion I put them under. It does make navigation cleaner, because you can go from http://www.one-shore.com/blogs/company to http://www.one-shore.com/about/one-shore by just editing the path, without messing with the hostname. This loses the independent logging and (easier) access restrictions (and ssl) that virtual hosts have. We’ll see.

So here’s a quick site map:

http://one-shore.com == http://www.one-shore.com
http://one-shore.com/about
http://one-shore.com/about/one-shore
http://one-shore.com/about/aaron-evans
http://one-shore.com/blogs/company
http://one-shore.com/blogs/technology
http://one-shore.com/blogs/news
http://one-shore.com/blogs/work
http://one-shore.com/wiki
http://one-shore.com/wiki/tools
http://one-shore.com/wiki/qa
http://one-shore.com/wiki/development
http://one-shore.com/wiki/pm
http://one-shore.com/wiki/biz
http://one-shore.com/forum
http://one-shore.com/forum/f2-Shore.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f15-Main-Support-Forum.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f18-Tools.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f20-Techniques.html
http://one-shore.com/demos
http://demo.one-shore.com/bugzilla
http://demo.one-shore.com/mantis
http://demo.one-shore.com/trac
http://demo.one-shore.com/qatraq
http://demo.one-shore.com/testopia
http://demo.one-shore.com/docuwiki
http://demo.one-shore.com/knowledgetree
http://one-shore.com/services
http://one-shore.com/services/qa-site
http://one-shore.com/services/consulting
http://one-shore.com/services/staffing
http://one-shore.com/services/web_development
http://one-shore.com/contact
http://one-shore.com/contact/sales
http://one-shore.com/contact/sales/qa-site
http://one-shore.com/contact/support
http://one-shore.com/contact/careers
http://one-shore.com/contact/investors
http://one-shore.com/contact/partners

Also the following external links:
http://demo.qa-site.com/
http://fijiaaron.wordpress.com
http://fijiaaron.blogspot.com
http://boneshore.runboard.com/ == http://www.runboard.com/boneshore
http://bqasite.runboard.com/ == http://www.runboard.com/bqasite

Plus lots of tools in the wiki, and more forum pages. As you can see, the forum URLs aren’t the best. Getting it merely took a tedious series of cut and paste steps from a tutorial on adminpicks.com Let me just say, punBB is spaghetti and I salute the brave soul who created the patch. Actually, a patch wouldn’t have worked because there’s been some change since then.

So now my site is structually complete, and restful, it’s time for me to get some rest, and then get down to the real work. Plus, there’s going to need to be some backporting because I did a lot of stuff on the fly in production, and I don’t have it mirrored in dev. Like the nav links, I think. And any blog, wiki, or forum content. And I still need to test the contact forms.

Site and Business progressing

Things are starting to come together.

The one-shore.com website is starting to get fleshed out.  Yesterday I got the wiki (dokuwiki) installed and created all the tools links.  Today I got the forum (punBB) installed and created categories.
The wiki is now more up to date than the tools links.  I still need to enable rewrite on the wiki and give it one shore branding (colors, logo, and nav links to return to the rest of the site.)  I also want to add the tools links to the side for easy navigation, as well as a link cloud, by most visited, and post info on the home page such as most popular, and latest updates.

The forum is fully branded with a bevy of sample categories and forums.  I think I need to notch it down and just make a few major categories.  One Shore, Tools, QA Site, Support, perhaps combining the last two.  It goes Category->Forum->Topic->Post — which is one more level than I anticipated creating it.  Also, it seems that all the way down to topics, only the administrator can post.  I’d like registered members to create topics, for things like adding a tool or posting a support question.

Multiple blogs are available on dev, but unbranded as yet.  I may continue to use my wordpress.com and blogspot.com blogs for now, because it provides an offsite location and the possibility that someone may stumble upon it.  Eventually I may mirror locally or migrate.

I also created forums on runboard.com, which offers an off-site location, but may be wasted space.  It will be a good back up if I have to bring my own forums down.

