Inspirational Technology

Trac is a great application to track software development projects, but anyone who’s tried to install it knows it can be a real pain at times. This is especially true if you want to get it working on Windows or Mac OS X. Because there’s such obvious pain here, we decided to give it the JumpBox treatment.

So here’s how to install trac in about 10 minutes. And the best part, for nine of those minutes you can put your feet up and enjoy a cup of coffee (or it you really wanted to you could do other real work, your choice I guess ). The best part, this process will work roughly the same whether your using Mac OS X, Windows XP or Linux. All that’s required as a starting point is virtualization software, either VMWare or Parallels.

Here we go.

1. Download

   Visit the JumpBox web site and download the Trac/Subversion JumpBox. Downloading will take a few minutes so proceed with the coffee sipping.

   

2. Extract

   Once the download is complete you need to extract the archive. It’s pretty big, but the size is worth it for the time it saves. Plus you really wanted to drink some more coffee anyway.

   

3. Run

   Once the extraction is complete look in the folder and double click on the JumpBox.vmx file if you’re using VMWare or JumpBox.pvs if you’re using Parallels. The JumpBox will take a few seconds to load, just enough time for a little more coffee.

   

4. Collect

   Ahh, now comes the hard part. Once it’s finished loading you need to locate the IP address to use to access it. You’ll find it on the console for the virtual machine. Locate the line that says “Application Page:” and use a web browser to open that URL.

   

5. Configure

   Now it’s time for the very complicated installation process. You’ll be prompted with a short form asking for a little information to configure things. OK, it’s really just four pieces of information and at this point you’re just seconds away from having a working Trac install. Fill it out and click the button at the bottom.

   

6. Click

   That was easy, and the app is now configured and ready to use. Just click the URL for the application and start using your Trac installation.

7. Enjoy

   What could be simpler?

   

You now have a fully functioning, self contained installation of Trac 0.10.4 and Subversion. Besides the tremendous time savings from this, your installation also isn’t tied to the system it’s running on. Need to move it to a server? Just shut it down, copy the trac directory to the server, correct the paths in the virtual machine configuration files and start it back up.

This process is simple enough that anyone can do it, and it’s also the exact same process for every application packaged by JumpBox. So want a Drupal, Joomla or MediaWiki installation? Now, you know how to do that in ten minutes or less as well. No more excuses, so get a Trac install will ya.

Today I came across an article about a new 32GB solid state 2.5″ SATA disk from SanDisk. This could potentially be a quite extraordinary development. Compared to current hard drives, it’s faster, quieter, uses less power, has much faster random access times and doesn’t have any moving parts. All very positive sounding things, the down side is that it’s lower capacity and costs quite a bit more than current harddrives. I’ll be watching these drives closely and am definitely looking forward to seeing real world performance numbers. There’s no data on write performance and the limited write cycles of flash media could be an issue for really heavy write intensive applicaions.

I just got an email announcing that the ModBook Tablet Mac will be on display at the Wizard World Convention & Expo in Los Angeles from March 16th to 18th. It’s a little odd to get a press release for what’s nothing more than a demo, but this is such an interesting sounding product I decided I’d pass it along. I know I’d love to get my hands on one of these things to see how well they actually work. It’s still a very big question if this company can move beyond demo prototypes to a shipping product, but they’re happy to take your money if you want to order one. Here’s the full release.

Axiotron to Demonstrate ModBook, the One
& Only TabletMac at Wizard World Los Angeles

El Segundo, CA - March 13th, 2007 - Solution hardware
manufacturer Axiotron, Inc. today announced that it will be
showcasing the award winning ModBook™, the only Mac OS® X
tablet computer solution on the market, on the Axiotron
Booth #310 at the Wizard World Convention & Expo Los Angeles.
From March 16th to 18th, showfloor visitors will be able to take the
ModBook for a spin and on Saturday, March 17th, special guest and
Emmy award winning artist Shannon Tindle will be demonstrating
the ModBook's benefits.

I’m generally not a big fan of Microsoft software though I do use Excel quite a bit. It’s a pretty good program, but it’s way too expensive for how I use it. I don’t go much beyond basic financial models and simple data lists. I’ve also been getting pretty annoyed with the fact it’s not a native binary on the Intel version of Mac OS X. I’ve tried various other Mac OS X solutions (Mariner, Mesa, AppleWorks) as well as some of the Web 2.0 solutions like Google Spreadsheet and I think I’ve finally found one that works well enough for me. It’s called Tables and while it’s rudimentary, my needs are also rudimentary so it’s been a decent fit so far.

It imported my Excel spreadsheets with no problems (again I’m far from an Excel power user) and will actually use the excel format directly (i.e. you can edit and save the excel files without importing/exporting).

