Saturday Bleahs

I was rather ill Saturday morning. I normally don’t drink at all, and hangovers are never good for me. I woke up with a crushing headache compounded by caffeine withdrawal. I showered and ran downstairs and gobbled down some excellent coffee from the hotel breakfast. That stopped the worst of the headache but I still was not at my best.

Plone Fun
Now I got to build on the lessons learned during the other parts of this trip. I haven’t been happy with the KSS documentation for a number of technical reasons, and I wanted some practice. For reference, KSS is the Plone AJAX engine, which allows Plone to do things of the same sort as gmail or flickr. So what I did was create a new tutorial for KSS, complete with a demo package.

I was joined by Carsten Rebbein and we quickly found a good pattern of effort. I did most of the writing and we shared the technical tasks. We used a buildout script to generate the demo package, and leveraged in my new Zope 3 skills to build the package. We each cooked up an KSS/AJAX demo, and integrated it into the tutorial.

Alas, I wasn’t at my best so the first half of the day I was lagging. Compounding that was when I was plugging my Mac OS X into a power socket and smacked my head hard into an obstacle. Ouch!

We didn’t quite finish the tutorial, but we got a lot done.

Keep in mind we started at 10 am or so and ended about 8 pm. 10 good hours of work!

Finding Friends
Near the end of the day Florian Freisdorf showed up back from Munich, Germany. He had been in the Zope 3 class but had to return to his university for several days. He is an academic on the Phd track and very smart. He didn’t have a place to stay yet, and would either stay in the youth hostel or find a hotel downtown.

I bumped into Jens Klein again. I hadn’t realized it, but he was the Austrian mastermind behind ArchGenXML! This is an incredible Python tool that converts UML diagrams into a working Plone application. This guy is really smart and the surprising thing is that the way he does his abstract thinking is amazingly like how I do it. His next big project, Genesis, is very interesting and I’m wondering if maybe I should get involved.

Dinner Again
Chris and Reed were tired and ate close to Albergo del Golfo. I decided I really wanted to eat at Pizzaria Port’alba, the world’s oldest pizza restaurant. Florian, Jens, and Carsten joined me there for food and excellent discussion. I selected the house special, which was dough, sauce, and muscles and clams in the shell. It was brilliant. Not quite as good as Pizza Sorbilla, but very close.

Sightseeing?
As you can see, I’ve had no time for sightseeing. I keep meaning to get up early and wander down to the harbor which is just a few blocks away. Alas, the pace of my journey here is too fast and too long each day for me to find that time. Oh well, I shall have to squeeze that all into my last day here, which is entirely dedicated to sightseeing.