The bathroom's proceeding apace. This weekend I put down the shower pan liner, adhering it to the cement underneath. I was a bit enthusiastic about making the cut for the flap for the lip, and cut from the base of the pan liner, so I had to patch the liner in two places.

It will have cured by tonight, though, so we can perform a water test. The books and articles we read for guidance on this all say about the same thing:

When the pan liner is down, use a balloon stopper to prevent water
from escaping down the drain, mark the pan liner an inch or so
below the entrance lip, and fill the pan liner with water to that
mark. Come back in a day and if the water is to that line,
proceed. If the water line is lower, fix leaks and start over.

Er!? Sometimes, I desperately wish I could apply unit tests to my house projects.

In more positive (or less anxious?) news, we put down four more buckets of epoxy grout. Epoxy grout is great, but only has a working time of half-an-hour or so, which means you can only operate on a three square foot area or so at a time, but once it's down and cleaned, it comes out looking beautiful. We've still got another eight or nine buckets of grout to go through, but we've developed a pretty effective system for zipping through two or three at a time. We should be done with the tile in the main bathroom soon. Which leaves the entire shower area (see above) and the trim before we can get fixtures installed.

Outside the house, we should be getting the trim under the eaves put up this week, and then the painter can come and caulk up the siding seams and give us some color. It's the first time (probably) since the house was built in 1939 that there's been a layer of insulation in the walls. This means that despite adding approximately 800 square feet of living space, we should be paying about the same in heating costs as we did before.

Now that Bob's released py2app, I thought it might be time to get a new release of ZopeEditManager out. My local copy of the source code (now managed in an SVN repository) was built around the Xcode templates bundled with PyObjC 1.1, but I had a hankering to get back to good old-fashioned straight Python. Every time I built ZEM with Xcode, it forced so many additional frameworks and libraries along that in the end, the binary was so bloated I was afraid to release it. Now, using py2app, the binary's back down to 1.8MB, roughly the same size it was under bundlebuilder. Kudos to Bob for getting it out!

Another thing that was whispering in the back of my mind was the icon I originally made for ZEM. Recently, Brent Simmons blogged a link to new NetNewsWire icons. On his site, Wolfgang Bartelme wrote a tutorial demonstrating the use of Illustrator to make lickable, Aqua icons. Seemed simple enough (after a trip through Babelfish), and I decided to take the plunge and try it out. Here are the results:

I'd be more than happy to hear thoughts on the change.

It's been quite a while since I've made a release of ZEM (Zope.org shows that 0.9.4 was released back in May). While there have been more than a few feature requests that I'm looking forward to tackling, I was so pleased with the return of a pure Python build system, that I reworked the code a bit, cleaned up the source, threw a new icon on, and am releasing 0.9.5 (and source).