Yesterday I setup a paypal account so I can receive payments through that.  Today I got a skypein number: 206-801-1701, so I can receive calls from the US easier.  Only sound (and hence skype) doesn’t work on my computer, at least since “upgrading” to Vista Ultimate (it swears there are no sound devices) from Vista Home –so I will have to use Kelsey’s for it.  I think I may want to go with TalkPlus eventually.

Skypein is $18 for 3 months.  It’s a good number (though the geek in me wanted 1734) and I’d hate to change it if I start to depend on it.  Talkplus is $6.99/month plus 11 cents a minute and can ring my land or cell number here in Ecuador.

The deciding reason I  got a number is because I sent an email to be listed on bugzilla’s paid support.  I also listed as a user.  And as a user of Mantis (I use mantis for the one-shore site development and Bugzilla for the qa-site dashboard and integration.)  I also have demos of both, and will support either for customer QA sites.  I also made a note on Dokuwiki about using them, and emailed Knowledgetree about using their product.  Knowledgetree told me about sourceforge, and I registered on there, though I need to look and see what tools I support are on Sourceforge and add that to my sourceforge market profile.  I don’t think bugzilla or dokuwiki are.

Tomorrow I hope to fix all the links and get the about, contact, and services pages finally up.

I will be visiting the computer school at San Blas square hopefully this week and eventually the technical college looking for people with good english and computer skills looking to join one-shore.  I’ll also try to network with people online and contact open source project leaders, and maybe company like Knowledgetree, but also, for instance, Atlassian.  Crowd is staring to look very appealing to me, though I want to have the option of java-free VPS accounts for lightweight users.

I’l post on craigslist, guru, and look for other places soon.  I’m probably not willing to cold call or spam businesses, but need to find out how to talk to someone who might really be interested.

Job Skills

What skills do you look for in a tester?

Not just technology X or language Y, but what makes them a good tester?  Creativity?  Pedantry?  (I think both can be good.)

Is there a combination of skills that attract you or send up red flags.  If you subscribe to Paul Graham’s theory, python is good and java is bad.  Not as a language, but as a skill.  Because all the cool kids are trying out python and drones use java.

 

I don’t agree with PaulGraham, on that, even though I like his essays for the most part. 

But I’m thinking about using python for my dashboard framework.  Partially to try it out again.  Partially because I think the community might have alot to offer.  Partially just because it’s not PHP and I’m a little worried what evaluators will pre-judge it by just because it uses PHP or Perl or Ruby.  The same reason many people use Java. 

Actually, what attracted me to Java was servlets and cached sessions and the libraries.  Perl, PHP, and Java have the most open source libraries available, and I can’t think I’d want for any of them.  Python and Ruby are a bit scarier.  Ruby is nice and Rails is really nice, but there’s an anti-Rails stigma out there — partially because it’s “too easy.”

Tech-wise alone, I’d choose Perl because of mod_perl.  Only perl gets ugly when it get’s big.  There’s no denying it.  I don’t like OOP perl.  I haven’t had an in-depth look at Catalyst yet though.

Can mod_python with vampire and python servlets give me the flexibility I’d get from Tomcat or Apache with mod_perl?

 – this was originally posted on my forum.

Forum & Wiki

I’m putting up One Shore branded forums on the site today. It uses a modified punBB with a (slightly) customized Mercury theme, which is close enough to the one-shore.com color theme. You can see it at http://forum.one-shore.com/ Here’s a screenshot.

I’ve been looking for a forum that doesn’t use a database, so that the posts can be put under version control, but haven’t found one yet. I also like nested threads.

The last post was originally posted on a remote forum I set up to see what it looks like. http://www.runboard.com/boneshore — they added the ‘b’, so maybe I’ll become known as “BONESHORE.” I also created another forum for qa-site, which became http://www.runboard.com/bqasite. This will at least give me something remote for a forum in case my own site runs into difficulties. Runboard actually looks similar to punBB in layout.

Also, the new wiki is up, with a tools outline, but no real content yet. The outline is actually a pretty good list and has value in it’s own right. I’ll try to add commentary and links, about one a day and hopefully other people will contribute. http://opensourcetesting.com is a good resource, and so is wikipedia, but I’d like to have my own, with more in depth commentary, discussions, and demos and tutorials of many apps.