It’s a pretty basic program right now and doesn’t support graphs or calculations that are too complex. For simple models (the stuff most people actually use) and the management of small sets of data it’s the first thing I’ve used that doesn’t drive me nuts in five minutes. A license costs roughly $51 (the developer is based in Europe, 39 €).

It’s not nearly as powerful as Excel and Excel does have better usability overall, but it’s a young program and does look promising. As long as Apple doesn’t come out with their rumored spreadsheet, the future for this program could be pretty nice.

This is a pretty interesting collection of 5 Apple Prototype products that never made it to market. What’s really intersting about it, is two of the products, the phone and the tablet Mac, are still active rumors to this day. The latest rumors now seem to expect both to show up sometime in 2007. I suspect that may be true for the phone, but I’m not so sure about a tablet Mac. I’d love to see one, but Microsoft’s Tablet PC has hardly taken the world by storm. I actually own one of the stupid things and bolting tablet functions to a desktop OS is just clunky. I haven’t touched the thing in over a year. Of course if it ran an OS truly designed for the tablet experience, with software also truly designed for the tablet experience I might find it more useful. Apple does have an OS designed for that usage, of course, it needs a fair bit of modernization.

From Virtualization Daily, Converting a VMWare virtual appliance to work with Parallels. It’s my goal to bring as many virtual appliances to Mac OS X users as possible. With JumpBox, everything we release will run under Parallels as well as VMWare.

I’ve been a big fan of the Rhapsody music service for quite a while. I’m a Mac user, but I used to keep a PC around just so that I could run the Windows client. A while back they launched a web interface for the service that allowed you to access the Rhapsody library from Mac OS X and Linux. At the time that was exciting to see … until I used it and realized how abysmal the user interface is. You can’t even queue an album through the interface, it always starts playing immediately, replacing what was already playing. I have never understood why they used that behavior. The benefit of the service is to be able to browse around and queue up various albums for playing from a mass library. With the web interface that ability just doesn’t exist which is really odd. That plus the fact their music player leaks memory forced me to switch back to running Rhapsody on Windows, only now I use a Virtual machine on my Intel based Mac. That’s a pain of course due to the memory consumption of the VM.

Anyway, boring history aside, there’s a new service called YottaMusic which puts a completely new web interface on top of the Rhapsody service. If you’re already a subscriber to Rhapsody you already have an account that will work with YottaMusic. To say that this interface blows the Real designed interface away would … well it would be the understatement of the year. YottaMusic is a modern AJAX based interface that’s simpler, more powerful and most importantly has the ability to queue an album for playing without replacing what’s already playing. It’s currently an alpha release, but looks very promising. Now, of course comes the question about how they’re going to make money? The service is free for now and there’s no advertising (unlike the Real designed web interface that pushes really annoying ads even if you’re a paid subscriber). The existence of YottaMusic just proves that Rhapsody is a great service at a fundamental level, while Real’s complete inability to put the user first is blatantly on display in the current Rhapsody web interface.

Now isn’t this an interesting development. Parallels has added a new capability to make installation of Windows under Parallels on a Mac easier than it is on real hardware.

Here’s how it works:

1. Click the “Install OS” button on the main configuration screen and select “Express Windows Installation”.
2. Select which version of Windows - XP or Vista - you’d like to install.
3. Enter your personal information and Windows Product Key and click “Finish”.

That’s it! The Installation Assistant will complete the entire installation process for you - you won’t have to select any configurations, answer and questions, or make decisions about partitions or options. Just sit back, relax, and wait for the Assistant to finish.

Sounds pretty simple. Now if they could make it so that Windows wasn’t so bloated. I’d love a very stripped down version that could be configured to just run one application. For instance I run Parallels with Windows to run the Windows Rhapsody client because the web client sucks. I’d really love to throw out the 80% of Windows that I’m not using and just have a bare OS with the Rhapsody client in a virtual machine. With Linux you can do this if you really want and I’ve explored the idea of using Wine on Linux to run the Rhapsody client. Unfortunately Wine doesn’t currently work for this so it’s a bit of a dead end. Maybe something like ReactOS will emerge to fill this hole. If they can get enough windows compatibility, without pulling along the full bloat, it could actually be really useful. In fact, with the concept of virtual appliances we need a redistributable Windows clone that can be configured in a very stripped down fashion to run just a single application. Hmm…

This looks pretty slick, it’s a little app called Mousepose that uses your mouse to highlight portions of the screen. Looks like it would be really useful while giving a demo, vs. using something like a laser pointer.

Parallels has just released a new update for their Mac OS X virtualization software that removes the previous limitations that had hampered usage on the latest Mac hardware. In particular it had a very significant limitation on the amount RAM that could be used. The latest release supports all Intel Macs including those maxed out with 16GB of RAM. Given that having plenty of RAM is the single biggest contributer to a happy virtualization experience, this is an important release for the OS X platform. Now if Apple could just figure out how to cram eight edo-dimm slots into a laptop…