UI Ideas for Managing Roles and Capabilities

Liz and I have been busy discussing, and here’s what we’ve come up with initially:

DrProject web administration diagram

Here is the state diagram of the current DrProject web administration interface:

Reading books

In the past week, Greg has silently put 2 books on my desk:

“Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces“. Carolyn Snyder. ISBN 1-55860-870-2.
“Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering“. Robert L. Glass. ISBN 0-321-11742-5.

I’ve read through most of each book now.

Singleton metaclass example

Here’s a metaprogramming example that I conceived, involving the use of a metaclass to implement the singleton property.
class Counter(object):

    global_count = 0
    count_by_class = {}

    @staticmethod
    def count(obj):
        cls = obj.__class__
        class_count = Counter.count_by_class.get(cls, 0)
        result = (Counter.global_count, class_count)
        Counter.global_count += 1
        Counter.count_by_class[cls] = class_count + 1
        return result

class CountedObject(object):

    def __init__(self):
        print “Creating instance [...]

Core components in DrProject

I will attempt to explain DrProject’s core components, which are depended on by the rest of the components. Copious amounts of metaprogramming are used, so beware of your sanity. Some relevant reference resources will be mentioned at the end.
Class drproject.core.ComponentMeta: The metaclass of Component. This ensures that all subclasses of Component follow the singleton pattern. [...]

Bug fixes (2008-05-15-Thu)

The following are the bug fixes I completed on Thursday May 15th:

[4804] fixes the behaviour of the size formatter when asked format a size of exactly 512 bytes. It’s a pretty subtle bug, which I only managed to catch by luck by testing boundary cases. (512 is a magic constant in the function.)
[4807] fixes #1421. [...]

Tools I’m using

Every trade has a set of tools for getting the job done efficiently, and programming is no exception. These are the tools that I am using to explore and develop DrProject:

Ubuntu: DrProject works best on Linux
Eclipse 3.2: My text editor
PyDev for Eclipse: IMO, the most useful feature is the ability to instantly jump to the [...]

Bonjour, world!

Welcome to QZ’s DrProject blog. Here I will be publishing my adventures in understanding and modifying the DrProject project management software.
Over this summer of 2008, I will be improving the administrative interface of DrProject for better aesthetics and a smoother workflow.
What’s up with the name of this blog, you ask? Why, it’s “QZ DrP” [...]