Matthew Revell

I’ve been playing with Python and Desktop Couch over the past few days, primarily as a learning exercise.

Why Desktop Couch? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

1. I’m writing a command-line podcast catcher and one of the main things that annoys me about other podcast catchers is that I end up downloading the same stuff if I move from one machine to another. CouchDB’s replication can solve that.
2. It seems more useful to learn to use Desktop Couch than to create my own file format to save my podcast catcher’s data.

What is Desktop Couch?

My understanding is that Desktop Couch is a project to make Apache’s CouchDB attractive to the developers of desktop applications, thereby giving those applications a common way of storing and replicating data.

Aq, one the people behind Desktop Couch, often gives the example of using a Couch database to store your web browser’s bookmarks. That way, if all your web browsers also speak to that database, you can share the bookmarks between them and, perhaps more interestingly, you can replicate your database to your other machines or the cloud and have your bookmarks on other computers, mobile devices, wherever.

Unlike SQL-based databases, CouchDB is not a relational database but a document-oriented database. A very simple relational database might have two tables:

• Table 1: first_name, last_name, favourite_colour
• Table 2: colour_name, rgb_hex_value, pantone_number

In table 1, favourite_colour would actually be a link to one of the entries in table 2.

In CouchDB, and other document-oriented databases such as Lotus Notes, you’d instead have a single document for each person that included all the info. So, no links elsewhere, just the info right there and then.

I’m no database expert but this is much simpler and, if you can get away with it, simple seems to be a good thing. I’ll leave it to other people to talk about why Desktop Couch, CouchDB and use of document-oriented databases are good ideas.

So, Desktop Couch provides a Python library that gives you access to Couch.

What I’m doing with Desktop Couch

I’m going to write here about my experience of writing a simple app that uses Desktop Couch. There’s not a great deal on the web, right now, about Desktop Couch so I’m hoping this will help me to work out what I’m doing and maybe provide a reference for others.

One thing to note, I’m pretty much learning Python at the same time and I’m not a developer, so I may write things that seem crazy or naive. Well, if I do, be kind

I hate our Freeview digital TV recorder. It’s made by Thompson. Here it is on Amazon. It fails on so many levels.

At first, it seems to work okay: wow, it records two channels at once, it records a whole series with just a couple of clicks. Even the minor quibbles, such as not being able to start watching a recording a specific point, are forgivable. And you can, mostly, get rid of the Top Up TV crap that no one wants.

Then, things start to go wrong but, y’know, it was so cool before that you deny there’s a problem.

Then, when you notice that it has failed to record a few episodes of your favourite programme — and it only tells you that by displaying a message in an obscure menu somewhere — you get angry. “Why? It was going so well! Why are you doing this to me, box?”

Then, you find yourself bargaining with it: “Come on, I don’t mind if you miss Deep Space 9, just make sure you record Wallander.”

When you realise that, despite it offering to automatically record the second half of the film that’s shown after the news, it hasn’t done anything of the sort, then you enter depression.

Finally, you accept that this is actually one of the buggiest, least reliable consumer electronics items you’ve ever come across and you take the bugger back to Argos.

Lily was born at 6.15pm yesterday. We’re still thinking of a middle name

Flicking through the TV channels this morning I spotted a surprising message at the bottom of the screen:

Free Boston Celtics Ubuntu t-shirt

Turns out that their coach has been using the word “ubuntu” as an inspirational chant for his players and, following the team’s success, their fans have taken up the word too.

Not being a basketball follower, it looks like I’m a touch late to this. CNet has more.

I’ve been struggling to get a Remote Desktop connection from my Ubuntu laptop to Xubuntu running on my Viglen MPC-L.

foxmajik provides a simple solution on the Ubuntu Forums: ditch vino in favour of x11vnc. Works a treat

I saw the phrase “stolen from Carmen” and it led me to write this. It’s pure fiction, very rough and I wouldn’t usually post it here but I quite enjoyed writing it. It hasn’t benefited from editing or more than just a few minutes in a text editor.

Last night, when the rain made bubbles in your windscreen glass, I tried so hard not to look.

Motorway lights flashed amber as we passed; gave me seconds-long glimpses of the face I’d so long dreamt I’d wake to. Your hand on the gear-stick — shaking with the vibration of that dying car — pulled at me. But touching you — even there, alone — would have too soon shattered our odd little truce.

Songs in minor keys played on the radio, drew tears across my cheeks. No matter: as I counted down the miles I knew I’d always hold close the memories of that, our final journey.

Soon, we came to the sea and my thoughts turned to that one night we’d spent together. I swallowed hard as I remembered the shivers your fingers sent through me, the ache you nurtured. Those few moments — stolen from Carmen — would be the barrier to any normal future I could hope for.

