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Gump Sysadmin

The last few days I've been playing Sysadmin for one of the new IBM xSeries 345's that will be used as a dedicated Gump Server.  And having a blast.

Gump is a social experiment that I started in 1999.  It's primary goal was to see if I could get people to talk to one another about versioning dependencies, backwards compatibility and integration.

bench

Gump started out life as a shell script and ran on my machine and  developerworks.  Maintaining the shell scripts became an issue, so I wrote a front end in XSLT that translated XML descriptors to shell scripts.  The output was a bit less ugly.  I even created an icon using svg and vim.

Eventually, I learned first hand the wisdom of Sunir's corollary's.  For Gump to grow, I had to step back.  This wasn't easy for me.  But before I let go, I initated a rewrite in Python.  Nicola Ken Barozzi pitched in and in a short while we had the beginnings of a GUI.

Adam Jack picked up where we left off, and made it work.  The new output is much prettier, complete with font tags and spacer gifs (blech).

This is only one of the ways that the design has diverged from some of the principles that I had envisioned.  More notably, Adam doesn't seem to have the same fetish I have for completely being able to bootstrap the system from source, which I guess is another way of saying that he is more pragmatic.  The thoughts of Gump as a personal build tool seem to have atrophied, but look relatively easy to resurrect.

I'm now trying to figure out how to effectively reengage in development.  For now, I'm contributing to design discussions (colloquially known as RT or Random Thoughts), but I am really itching to code.

Mmmm.  Python.

Bah. Pragmatism sucks. (And so does <table>-based layout, <font>-tags and spacer GIFs.) Everything else looks nice, though! :-)

Posted by Asbjørn Ulsberg at

Grrr... I suck too, obviously. Those tags should apparently not be escaped.

Posted by Asbjørn Ulsberg at

Heh.

Asbjørn: this blog even has a preview function.  And even requires you to use it.

;-)

Posted by Sam Ruby at

I do remember someone doing a CSS only skin for
Forrest.
I forget who and where.

Posted by Nick Chalko at

Gumping

I am glad that Sam Ruby has been having fun administering to Gump's needs on Brutus, 'cos it sure is nice to have that IBM box, called Brutus. Wow, it flies! Full Gumpage -- soup-to-nuts -- in two hours! That,...... [more]

Trackback from Neukalog

at

Sorry Adam (Neukalog)
My server csm.chalko.com  is down.  It will be back tonight.
Yesterday my house was being inspected, and the inspector stepped through the ceiling.  Luckily he was over the closet and was not hurt since he stepped on my server at the top of the closet. 
A repairman is patching the ceiling tonight. Bummer I had 179 days uptime.

Posted by Nick Chalko at


Asbjørn: this blog even has a preview function.  And even requires you to use it.

Heh. I know. But it was early in the morning, and I didn't realize what I'd written until it was too late (the post button was already clicked). My body acts faster than my brain until 11 am. Then it acts quicker until 6pm, and from there my body and brain are almost synchronized. ;-)

Posted by Asbjørn Ulsberg at

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