Category: software

Jira

I picked up Jira and Confluence this week, during Atlassian’s “Stimulus Package” sale — $5 each! A while back, I’d looked at Jira, and several other bug-tracking/project-tracking applications, but I never got around to evaluating any of them. I’ve had a vague sort of a plan to implement Trac eventually, after first converting from CVS to Subversion (which was also a vague kind of plan with no particular timeline on it). I don’t think I could have ever talked my boss into paying $1200 for Jira, which is their cheapest commercial license. The $5 version only covers 5 users, but that’s fine, since I only have two programmers working for me right now anyway.

It looks like Jira can work with either CVS or Subversion. I’m still planning on converting to SVN before I install Jira though. Of course, since we’re a (mostly) Microsoft shop, I should probably look into TFS, but I think that might a bit too expensive for me.

It’s a bit of a balancing act, in a small shop, trying to figure out how much time and money to spend on infrastructure (for lack of a better word) — project tracking, version control, formal testing, and so on. I can’t spend too much time on it, but if I don’t do it at all, things start to fall apart…

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

syncing

I’ve been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There’s a default calendar in Outlook called “Calendar” that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I’m hoping this is a one-time thing, and I’m not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I’m also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see “Loading Events”, and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here’s hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I’m thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I’m going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it’s possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

Dazzle Video Creator Platinum

I recently pickep up a Dazzle Video Creator Platinum from Woot. My idea was that I’d take the last few videotapes I own, convert them to MPEG-4, then toss the tapes and the VCR. I had a bit of an adventure getting the software installed and working under Vista. This blog entry helped out a bit. It would be nice if Pinnacle would just allow you to download the full install for their Vista-compatible software, but instead you have to stumble through the install of the XP version, then run a patch install. Once you’ve got that done, and you’ve got the Vista driver for the device installed, it works fine. I’m in the middle of converting an old anime VHS tape to MPEG-4 right now. I’m hoping it’ll be watchable on my Apple TV when I’m done with it. If it all works out OK, I have a few other random tapes to convert, then I’m done with VHS forever.

defunct tech magazines

Related to my post about PC Mag yesterday, here’s an article about defunct tech magazines. I have fond memories of a few of the magazines on his list — Byte, in particular. That was a great tech magazine. Looking through the comments after the article, I see mention of Amiga World, which was another great magazine, about a great computer. On a somewhat related topic, the NY Times just started a new gadget blog.

random patching

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that’s cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven’t had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn’t turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn’t started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn’t have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can’t buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that’s hanging up on one of the updates. I’ll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I’d like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don’t have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There’s a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven’t figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There’s certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I’ve been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple’s been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There’s an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: “I’ll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have.” I can’t help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I’m probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven’t written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I’ve got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I’m going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

text editors

There’s a poll on Lifehacker about text editors. Their top six are Notepad++, Emacs, UltraEdit, TextMate, Vim, and TextPad. I do use TextMate on my Mac, so I agree with that call. It’s a nice editor. I *wish* I was proficient with Emacs, just because it would probably come in handy occasionally, and just generally seems like something I should know. I’m amazed that people still use vi/vim. I had to use vi a bit back in college, and never liked it. Under Windows, I have to admit that I’m still using Multi-Edit, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days. I’ve been using Multi-Edit 9, which dates back to 1999. I kept putting off upgrades, since ME 9 did everything I really needed to do. At some point, I realized that I needed an editor with Unicode support, so I installed PSPad. I like PSPad, but not enough to switch over from Multi-Edit, except for those occasional Unicode files.

After poking around on the internet a bit today, I decided to finally upgrade to the most current version of Multi-Edit. It seems like ME is still behind the times a bit. The current version is called “Multi-Edit 2006”, and the most recent revision was posted in October 2007. It mostly works in Vista, but there are a couple of problems, mostly with macro recording, from what I can tell by looking at their support forums. And they’ve got some support for Unicode now, but it doesn’t look like it’s really full support.

I’m not sure if sticking with Multi-Edit is the right choice in the long run. UltraEdit might be a better choice; they seem to have been updating their product a bit more regularly. They appear to have full Unicode support and Vista compatibility.

Only a true geek could spend so much time worrying about text editors!

e-mail clients for my Dad

My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he’s not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We’ve got his machine set up so that he’s using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don’t take these kind of things into account. We’ve found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.

We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.

When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn’t been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.

I’ve been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I’m looking for something with a fairly simple interface that’ll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn’t get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn’t remember where he’d written down his e-mail password, so I couldn’t actually get all the way through the setup. We’ve also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I’m not sure that’ll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he’ll have found that password and we can play around some more.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server

We implemented a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) at work last week. I was afraid it would be overly complicated, but it wasn’t that bad, and we seem to have it running smoothly now. We’re running it on top of Lotus Domino. I’ve found that the documentation for BES is OK, but if you hit a snag, you’re going to need to head out on the internet and do some searching. The best place to find BES information seems to be the BES Admin Corner at BlackBerryForums.com.

CrackBerry.com has some useful stuff in their forums, too. For Domino-specific information, I’ve found besdomino.blogspot.com and notesberry.org useful.

I’ve been almost completely ignorant of the BlackBerry platform until now. I’ve got plenty of experience with Windows Mobile and Palm, going back several years, but I just never had occasion to pick up a BlackBerry. It turns out that they work pretty well! We won’t get to keep one in the IT department, unfortunately. We’ve just got one to use for testing that we’ll have to give back at some point. I looked into picking one up myself, but I don’t see any way to do that (and hook it up to the BES) for less that $50 per month, and that’s a bit much. I guess I should be glad that the company’s not making me carry around a BlackBerry 24×7, but it does seem like it would be a useful thing to have.

For now, I can still check my e-mail on my Moto SLVR via RemoMail, which I’ve blogged about before. And when I’m near a wifi access point, I can always use my iPod Touch.

MacHeist and other Mac stuff

Well, after deciding not to buy this year’s MacHeist, I changed my mind and gave them my $49 today. They’ve added enough stuff to the bundle to make it worthwhile for me. Even if I don’t use anything else I’ll probably get my money’s worth out of the two games they added.

And I gave Apple $20 for the new iPod Touch apps. The Touch still isn’t where I think it should be, in terms of functionality, but I’m hoping third-party software will fill the remaining holes after the API comes out next month. If I could just get contact, calendar, and note-taking apps that all sync back to my computer, and can be updated on either the Touch or the MacBook, I’ll be happy. I’m basically just looking for the same stuff I’ve got on my Palm.