Having just read the (very) last post on Joel on Software I decided to follow Joels advice to talk about more than just my *product*. I do that occasionally anyway and every time I am surprised how many hits posts unrelated to ZenMagick (but related to programming) actually get.

But today to something completely different: Chess. If you’ve browsed this site you might have found to Greasemonkey scripts that I’ve written that implement some sort of a practice board for online correspondence chess. I do play Correspondence Chess on two sites: chessworld.net and atlanticgames.net.

When I started, both sites where about even with features, perhaps with a slight advantage to chessworld.net. Now things have evolved a bit and chessworld.net is clearly richer in both game quality (ie. stronger opponents) and features. [Not that I need particularly strong opponents!]

One of my favourite thing, though, is to watch KingsCrusher, the guy running chessworld.net, play and comment! 5 minute chess.

If you don’t know what 5 minute Chess is, it’s Chess with a clock where each player has 5 minutes for all his moves. Together with his mostly insightful comments, watching KingsCrusher play International and even Grand Masters is a lot of fun, so if you want to improve your blitz and bullet chess, you should really try this.

Since I started using git (and github), i’ve struggled with the fact there wasn’t a single client that could matchexisting svn or hg clients.

I tried TortoiseGit – hoping that it would be up to par with TortoiseSVN, but that was not the case (I thingk that would have been somewhere around version 1.2.??).
So, I ended up using mysysgit like most of the other windows users, looking at the number of posts about that particular topic.

Then, recently I thought it might be interesting to see how TortoiseGit has improved. And I was impressed. Pretty much everything (at least the stuff I use) seems to be working. However, there still was the issue with using ssh. I didn’t really have the patience to get to the bottom right away, so ended up using TortoiseGit locally and mysysgit (bash) to push and pull.

Today I did some more research and while there is lots of stuff about how to download putty et al, there isn’t really a lot about TortoiseGit. Then, there is also the issue that the default is plink instead of openssl, which means different keystore structure etc.

Eventually, I figured I  should perhaps look at the help – and lo and behold – there it was. All I needed was:

1. To use puttygen.exe (comes with TortoiseGit) to convert my openssl private key to a .ppk file
2. Configure the remote with the newly created .ppk file

And now there isn’t a single reason to use anything else! After using TortoiseSVN for so long I feels instantly at home. Beside the push and pull I can use it pretty much the same like SVN. It’s perhaps not that simple, but it makes migrating from SVN to git a lot less painful.

I’ve got some ZenMagick money to spend on Google Adwords. It’s a voucher that expires March 31, so there still a bit of time. Perhaps I’ll get 0.9.9 ready until then and we could try to do ’some’ adverts in combination with the release. Any suggestions welcome…

I finally felt brave enough to release ZenMagick 0.9.8. I think it is a good time to do a release, seeing that there are so many new ideas coming from users and developers.

As usual there are release notes and also the beautified changelog. I think I’ve written enough about what is is in the release and so I’ll leave it at that for now.

One note about pugins, though. If you feel that a plugin is really missing (not all plugins have been released yet), drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

The freshmeat announcement will have to wait until tomorrow or perhaps even Tuesday, but I am sure will do it. Other things still to do are updating the apidocs (done!) and the demo store (which is still on 0.9.6, I think…) (done, except for the pretty links plugin)

I finally managed to repair the database and get the wiki running again. Should there be still issues, please let me know.

The wiki is currently unavailable due to some database issues. Unfortunately, I can’t login to the management panel as the ISP decided to blacklist my IP!
I’ll write a update once things are back to normal. Sorry for any trouble this should cause.

There are tons of articles about this topic, but as usual things are slightly different for for about just everyone writing about it.

The most helpful resource has been a post from Jeff Tchang about the very same thing. I’ve followed the instructions for Windows (XP) and with some small differences things do seem to work now – yay!

The differences were:

• ssh github.com does not work as described but gives an error ‘Permission denied (publickey)‘
• The git clone URL that finally worked was using ssh.github.com, but without the leading ssh://, so for example: git clone git@ssh.github.com:443/DerManoMann/zc-base.git

I haven’t actually tried to push anything via that connection – so far pulling was all I needed.

One of the things on my todo list for ZenMagick is to review the different types of config/option/setting formats used. Right now there are:

• plain PHP with static code
  This is handled via the loader and the most prominent special cases here are local.php files which are fine, though
• PHP code without the <?phph ?> tags
  Used for the database mappings – this should/could be nicer I guess, in particular since it might get cached as serialized array anyway
• list of method calls in a single global function
  Done for the sacs and url mappings. These could be a single array and perhaps should be. However, it would be nice to have a simple format that can easily be parsed

So, what do I want/need? .ini fileformat is too simple as there is some hierarchical data, although not too deep. Some nesting would be good too.

Of course, XML might be an idea, however I do not have any experience with XML and PHP and do not know what performance is like.

Any ideas?

I have started cleaning up domains/subdomains in my realm to get ready to move my ISP.
Right now this blog, for example, is hosted in Germany. While this was convenient for a long time it is just not that practical any more.
There is the chance of some outages but if anyone experiences longer downtime, please let me know.

I think I’ve complained before about the pain of creating a file release on sourceforge. While I can understand the motivation behind the design, it’s still a big pain, especially updating the processor and file type for each plugin!

So, today I finally spend some time puttng together a small greasemonkey script to make life easier. it’s still a but crude, but works well enough for my purposes.
What it does is the following:

1. Iterate over all select elements and pick the ones named processor_id and type_id,
2. if not already selected select ‘Platform independent‘ and ‘.zip‘,
3. if the dropdown was modified also modify the table row (set background to some red),
4. and also add a target to the form to allow submitting forms to a new tab to avoid having to reload the page for each submit

Admittedly, that’s all rather specific for my needs but on the off-chance that someone might find it useful – here it is.