July 17, 2008 – ${me:-whatever}

In my old blog I hinted about a project that I’d been working on and was hoping to release. It’s getting closer to release, so Happy and I spent part of the day looking at “project” software. That’s some crappy nomenclature, but I lack a better term. I’m referring to software like Trac, Redmine, Jira, etc. Something that does issue tracking, maybe a wiki, maybe some forums and maybe some VCS integration.

Trac is out because it’s just awful. Puppet used to use it and I hated every second of it. It was hard to use, but moreover it was hard to read. Issues/Tickets/Bugs/Whatever looked terrible. Oh and the wiki syntax sucked too.

We tried Redmine today and being the ruby noobs that we are, it wasn’t exactly easy to get going. There’s a bug in the release version when using the version of ruby we had and coupled with a few other things that made me feel like it’d be fragile (which is another way of saying I wasn’t sure I was qualified to run it in production.)

Then in the last 10 minutes of the day we tried Jira and holy smokes! For a project our size this thing is enormous overkill. It’s also payware. They have an “open source” license, but the main qualifier to get said license seems to be “being cool enough.” Plus, I fucking despise java. That said, it’s quite a polished package and was amazingly easy to set up. It’s certainly far better than then issue tracking system my work is about to deploy.

So at this point I’m looking over wikipedia’s big comparison chart, but I’ve lost hope and am starting to think that we’ll just end up using smaller pieces rather than an all-in-one solution. For the first time in my approximately ten years of blogging I’m allowing people to comment on my blog! Why not make a suggestion of the kickass project software you use/wrote/love?

I finally switched away from my home-grown blog software. It lived for over 5 years, I’m proud to say. Nothing about it was failing, I just got tired of extending it and if you’re not growing you’re dying.

My plan is to migrate the old stuff that wasn’t just crap filler over to this blog if I can pre-date entries. I guess I should have tested that before I went “production.” Being the curmudgeon that I am, I have plenty to complain about in the WordPress department, but I’ll spare you. I’m trying new things and I guess that’s what matters.

Speaking of new things, I’ve started using Ubuntu on my new work machine and my new personal laptop. It’s a painful switch away from Debian and I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Quite sadly my main reason for switching is font rendering quality. That’s right. I have two machines that actually have stuff like Evolution installed because I like how fonts look in Ubuntu and I can’t get them to look that nice in Debian.

While I’m going crazy with new things, I’m also trying new window managers. I tried E17 the other day and remembered why I quit using E back in the E14 days. Just not for me. I also tried KDE4 which is very very much not for me.

I am using Compiz-fusion on both my laptop and work desktop. I doubt very much it’ll last though because it’s very slow (for some reason it makes Google Reader insanely slow on my work machine which is 4cpu/8G, with a real graphics card: an nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 1700 so no excuses) and doesn’t have my precious ctrl-; which I map to a middle-click style paste.

For you non X11 users out there, prior to stupid window environments like GNOME and KDE, X11 used a simple text-buffer for selections. All you had to do was select text and it was automatically copied into the copy buffer; middle click pastes. No pesky keystrokes just for copy and paste. G&K added their own copy buffer that allows for the more windows/mac style copy and paste (meaning more than just text.) I never ever ever use that though, so it’s just a nuisance for me. It’s especially awful because the paste keyboard shortcut differs from application to application and I spend a ton of time in terminals.

So a long time ago I tricked some lisp-er in #sawfish into writing me a universal paste that the windowmanager itself handled and it worked mostly great. Great enough that I’m going to probably go back to sawfish on both machines because the eye-candy just isn’t worth having to use a mouse.

As if that weren’t enough new, I’ve been writing some comics about work and my life. It’s entirely probable that you had to be there and it’s just not funny to anyone else. I’ve also been co-writing some comics with my friend Ed Kelly. And if you act now, I’ll double your order!

Oh and did I mention that I’ve got a couple of youtube videos up? They aren’t great, so please be kind.