Four things that are free/cheap and nice

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, website like this Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, audiologist apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, information pills wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, treatment Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, capsule apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.