Asymptomatic

Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.

The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.

The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.

So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more

The people at the Habari Project have recently released version 0.4 of Habari. If you don't usually read my blog, then you might not know that I help write this software and that the software is what runs this site.

Following up on the 0.4 release, I wrote a kind of "manifesto" for what we need to accomplish for Habari 0.5, and then I read the whole thing into the computer so that you could just listen to it. Lucky you, fun for me. Enjoy.

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In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.

Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you've just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don't go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven't put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta's car out when we go out for family trips.)

In any case, my desire was to take a PC to the Starbucks or some other WiFi-enabled location, turn on, and work for an hour or two in a different locale. I looked over my notebook options....