Marc Palmer

I’m extremely busy at the moment with work projects, and this has meant I’ve got a backlog of Grails plugin updates to tackle.

There’s a number of tweaks to Navigation Plugin, improvements and fixes for Functional Testing (G-Func), as well as some bug fixes for the Authentication plugin.

I’m not sure when I will get time to do these, but they are on my radar. Sadly one has to earn money and plugins don’t generate any (directly). I really want to work on these things but you know how it goes. Good will doesn’t pay the bills!

I was toying with the idea of “crowd-funding” updates to plugins, for specific iterations of plugins that users are willing to pay small sums for in order to get it turned out quicker. I think the model could work… eg 100 people pay $10 to get a new iteration of G-Func released. It could be a new model for open source..

The tools for collecting crowd-funding revenue are already out there for fundraising projects.

Anyway I hope to knock out a new nav plugin iteration in the next week or so, ditto for G-Func. I just can’t promise it

I had a wonderful easter break with my family, mainly consisting of being outside in the generous gardens we are lucky to have – weeding and planting to create a new and interesting garden from the overgrown mess that was left by the previous owners.

I find I can get very passionate about creating a woodland garden. I love woodlands and trying to plant the correct plants to thrive in the deep and partial shade whilst also producing some form of crop or wildlife benefit is really important to me. The book Plants for A Future is invaluable for this – as soon as you start thinking that every space can be filled with a productive plant, you have a completely different view.

I’ve been programming commercially for about 16 years now, and I have to say that if I could make a living being outside and working with nature and plants I’d happily drop it all tomorrow. There are parts of programming/consulting I absolutely love – creating new architectures, UI analysis and design, solving real business problems for clients.

However there is the insidious addictive quality of computers that has kept me in front of a screen for what is probably 5 or so years of that last 16 years since I’ve been programming. That much of my time sitting down typing. Its really ridiculous when you think about it. Think of the self-sufficient permaculture woodland I could have created in that time.

That is surely awful, and I think if I could engage myself in other constructive co-operative activities outside and the mental challenges those can produce, I would not look back to computers for occupation!

I do find it easier and easier to unplug these days, and my happiness has increased tremendously. At weekends I rarely touch my iPhone or laptop any more, and I barely use email now.

We all need to reconnect with the people and land around us.

Well it took a lot longer than we hoped for various reasons, but the “stake in the ground” 0.1 release of the open source grails CMS called “Weceem” is now available.

Details are available here

The release has known issues and we have lots of plans already for 0.2 and 0.3 releases, including complete back-end UI rewrite in 0.2. This release really is just to put it out there and get us on the road to future releases now that the app is hosting its own website at www.weceem.org

Thanks to the jCatalog AG team – Stephan Albers, July Antonicheva, Sergei Shushkevich and other contributors such as Glen Smith who have all been working on the app on and off for quite some time. An internal project that has morphed into an open source project which will see continued development