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.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new release of Berkeley DB XML, I probably just wasn’t paying attention, but I did see Oracle has released Berkeley DB XML 2.3.8.

This release of Berkeley DB XML improves many aspects of query planning
and execution. Using indexed node storage, users will generally
experience significant speed increase. A new event-style layer allows
for tight coupling between Berkeley DB XML and other XML processing
code. This greatly enhances integration with programming languages and
XML parsing libraries by eliminating the need to create and then
re-parse XML content. The W3C XQuery 1.0 specification is nearing
completion and this release of Berkeley DB XML is compliant with the
current Proposed Recommendation.

Would you want to live on a ship? This has actually been around for a while, but I just came across this company called SeaCode that’s proposing to use Cruise ships to house software development teams off the coast of California. The teams would be made up of foreign workers and the idea is to bring cheap labor closer to the US to cut down on communication overhead. Since they sit off shore, they’re not subject to any US immigration laws. It’s a pretty odd idea and I wonder how many engineers would actually go for the idea of living on a ship. We may never know though, all the press on the web site is from 2005, but it is a kind of interesting idea.

Pete Lacey has an excellent post up about why all the teeth knashing over REST vs. WS-* and W3C XML Schema vs. Relax NG doesn’t really matter within the corporate space. I’ve certainly argued about this enough to know the sad reality that he’s right … as much as I hate to admit it. No matter how much simpler things could be if we chucked the whole WS-* stack, in the corporate world nobody is listening. All they hear is what the big vendors say, and all they talk about is SOAP and WS-* and W3C XML schema and a bunch of other really complex crap that just makes people’s jobs harder.

I think it’s naive to believe that this isn’t intentional, the complexity is there because it requires tools to make it usable and it just so happens that all those vendors that corporate developers are so fond of, sell tools. It’s good for their business to make technology as complex as possible. In fact it’s my distaste for what the big vendors are doing that keeps me from leaving the startup world. In that world we pick technologies that we can actually understand and that we know will work. Simple is always better than complex, and anything that requires an expensive suite of tools to make it simple is looked at with great skepticism. It also helps that we simply can’t afford the stuff the big vendors sell, but even if we could, there is very little I would actually want to use.

Just came across WikiMatrix from this article on TechCrunch. There are a number of interesting things about this site.

1. There are a lot of different Wiki packages available now with a broad range of features.
2. Way too many of them include the word Wiki in their name.
3. They expect the software owners to maintain their own entries.
4. Wikis are exploding if there’s room for a ten person company to support a site that’s little more than a specialized comparison system.

What I want to see is a CRM system based around the Wiki concept. Current CRM systems seem too rigid to me, while current Wikis are a little too loose. It seems there should be room for something in the middle based around the concept of semi-structured data while still maintaining much of the freedom a wiki provides.

Phoenix BarCamp is coming up next Saturday Dec 9. This will be held at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe.

This event mainly exists to get people in the technology community around Phoenix into a single place so we can have some good discussions on technical and creative topics. It’s an event for both the development and the design communities and the schedule for the day will emerge as it occurs. If you’re planning to come, please be prepared to truly participate, this isn’t an event for people to get up in front of a crowd and just give presentations.

As an added incentive, we’re also planning to have free tshirts and lunch, thanks to the BarCamp sponsors: Microsoft, Neurogami, Integrum, Grid7 and JumpBox.

The next edition of Agile web development with Rails is now available in PDF form and is expected in book stores around the same time that Rails 1.2 is released. I’ve been reading the beta PDFs and am looking forward to getting the paper book when it ships. The REST features of Rails 1.2 are a great enhancement that brings Rails one step closer to being a true next generation web framework.

Desert Code Camp is coming up Oct. 28 in Phoenix. The last Code Camp was actually pretty disappointing due to the complete lack of hallway interaction and the heavy Microsoft orientation of the sessions. All I really care about is meeting smart people who are doing cool stuff, finding out about the latest Microsoft technology is something I can do online. This one looks like it might be a bit better so we’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, the Phoenix Ruby community will be out in force and there are a number of sessions on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

I’ve been looking around at ways of encrypting file systems on servers. dm-crypt seems like a good way to go, however the big question for me is how do you handle key management? It’s great to have the data encrypted, but that key still needs to be on the system somewhere or else you hang if the system restarts. That was something that always bugged me about SSL certs that required a password to decrypt them when the webserver started. In order to have a self sustaining system you had to put the key somewhere which obviously defeats the whole point of encrypting anything. So if you had to build a system with application code encrypted on the drives, how would you manage keys?

BarCamp Phoenix or what was formally known as the refresh unconference is going to be held Dec. 9 at the University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix. Unfortunately, the wiki page for the camp is currently down. I’ll post an updated link as soon it’s available again.