awake and alive

Splitting work and school so far has been alright, but I’m kind of worried about what it might mean later in the semester.

I am definitely learning a lot working at Jackson, but what happens when I have a lot going on at school?

Speaking of learning a lot, here’s a few things I have picked up so far at Jackson:

• Programming in “the industry” is quite different from programming at school
  • A solution isn’t necessarily the right solution just because it works and is fast
  • There are standards that are in place that are kinda like unspoken rules at a secret club
• I actually like programming in Java
  • It’s fairly similar to the languages I have been using
  • Eclipse makes learning the language much easier with autocomplete and syntax checking
• I will never know it all, and I need to rely on others
  • I have been put on projects where I literally know nothing
  • People higher up aren’t the only ones that have good answers, many times my peers know as well

Okay, so this is one of those nerdy type posts, and it’s for my independent study at school.  Ignore it if you don’t understand…

(5:12:07 PM) ehenry5: alright, can you explain the general idea behind ispdb?
(5:12:07 PM) ehenry5: it sounds like it stores more than just the email connect info…
(5:12:25 PM) bwinton: What else do you think it stores?
(5:12:33 PM) ehenry5: i couldn’t gather all of that
(5:12:38 PM) ehenry5: but when i was searching ispdb
(5:12:45 PM) ehenry5: there was a lot going on
(5:12:51 PM) bwinton: Also, do you have a blog set up? Cause I’m going to ask you to post the results of this conversation.
(5:12:58 PM) ehenry5: sure
(5:13:30 PM) bwinton: Where is it (so that I can subscribe)?
(5:14:04 PM) bwinton: So, lets start with http://svn.mozilla.org/mozillamessaging.com/sites/autoconfig.mozillamessaging.com/trunk/hotmail.com
(5:14:17 PM) ehenry5: ok
(5:15:39 PM) bwinton: So there are a bunch of domains that it applies to.
(5:15:52 PM) bwinton: A name so that you can see what it is.
(5:15:57 PM) bwinton: And then the connection info.
(5:16:06 PM) ehenry5: right on
(5:17:26 PM) ehenry5: so that’s all that’s stored?
(5:18:03 PM) bwinton: For now, yeah. At some point we might need an “owner” field, to let people update their own.
(5:18:20 PM) bwinton: Or an “accepted” field, if we go with submission-and-manual-approval.
(5:18:32 PM) ehenry5: so what is the work that needs to be done on ispdb?
(5:19:24 PM) bwinton: Well, I’ve hinted at a bit of it.
(5:19:37 PM) bwinton: User submitted email configs.
(5:19:47 PM) bwinton: Unit tests. A lot of unit tests.
(5:19:48 PM) ehenry5: right
(5:20:09 PM) ehenry5: because it’s all django and you want to be sure that it runs smoothly
(5:20:36 PM) bwinton: Yup.
(5:20:55 PM) bwinton: There are also some fixes, suggested by AndyM, to make it more Django-y.
(5:20:55 PM) ehenry5: but the functionality is mostly working?
(5:21:12 PM) bwinton: Yeah, most of the functionality is mostly working.
(5:21:31 PM) ehenry5: what about in thunderbird
(5:21:37 PM) ehenry5: does it use it yet?
(5:21:44 PM) bwinton: Almost, kinda.
(5:21:48 PM) ehenry5: lol
(5:22:01 PM) bwinton: We’re about to release Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4, which has the autoconfig in it.
(5:22:09 PM) bwinton: beta 3 also did, but it wasn’t very good.
(5:23:47 PM) ehenry5: who is/has worked on that part of tb?
(5:24:03 PM) bwinton: Me!
(5:24:14 PM) ehenry5: and it comes full circle…
(5:24:31 PM) bwinton: Ta-da!
(5:24:37 PM) ehenry5: so, i take it you also have other things to work on too?
(5:25:17 PM) bwinton: Yeah. Some of what I’ve been working on is at: http://moxie.fligtar.com/thunderbird/3.0b4-blockers//sort:bugsFixed
(5:25:46 PM) ehenry5: okay
(5:26:02 PM) bwinton: And now that beta 4 is out of the developer’s hands, it’s off to the rc1 bug list.
(5:26:27 PM) ehenry5: so, what would be best case scenario for ucosp in this project?
(5:27:30 PM) bwinton: We get the user-submitted autoconfig working.
(5:27:34 PM) bwinton: With tests.
(5:27:44 PM) bwinton: And it makes it in to Thunderbird 3.1
(5:27:55 PM) ehenry5: where would the users submit their autoconfig info?
(5:28:02 PM) ehenry5: is that something that tucows was talking about?
(5:28:08 PM) bwinton: Not quite.
(5:30:03 PM) bwinton: So the grand vision is the user types in their email address. TB tries to get the config from the database. If it fails, TB makes some guesses and sees whether they work. If one of the guesses works, a button/dialog appears saying something like “Would you like to submit this info back to Mozilla Messaging to help other people on the same ISP?”, and if they click Yes, the config is sent back to our database.
(5:30:32 PM) ehenry5: okay
(5:30:52 PM) ehenry5: so, are you going to be working on the c++ side and we work on the python side?
(5:30:57 PM) bwinton: Tucows also wants to be able to make an HTTP call to add a new domain to our database when someone signs up for their email service.
(5:31:33 PM) bwinton: We’ll see. I think there is probably not enough work on the python side for everyone, so some of you will switch over to the client.
(5:32:02 PM) bwinton: (Which is really mainly javascript. After three and a half months, I think I’ve only made one change that touched a C++ file…)
(5:32:51 PM) ehenry5: interesting
(5:37:44 PM) ehenry5: so of the items you’ve talked about, what’s the priority?
(5:37:50 PM) ehenry5: er priorities…
(5:38:22 PM) bwinton: Tests first, cause if we don’t have those, we don’t know if it works or not.
(5:38:28 PM) ehenry5: right
(5:38:42 PM) bwinton: Then probably Andy’s fixes, cause they should be quick.
(5:39:17 PM) bwinton: And from there, we’ll see what the other requirements are. (I’m expecting those to take up the next couple of weeks at least.)
(5:40:04 PM) bwinton: (And hopefully after that, we’ll have some email from Tucows and DavidA, with more stuff to do.)
(5:40:11 PM) ehenry5: right on
(5:40:48 PM) ehenry5: so getting done for next week is any unit test or one specifically for ispdb (or django)?
(5:41:28 PM) bwinton: If you can run ispdb on your local machine, feel free to add a unit test to it.
(5:41:35 PM) ehenry5: okay
(5:41:43 PM) bwinton: If you can only run django, and have created a test app, write a unit test for that.
(5:41:58 PM) ehenry5: okay