Out of the car window I saw the bridge and felt the seconds slipping away; yet again I was falling towards something, out of control. You stopped, I opened the door; could’ve sworn I heard the ping of a submarine from beneath the waves. You stared directly ahead but I saw it: that quiver of your eyelid meant more to me than anything you might have said.

Within seconds, you were nothing more than tail-lights and memories.

After seeing yet another friend get an iPhone I decided it was time I got hold of a phone that would give me email on the move and something more akin to a usable web browsing experience.

The iPhone wasn’t an option for me: I don’t run Windows or Mac OS, I didn’t want to pay a lump sum up-front and I want to be able to use my phone as a modem for my laptop.

I’ve only ever really been happy with Nokia phones and have heard great things about the N95. For the past six months I’ve been using the Series 60 3rd edition Nokia 6120 and it’s great. Three offered me the N95 — at the £15 I’m paying now each month — so it seemed I’d be getting more of a good thing but for the same price.

So far, I’m quite disappointed with the Nokia N95. It’s slower than the 6120, by a noticeable margin, and it has hung more times in the past day than the 6120 has in the past six months. The screen seems less crisp, the 5 megapixel camera oddly appears to produce fuzzier images than the 6120′s 2 megapixel camera and by Baal is it large.

The interface is clunky in comparison to my hopes, the iPhone and, yes, even my 6120. The battery life seems poor. The wifi support — a major selling point for me — can’t handle DHCP with my Linksys router.

So, the good: the larger screen is welcome and the GPS seems to work (although I haven’t left the house with it yet). There is more but none of which I couldn’t have had with the 6120. Opera Mini, for example, provides a better web browser than the standard S60 browser but I could have had it with the 6120.

Perhaps what I really wanted was unlimited mobile data so I could get email on the move and not a new phone.

I really do want to find more positive to say about the N95 but, having come from the 6120, it hasn’t yet wowed me; I s’ppose I’ve got 18 months to find it.

Tomorrow I start a new run of the Wolverhampton Politics Show on WCR FM!

I have a new time slot — 8pm to 9pm Fridays — but it’s still 101.8 FM and wcrfm.com to find the stream.

This week my guests are the Conservative Councillor Carl Husted and Wolverhampton South West Liberal Democrats Chair Colin Ross.

Subscribe to the podcast if you’d like to listen but can’t tune in at the time.

Each month, we in the Launchpad team make a new release.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve learnt some of what works — and what doesn’t — when announcing our releases. I thought I’d share some of that here.

Style and content

Keep it:

• Relevant: announce only what is of interest to the majority of your readers and what they can use “out of the box”. Direct your most ardent readers to the relevant milestone page in your bug tracker’ for the full details. Consider direct communication with those groups who are affected by a specific change. Ignore things that help you, the developer, rather than the reader.
• Personal: “The user” is not an abstract: they’re the person reading your text. Speak directly to them and show them how each change affects them. Use examples.
• Easily understood: don’t assume too much of your reader. Give them enough background to understand the problem you’re describing and your solution.
• Well ordered: start with the exciting, most relevant, stuff. Assume your reader has a limited attention span because, y’know, they do.
• Enticing: your readers are lazy and promiscuous. Suck them in by trailing the highlights in your headline.
  • Bad: ACME releases a RoadRunnerStop v1.2
  • Better: RoadRunnerStop 1.2: now easier to catch your lunch
  • Better: Catch more road runners with ACME RoadRunnerStop 1.2
• Benefit-led: tell your reader how you’ve fixed their life.
  • Good: Save time uploading branches to Launchpad
  • Not so good: Launchpad now supports Bazaar stacked branches
  • Bad: Launchpad will no longer OOPS when you attempt to alter a conjoined slave bug-task
• Plain-speaking: your readers aren’t stupid but you should err towards commonly used words and shorter sentences with fewer clauses.

Format

Launchpad release announcements have four parts, in order of importance:

• headline/subject line
• introduction
• detail of each change
• supplemental information: where to find more detail, other announcements, etc.

Examples

Take a look at the Launchpad releases page for some examples of our past release announcements.

My favourite Liverpudlian living in Sweden, Patrick Finch, is moving on from Sun Microsystems to look after the European side of Mozilla’s Firefox marketing.

I mention this for two reasons:

• his excellent blog has moved to patrickfinch.com
• it’s the ideal opportunity to remember the classic Silicon.com headline “Peter Fuchs off to TheBrain.com“.

Patrick’s Sun blog was home to insightful and incisive comment on the free software world and I expect his new blog will continue in that way. Congrats on the new job Paddy!