After four weeks, the 3.0.3 bugfix+polish release is out. It's definitely the release I'm most proud of. 3.0.2 was great, and 3.0.3 is a really polished 3.0.2 with minor improvements. And reaching 15,000 downloads this month does rather put things in a happier light.
1000 Issues
30 May
For some reason, I really like seeing high numbers of issues logged. In KnowledgeTree, hit 1000 yesterday. Of those 1000 (and a bit now), 780 are closed, 135 are items we will implement (open), and the rest are as yet undecided (uncomfirmed). Of the 135 to-be-implemented issues, 43 are marked as bugs (although they're usually cosmetic or "non-functional requirements"), 47 are improvements, and 42 are new feature requests.
It seems Jo'burg's libraries will soon have Internet access, as well as career guidance software. They don't seem too far in the planning, so this may be an opportunity to ensure that the software is open source (or at least portable), and perhaps the library computers use Linux and/or other open source software...
First KnowledgeTree bounty
28 May
One of our KnowledgeTree users has posted a bounty for extended import functionality, grabbing metadata from CSV files. Cool!
SourceForge.net Subversion
27 May
Earlier this week, I moved KnowledgeTree's OSS version control repository hosted on SourceForge.net from CVS to Subversion. After a lot of planning and testing, it ultimately could have come down to pressing a few buttons on the SF.net admin pages. In our case, I did a little special magic on my own, but it was still as simple as uploading my dump and pressing a few buttons. Well done SF.net guys!
I can't recall how I got there, but I found myself reading Kathy Sierra's
Don't give in to feature demands!. Which recalled to mind Joel Spolsky's
Set Your Priorities(I'm not as taken by Joel in general, but this one is spot-on). I guess this is one of those habit things - the advice is easy to understand when read, but it takes practise before you're in the habit of noticing it when it is going on.
Interesting job at Canonical
24 May
I was quite interested when I read Mark on growing the Ubuntu team and the skills and roles that are going to be required to build the sort of community-corporate mix Canonical is attempting. They've added two Bazaar positions on the Ubuntu jobs page. One of them is a community advocate for Bazaar - it sounds a lot like what I was talking about earlier.
So far, but yet...
21 May
One of the things I noticed during my trip to LinuxWorld in Johannesburg was how far racial integration has come in South Africa. It's one of those things that make me go all warm inside - it's like watching a couple newly fallen in love.
Milestones
20 May
I've come to think that recurring events are quite useful as milestones by which to compare or even rate yourself. LinuxWorld this year is a good example (and this probably isn't of interest to many, if any, people other than me).
Short form: Both Futurex (general IT) and LinuxWorld Johannesburg were smaller this year, and there were less people around. This, however, meant that we had an opporunity to talk to a much larger percentage of people, and the people who were visiting formed an even more interesting spectrum of interest and experience.