Yes, I have started a blog!

OK, actually I already have a blog!

In fact, I have two.  Well sort of.

You can find out about my work at Questionmark from the main Questionmark blog and you can find more technical articles on my developer blog on Questionmark's developer site.

So why do I need another blog?

I created this blog so that I could blog about technical things that are not directly to do with my work at Questionmark but relate to my work on the QTI migraiton tool (qtimigration on Google code).  This project has been much neglected over the last few years and with renewed interest in QTI version 2, and a steady drip, drip of requests for changes I thought it was about time I did something about it.

The migration tool followed in the footsteps of PyAssess, which I worked on about 5 years ago with Alice while we were working at Cambridge Assessment.  Both PyAssess and the migration tool itself were important projects that helped to guide the specification development process I was involved in at IMS.  Earlier today I checked in the PyAssess source into a branch of the qtimigration repository, I don't have access to the old SVN repository so have had to abandon the history.  I'm also sad to say that the unit tests aren't all passing, but they stand more chance of being fixed once they're in source control again.

I still find myself dabbling in python from time to time and have continued to develop some of the modules used to help support and test implementations of standards for learning education and training.

I have also recently rediscovered the joys of wxPython.  I do most of my work on a Mac and struggled along with PyObjC for quite a while but recently upgraded my last Mac to Snow Leopard.  My beautiful Cocoa-based interfaces for my homespun python scripts stopped working and I spent a frustrating weekend trying to port them.  In the end, I gave up and rewrote the interfaces in wxPython!

wxPython is actually used in the Windows/GUI wrapper for the migration tool that Pierre Gorissen created.  His work was merged into the trunk with a bit of frantic hotel-lobby coding following an IMS meeting a few years ago.  I feel better equipped to maintain it now.