Sven Edge :: Blog

i love it when people reply to automated messages. From an elgg.org invite:

Let's run with this. I can install and customize it. It's open-source so we can't beat the price.
What do you think?

http://terrychay.com/blog/article/my-data-in-a-box.shtml#mor

i love how much of an accidental google bomb elgg is for people's names. :D

I've finally given in and set up window focus-on-mouseover on my home desktop, because I've got so used to having two single-monitor computers linked with synergy at work, which already behaves that way. Sitting coding at home today I finally got sick of pressing ctrl-r to refresh the web browser on the second screen, to find i'd launched search-and-replace on the still-focused text editor on the first screen..

I'm also not used to 1280x1024 resolution any more. my laptop's 1680x1050, and my work computers are 1680 and 1440 iirc. Even with my text editor font at 8pt, it feels like i can't get a decent overview of the code. Sadly I can't really justify buying new higher-res ones, especially given how rarely i actually sit at my desk at home.

Still, using two 1280 monitors still feels more productive than just working on my 1680 laptop. not that my laptop isn't on my desk as well, currently linked in with synergy as a third screen. *cough* just as it normally is at work. *cough*

What i want is something that makes a graphviz graph for a tree of PHP code's function calls, like this. Textual analysis output and runtime profiling is all well and good, but I'm a visual person. I want pretty pictures.

Perhaps I should name my firstborn Node. :>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/05/immigration_search/

also, ouch.

...is more painful than I expected it to be. (So much hate for qmail).

Anyway, of the 4 scripts I tried (1 in bash, 1 bash+executable, 1 php and 1 python), the only one that worked was this one: http://yergler.net/Maildir_to_Mbox

In both of my hats, we're looking trying to use some sort of issue tracking/CRM type software that integrates with incoming email.

The requirements are slightly different, in that aiui the Scran one will be used as a full bug tracker, as well as for keeping track of incoming feedback, data corrections, and whatnot, whereas Elgg/Curverider already uses sourceforge for bug tracking, and the issue tracker would purely be to stop incoming email getting buried in any one person's mailbox.

Other than that, the technical requirements are open source, written in php or at least perl or python (java makes servers cry), and using mysql as the backend. There are some online services that do similar things, but we want something we can control/customise and *cough* not pay for. (I'm not dave, so i won't go off on an elggspaces plugging tangent here ;)

For seemingly asking so little, finding something suitable is a right arse.

There are lots of trackers that are good bug trackers, but either don't integrate with email at all or aren't set up to present the issue as a human conversation rather than mainly a bunch of version-number/bug-report-rejected type flags (bugzilla, mantis, trac, etc). Then there are the full-blown CRM packages, which are many and varied and almost certainly OTT, as we're not trying to keep track of whether our Denver sales team is meeting its sprocket sales targets, or whether customer X has had a backrub lately. In the middle seem to be precious few apps.

I've looked at OTRS, and despite being fairly powerful, the interface has all sorts of brick walls to run into, where things that seem really basic to me haven't been implemented, or have been done "wrong". In some cases it's too powerful for its own good, and gets its knickers in a twist. Ben's reaction was "its ease of use on first look is through the floor".

I've just about installed RT3. Christ, dependencies much? Anyway. Haven't actually tried it yet, but after the effort of hammering it into the server, I need a rest. Time for some caffeine.

Eventum is welcomingly PHP, but at first glance looks more bug-trackery, but might be worth a poke.

Looking at this list on Wikipedia, once you take out the proprietary and windows-only software, not much is left. And without having ever run Zope, it smells of "we can't possibly use python without turning it into a bloated java-style elephant".

OMG look I liek totally reflected.

never mind, some smug twat's already deleted it.

While marking up some links in the somewhat marketing-speak-ish wikipedia article on Scran, I noticed Elgg didn't have an article, so a little cribbing from wordpress and drupal's articles later, here's a very basic start.

However, I suck at writing, so if anyone else feels like it... :)