Originally posted over at the Launchpad blog.

For the last million years¹ or so I've been working on a cool new feature for Launchpad Bugs: an inline, AJAXified, asynchronous dupe finder.

For quite some time now people have encountered timeouts or long response times when trying to file bugs, particularly when they enter a long bug summary or the project that they're filing the bugs on has a lot of bugs through which Launchpad has to search in order to be able to find some possible duplicates. The upshot was that whenever a timeout occurred people were unable to file a bug and would have to back up and start again. Needless to say, this was frustrating for all involved.

The new inline dupefinder, which you'll now find on the "Report a bug" page of any project in Launchpad (when viewed on edge.launchpad.net) is designed to stop this from being a problem, or at least to reduce the problem to a more manageable level and stop it from getting in peoples' way. It does this in two ways:

1. The inline list of duplicates is much quicker to render than a full Launchpad page.
2. If the search for duplicates times out for some reason you'll still be able to file a bug.

Here's the catch: we need your help. Launchpad's development cycle this month is very short due to the approaching year-end holiday period, so we need to get as much testing done on this as possible. Check out the dupe finder, see if it works for you and, most importantly, report a bug if it doesn't. 

One last thing: at the time of writing, the inline dupe finder only works for projects (like Launchpad Bugs), not for packages or project groups. We'll hopefully be enabling it for project groups today and with a bit of luck for packages, too. We started off with projects only because it's the simplest implementation of the concept and it gives us a good base to test from.

Thanks in advance for your help. Let's make Launchpad awesome together!

¹ This might be an exaggeration

In bullet-point form, because I'm not capable of anything else right now.

• Banshee is being an arse on Karmic on my desktop machine. Can't figure out why. It freezes up when playing big files (podcasts are particularly affected by this), plays too fast sometimes (so it sounds like I'm fast-forwarding through songs) and other times just crashes for no apparent reason.
• So, I've switched back to Amarok in the mean time, though I don't particularly like Amarok 2, and the way its UI behaves is irritating to me at the moment.
• I've more-or-less, bar some work for the reviewer, fixed bug 471974 which should mean that bugs with lots of subscribers shouldn't time out any more. Hurrah for asynchronicity.
• People keep marking as favourites old photos of mine on Flickr, from the days before I considered myself worthy of having people in front of my lens. Not that I don't appreciate it, but I'd rather people liked the newer stuff.
• I had a crisis of confidence last night (again; how boring you must think me) about photography, mostly, and where I think I want to be. I've made peace - for now - with that particular demon; I don't know quite where I want to go but I think I know some of the things I want to do on the way.
• I've been playing a bit with Tumblr today. I quite like it's simple interface, and I suspect I'd use something like that quite a lot for things bigger-than-a-tweet-but-smaller-than-a-blog-post. Haven't quite worked out how to fit it in with what I do though; maybe aggregating everything together through FeedBurner is the way to go.
• I finished reading Michael Moorcock's Gloriana last night. Good book but didn't really grab me all that much. Somehow it just didn't quite sit right with me, and I don't know why.
• Started reading The Lies of Locke Lamora today, for the second time (I never finished it the first time round because I foolishly left the book on a plane in Schoenefeld Airport in Berlin). It's just as good as I remember.

Anyway, tired, can't think, going to do something that requires no brain.

1. Reviewed the first community contribution to Launchpad, from the omnipresent William Grant.

And it was awesome, and it was fun. I think I'm going to like this open source malarkey.

It seems to have been a week of minor annoyances. Particularly with regard to this website. For some bizarre and as yet unknown reason the VM upon which this site resides keeps losing track of time, by up to ten hours. The upshot of this - and I haven't been able to track down exactly why yet but it's either Django's DateTimeFields or, more likely, PostgreSQL's datetime handling - is that every time you try to access a blog post by date you get a big fat 404. I'm starting to get the distinct feeling that I'm going to have to re-image the machine at some point, but I'm loathe to do that unless there's no way to fix whatever it is that's going wrong.

