Livre d'Or

So I bought an actually new-new laptop to take to college. It came with Windows11 OEM, and I started it up and checked that was working ok, and immediately felt mentally itchy and gross so I was pretty impatient to replace it with Ubuntu.

( progress with minor obstacles )

So broadly I'm proud of myself, I just went ahead and did things and searched up tutorials and problem-solving when it didn't go completely smoothly.

Mostly playing games has been so easy I hardly even noticed it.

( details )

I think the general conclusion is that searching for stuff via the app store, and then downloading it, just works by magic though I don't understand what's going on under the hood. But clicking links on webpages to download software results in files being put on my computer in some arbitrary location, and the next step is some kind of tacit knowledge that nobody ever bothers to explain.

Next steps:

Determine the file path in a way that can be entered into a terminal

Figure out search terms to find how to install software (from the command line?) once downloaded

Further investigate running Civ VI under Steam and Linux.

Oh gosh I got stalled on installing Ubuntu for four and a half years! But I'm not stalled any more, so I suppose I should feel good about that instead of bad about getting stuck.

( how it went )

A lot of the stuff I'd planned to do with initial install is completely redundant now. The sort of step-by-step guide for newbies I had in mind already exists on the main Ubuntu webpage. And I got to a fairly comfortable endpoint with only the most minor of hitches.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to learn to program, and everybody advised me that programming is much better if you have a computer that runs Linux than a Windows machine like I have. But trying to convert my netbook to Ubuntu proved an insurmountable obstacle. So I've spent a lot of time vaguely regretting that I'm not making any progress with programming, but being intimidated by the needing to switch OS part, and I've decided to start again with a clean sheet.

( getting ready )

After a couple of evenings of this, I have a hello world program that isn't careless about closing things after use. I don't know exactly what I'm going to need to write my HTML generator, but at least I know the general sort of shape of how to create files using Python on my own computer.

It's possible that my next step should be installing a bunch of utilities that make Windows suck less; jack suggested Git, which I'm relieved to know can be run locally as well as on a server. And I think I need a better terminal than the Windows default one, and possibly a more programmery text editor.

So this patch has a really unfortunate history; I started working on it last summer, I was all gung-ho enthusiastic about DW dev, felt comfortable with all the tools including GitHub, and was ready to have a go at delving into the actual code rather than what I've been doing up to now, which is just patching styles and themes. I struggled a bit with the learning curve, but I really felt like I was making progress. I had to redo the logic because it turned out that I'd misunderstood the spec of what I was supposed to be implementing, but that was fine, and helped me to improve my understanding of how DW works.

And then I got some review comments asking me to improve the appearance of the eventual HTML to be printed, but unfortunately that happened just at the beginning a few months of being really busy at work and abroad for a couple of weeks, which meant I lost momentum for actually fixing the cosmetic bits of the bug. Anyway I eventually managed to complete the required CSS fiddling, right in the middle of typhoon Haiyan, meaning that fu was understandably rather distracted from reviewing the tail end of low-priority patches, and I didn't exactly want to nag her about it, so my final version kind of languished until this week. During that time I didn't quite find the motivation to start a new bug, so by now I've forgotten most of the skills and knowledge I was starting to pick up last summer.

Anyway, the good news is that kareila did a Current Contributors post, where I saw that I hadn't committed anything since June last year. That prompted me to ask fu if she'd forgotten about the last bits of my patch, and she very kindly checked it over and merged it. The less good news is that I have picked just the moment to get back into dev when our bug tracker has died, making it hard to remember what was on my to-do list or search for bugs that will usefully stretch my meagre coding abilities. I don't want to let that block me, so maybe I'll go back to doing styles bugs for a bit, because at least they're documented in dreamscapes.

I'm a bit worried about this, really. Without a shadow of a doubt this is partly my fault; I could have prodded more, I could have got started on a different bug while I was waiting for code review, I could have documented stuff better rather than just waiting until final version was merged, which I kept hoping would be "soon". But I think it's also likely to be a problem for a lot of newbie devs, as evidenced in the Contributors list; only 5 people have committed code in 2014, and only 20 or so since I got derailed from dev work last summer.

( let me see what I can reconstruct of what I learned from this bug )

Anyway, here's what actually got committed: Bug 5041 Include comments search in S2 search module, which is the above plus creating a bunch of spans in the search form so that I could style it with CSS, and then some fairly crude CSS to make the search form reasonably non-ugly whether or not the tickybox is present and whether the form is displayed horizontally or vertically and how much space it has. For someone who spends a lot of time working on the pretty on DW I am a really bad web designer. But anyway, that bit was just fiddly, I pretty much already knew how to make each element its own CSS class or ID and then use trial and error until I get CSS that makes it look how I want it. But I am so very glad of the time we spent early in 2009 rationalizing the CSS for all the journal styles so that when I introduce a new feature I don't have to do this bit separately for every possible journal style on the site. And deeply grateful to ninetydegrees and momijizukamori for all their ongoing hard work in keeping that rational, consistent system in order in the five years since.

Three years since I touched DW dev, so I'm rusty as you could imagine. I decided to start with a simple colour theme, because at least I know S2 meaning that it would be a way of doing hello world and getting used to the workflow for submitting patches. I grabbed the top entry from dreamscapes, which happened to be four themes by rising. rising has excellent colour sense and enough experience with DW that his themes are generally almost ready to go with minimal tweaking, so that made it an easy starter bug for me.

As it happens, several things about the environment have changed over my long hiatus. The S2 layer editor has been tweaked so it's less user-hostile (I always test code in the layer editor first before I start changing theme files). DW's file structure has been moved around and rationalized a bit so it's more logical and easier to find the file to work with. The Wiki has ridiculously better documentation than what I was working with when I first started, including detailed style guidance so that code committed by different people, even newbies, will have the same structure, yay.

And... we have migrated from Mercurial to Git. I know a lot of people found it hard to adapt, so the fact I've forgotten everything I ever knew about submitting patches probably actually stood me in good stead. ( excruciating detail )

The thing that was frustrating about this was not being able to work out what I'd done wrong! I'm not worried about making a mistake, that's obviously going to happen when I'm learning the system for the first time. What I found difficult was that the thing I did wrong, whatever it was, was untraceable, and most especially that it was putting the zombie commit into all my branches, even though I was being ultra, ultra careful to do everything right when I created the branches. However, everybody in IRC was incredibly supportive and helpful, so I'm not going to give up trying to learn version control because of that set-back.