michael schurter

Thanks to Ben Ramsey for live blogging a presentation on Google Code.  Google Code is SourceForge done by Google so its simpe, fast, and efficient.  (Or so they promise.)
I’m moving OpenIT over to it right now as a test.  It detected that a SourceForge project of the same name already exists and allows you to e-mail the owner.  If the owner allows you to use the name, supposedly you can create the project on Google Code.

However, when I tried it I got a “502 Server Error”.  Looks like they already match SourceForge’s stability.

I’m moving to Peoria, Illinois! My amazing wife Samantha got a job with the First United Methodist Church, and we decided to move. I’m going to continue working for Synthesys, but I’m looking for new clients in the Peoria area.

I’d love to work with public schools and open source software. However, since I have experience with rural electric cooperatives (from an IT perspective), I’ll probably be trying to make contacts in that sector as well.

And for you OpenIT users out there: a little funding would go a long way! Since I may not be working directly with a client who uses OpenIT anymore, I may have even less time to devote to it. I think OpenIT has a lot of potential, so please contact me if you’re interested in seeing the pace of OpenIT development accelerate.

While I should be focusing on marketing, right now I’m going through the drama of selling my home and buying another. If you’re interested in a nice little house in Greenville, Illinois, let me know!

SourceForge.net finally adds yet another feature that its free and open source fork, GForge, has had for some time: Subersion support!

I’ll be migrating OpenIT as soon as 2.2 is released.

OpenIT is actually the last project I work on that uses CVS, so it looks like I’ll be able to remove TortoiseCVS. Thank you TortoiseCVS for making CVS bareable to use, and for laying the groundwork for TortoiseSVN.

I’ve been keeping up a good pace of bug fixing in OpenIT thanks to user bug reports. I’m really getting bitter about using MySQL 4.0, especially after we’ve started using PostgreSQL for a new project at Synthesys.

Views? Foreign Key Constraints? Cascading UPDATEs and DELETEs? I’ve had to implement these in PHP! Lord have mercy on my soul. While I appreciate how easy MySQL is to install and use, after using PostgreSQL for just a short while I’m ready to drop MySQL and never look back.

Snuck out a new development version of OpenIT even though I’ve been swamped at work lately. Work this morning included watching lots of progress bars which lends itself well to bug fixing OpenIT on a seperate machine. A SourceForge.net user, hofrichter, submitted lots of very specific bugs complete with line numbers and even a few fixes. I love users like this, although no one ever sends patches - just line numbers, comments, and the occassional code snippet.

Perhaps this is a side effect of PHP being so easy to hack: it takes longer to generate & e-mail a patch then it does to open the source and fix a problem.

Oh and last night I finished reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris which was wonderful and incredibly funny. It was a Christmas gift from my wife and greatly appreciated after spending the last 3 months analyzing a C# textbook for the class I was teaching.

On Thursday I helped Tony upload the new Synthesys Solutions home page. We replaced our old custom built PHP site with Drupal. There are still a few kinks to work out - such as not mentioning OpenIT! - but for the most part I’m excited to finally have a powerful CMS driving our home page.