osCommerce Blog

I returned from a 3 week break on the weekend, yes just after getting 3.0 Alpha 3 out the door, and am in top spirits to continue full-time work again on osCommerce. I did not make any public statement about this as I had my notebook and mobile phone with me to be able to take care of important issues during this time.

This was the first experience for me at connecting online over a mobile phone and did not face any technical problems doing so. The only negative aspect I had with it was when checking my inboxes due to the amount of spam I receive. Even using IMAP and only downloading headers took a while to complete but was sufficient in picking out the emails that looked important enough.

I was also able to bring the development site up during this time after it crashed a couple of times. There is a threading problem with ClearSilver (which Trac depends on) and FreeBSD/AMD64 which occasionally causes the web server to crash. Fortunatly Trac have moved on to their own templating engine called Genshi which the developoment site has been recently updated to (0.11-dev). Although a risky move, I hope this brings an end to the downtime of the development site.

I mentioned briefly in a blogging entry in March that I would be going to Tegernsee/Bayern again in September for the Oktoberfest. I went for a week in March and was there again for 3 weeks this time. The major difference being ofcourse the seasonal change where everything was now green instead of white. And ofcourse what you order after a long walk (beer vs hot chocolate drink)

Here are two pictures of the same temple I took pictures of in March, on top of Wallberg mountain:

   

Now that the sea was free of ice I rented a small 2,000 watt electric boat and took it for a spin:

The Allianz Arena soccer stadium:

And ofcourse some pictures of the Oktoberfest:

(on the Star Flyer, about 50m high)

      

(on the Ferris Wheel)

   

(on the Olympia Roller Coaster (with 5 loopings), yep, look closer to see me on it ;-))

I also went on the EuroStar Roller Coaster - both rides were too short in my opinion.

(on the Flying Circus (the ride I enjoyed most; and yep, look closer at around 39s to see me on it ;-)))

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(me with a Maß in my mouth)

(follow these outside the tents to find the toilets)

With the fun and social experience at the Oktoberfest there was another experience that topped it that occurs normally in nature. After reaching a restaurant during one of our long walks through the forest, we were able to witness a group of young deers in an opening and were able to hear the adult deers deeper inside the forest. This was a rewarding experience after a long walk, enjoying a beer and seeing this not far from where we were seated:

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Overall a great holiday, and look forward to the next Oktoberfest next year

I’ve been spending this week catching up on work and will start committing some changes on the administration tool next week for the alpha 4 roadmap entries. I started on modularizing the administration tool during my break and look forward to finalizing the work involved as the access levels implementation depends on it. The modularization of the administration tool makes it even easier to install administrative contribution add-ons without the need to edit core source files.