Mmm, yummy

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.

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog and frustrated by my wild inconsistency in output may be even more frustrated to learn that I have been blogging consistently for several months now, adiposity just not here. Of course, cough it’s easy to blog consistently when all you’re doing is saving a link and adding one occasionally-witty line of comment, which is why I’ve put so much more into my del.icio.us linkblog. Clicking on that link takes you to my full del.icio.us account, which may be rather more than you want, since I also use it just for things I want to bookmark for myself. Links that I specifically want other people to see – about a third of the total – go into my top tag, from where they are reflected to Haddock Linkblogs. So if you want a good linkblog from me, I’d suggest starting with top. One day, I may even get around to integrating into this site, if I can find the room in my hideously-crowded front-page layout.

(Other recommended tags, based purely on the amount I throw into them: perl, software, windows and funny.)

I’ve been a big fan of del.icio.us for a long time and have done occasional bits of hacking on it, such as my avar.icio.us posting interface (some bits of which have now found their way into Greg Sadetsky’s fabulous nutr.itio.us). Today, I wondered why nobody appeared to have done a Firefox search plugin. Twenty minutes later, here they are:

• del.icio.us – your bookmarks
• del.icio.us – all bookmarks

May all your links be yummy.