I’d like to combine forum, wiki, and blog functionality. I looked at bbPress, but wasn’t impressed. vBulletin reminded me too much of those ugly flat colorful bulletin boards that every site had a couple years ago. Like I said, nesting is desirable, a la newsgroup threads. Simplicity is also a huge plus. Embedding in my webpage without the antics needed of a virtual host, editing templates, iframes, etc. is also necessary. I’ll get by with punBB for now, but look forward to finding a replacement. My luck, I’ll have valuable data I can’t transfer.

Now I need to “theme” dokuwiki, which really just means putting links back to my site and making it not look stock. A black background with light text, a logo, nav, and I’d like to have the tools sidebar for easier navigation. Integrating the tools list from the front page will take some work. I spent a lot of time creating the tools outline pages in the wiki, but maybe I’d want to generate those pages in the future from the same database I’d like to create the tools widget.

I found an interesting plugin for dokuwiki, a “cloud” like the flickr tag cloud, only I’d like to modify it to emphasize most visited, not most linked to. Esther Brunner at wikidesign created the cloud, and I thought of hiring her to do the design and implement it, maybe with the existing stats hack, but I couldn’t find contact information. It looks like she does good work, and maybe she’d be interested in collaborating if One Shore gets customers who want specific dokuwiki customization.

Really, I’d like to find a network of consultants who I can share stories and maybe clients, because as much as I’d like to, I realize I can’t specialize in everything, and I can’t afford the hierarchy of many employees, at least not yet.

Finding Clients

How, as a consultant, do you find clients?

This is one area I profess total ignorance. And somewhat of a dislike. What techie rubs his hands with glee at the prospect of marketing and sales? Well, not exactly glee, but I have at least a scientific curiosity in the subject that is more tainted by bothersome necessity than superstitious loathing.

Do you cold call or spam? If so, how do you identify organizations to target?

What about job boards? What do you post?

How about craigslist? Is it a waste of time if you’re not local?

I found one interesting option, particularly geared towards my specialty, supporting open source tools: Sourceforge.

Another thing I’ve done is try to list on products I’m using. For instance, Mantis and Dokuwiki both have pages where users of those projects can add themselves to the list. Knowledgetree has a partners page I’d like to get on and actually pointed me to the sourceforge marketplace.

What else?

Okay maybe I was hasty

It may have just been the way it interacts with NoScript — not the old plugin the blocked flash and allowed fine grained controls, but the one put out by http://www.informaction.com/.  I thought noscript was a trusted tool, but now I’m afraid I just installed spyware.  I didn’t like the look of the site.

Mozilla sucks

Firefox and Seamonkey forced ugrade installations and browser restarts.  Seamonkey completely broke on its mandatory upgrade, and I had to re-install.  Now both browsers launch, but neither work.  They are broken beyond repair, javascript doesn’t work, css is worse (you couldn’t really say it worked before), and you can’t even properly configure javascript. To top it all off, popups aren’t blocked by default.  Oh yeah, many extensions are broken as well.

 Looks like I’m going back to IE.  I’m downloading Opera now.  I’m certainly not going to support anything from the Mozilla Foundation Corporation for at least 6 months. 

 My guess is that there was a major security vulnerability discovered (but not disclosed) that in their minds, justified forcing such draconian and idiotic measures on the users.  However, not even Microsoft forces installation unless you select it.  Maybe I should blame windows for allowing these crap applications to infiltrate my computer.

Don’t use Firefox 2.0.11 or Seamonkey 1.1.7.  They are broken beyond use.  Not since the early milestones has it been this bad.

pycron

http://www.kalab.com/freeware/pycron/pycron.htm

This is a nice tool to run cron jobs on windows. It uses py2exe

An article on how to use it
http://www.bigbluehost.com/article4.html

Another tool I’ve read was good:
http://www.nncron.ru/

Don’t use VisualCron (it doesn’t even know what a cron job is)
or CronW — it’s an ugly perl program.