Other minor annoyances have mostly been self-related. I've spent most of the week working on some cool new features for Launchpad but, due to the fact that we're in code freeze at the moment because this is Launchpad 2.2.4 release week, I haven't been able to land anything. Add to that the usual frustration that comes with doing anything that requires a particularly intricate piece of UI work and you find me feeling not unlike I've repeatedly smashing myself on the head with a potato masher.

On the other hand, doing all this cool Launchpad Javascript work has given me a new appreciation for just how much fun Javascript can be when done right. I've tended to avoid Javascript most of the time because I found it non-intuitive and, coming from a background of object-oriented languages, a bit weird. You see, Javascript's a prototype-based language, which when observed in a certain way makes it look as though the developers were adding object orientation as an afterthought and, worse, going the wrong way about doing it.

But whether that's true or not (and I have no idea whether it is) the simple fact is that you can't observe Javascript as an object-oriented language because it isn't one, at least not in the purest sense. If you lose that particular conceit and actually treat it as what it is then you fairly quickly realise that:

• Javascript is extremely good at what it does - that's why it's been around for so long and hasn't been superseded by anything remotely convincing (and don't go saying Flash here because if you do I'll reach into the internet and slap you).
• Most of the problems with Javascript are due to inconsistencies in different browsers' JS engines - which is why doing anything with IE7 and Firefox is only marginally less painful that hitting yourself in the nuts with a lump hammer.

Anyway, all this fooling around with Javascript, fun as it's been, has led me to thinking about how to include it in my blog engine (because if there's technology you've no choice but to use it, right? Yeah, that's going to end well). I've got some ideas - many of which include using the code provided by the awesome LAZR-JS library, which in turn uses YUI 3. I wasn't a fan of YUI to begin with - it's big and complicated and more heavyweight than I need for most things - but after two weeks of solid YUI work I've come to really like it.

So, watch this space for news of things that I'm trying to do. You probably won't notice them at first because high on my list of things to do is write a better interface for blogging rather than using the existing Django admin interface. Whilst django.contrib.admin is awesome in a lot of ways it's not the most user friendly thing ever (I'm writing this in gvim using It's All Text for a reason you know), so I aim to improve it to the point where it's on a par with the latest Wordpress UI (not that I'm setting the bar high or anything).

But before that, I have to do other things, which I'll talk about in a separate post. In the meantime, if you're looking to do interesting things with Javascript, take a look at LAZR-JS. I can't guarantee it'll be useful, but it may well be instructive.

I don't often blog here about work, mainly because

1. It's not (at the moment) open source (it will be come July, never you fear).
2. The people who aren't reading this blog for open source-related stuff (which to be fair is probably a reasonably high proportion; after all I've done a lot of photography and rant-blogging over the last six months or so) don't really care.
3. When I do blog about Launchpad I do it over at the Launchpad blog.

But the last two Launchpad development cycles have been particularly awesome for the Launchpad Bugs team. We've got a set of goals for Launchpad 3.0 (the version which is going to be open sourced in July) and until January-ish we weren't doing hugely well at getting them done. There's a lot of work to do in Launchpad at the best of times; sometimes other concerns get in the way and the stuff you wanted to get done this cycle because it's targeted to the next major release gets pushed out by critical bugs or long-standing bugs or some other thing which occupies your time.

But at the start of our February development cycle our estimable team leader, Bjorn Tillenius wrote a script that would take our list of goals, subdivided by user story and turn it into a wiki page. The effect has been awesome, and this cycle we've managed to get so much done that we've pretty much blown the socks off our own and everyone else's expectations.

Gavin and I have done a huge amount of work on getting bug activity logs working properly (with a little more to come next cycle to make things really, really awesome); Tom and Abel have done masses of work on official bug tags and Michael, who's actually nominally a member of the Soyuz team, for which we'll forgive him, has worked really hard to add one of the first bits of javascripty coolness to the bug tracker, with the excellent new "mark as duplicate" functionality.

Cycles like this remind me of why I do this job: the software is great and getting better all the time, the company is fantastic and is easily the best employer I've ever had and the people I work with are some of the smartest, coolest, craziest froods I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks, guys. I see no reason why next cycle can't be even more awesome than this one.

(Your usual programme of ranting and photography will return shortly.)