I’ve started to use Redmine a bit in my personal business to help manage the few projects that go through my doors. A buddy, Brian Wigginton, turned me on to it. We have spent several nights looking for a good app that can manage, tasks, issue and project workflow from beginning to completion. After trying out several different ones ( i.e. OPProject, Trac, Achievo, and even dokuwiki ) based on multiple technologies ( i.e. java, python, php, and ruby). We ended up with Redmine, which is based on Ruby on Rails. The install wasn’t too bad (we spent most of the time working with phusion passenger, which being a fan boy of mod_fcgid, I highly recommend.) The database design seems pretty straight forward and it has all the features we were looking for.

OnePoint Project (OPProject) was an amazing it. It was java based and we deployed it over a tomcat-6 server. For a strict project management app, I think this one wins hands down. The interface is clean and sharp. Even know little about Project Management, I was able to find my way around the system and get some basic things set up. It manages resources and time. And again, the Gantt charts were very easy on the eyes.

Trac is more of a software management portal. It is based on python, and I deployed it in the past using mod_python (before I knew about mod_fcgid). It is a very strong app for managing software development. It has a strong integration between the repository, bug tickets, and a wiki. It was missing a few of the project managemenent aspects we were looking for, but it works great for basic management of software development.

Achievo describes itself as a flexible web-based resource management tool for business environments. And I would have to agree with that. It doesn’t tie into a software repository like Trac does, but it does provide more project management tools such as gantt charts. One piece I did like, was it’s ability to add clients, and manage projects and task for assigned to those clients. If we were looking for a general business or department management tool, this peice of software would of probably won out.

DokuWiki is just a wiki, with the ability to add plugins. We started using it in the interum as we were trying to find a software package for us to use. You could use this as a basic project management for a group of people, especially a decentralized group. Collabrating on pages for ideas, managing picture, and providing revisions is essentional. There wasn’t any strong project management tools, but getting going, it was extremely usefull. I love the fact that it doesn’t use a database for it’s wiki pages and revisions, but instead plain text. This has always been my love of dokuwiki, and will always make it my first choice for small to medium sized wiki’s.

Redmine is really a plethora of applications rolled into one. It provides Repository integeration, bug ticketing, wiki, forums, customer management (via plugin), and project management tools. We are able to track our time for each project, and with a plugin, see a resources time across all projects. We have a wiki, document section, and file upload for each project. Wiki pages can cross link to other projects, and any one section can refernce another. I.E. a wiki page can reference both a ticket number and a repo revision. We are also able to provide some basic project planning through gantt charts as some of our customers request. Security is strong, and development still seems very active.

We’ve been happy with our initial testing of Redmine, and look forward to really running it thorugh it paces on our next project. I’ve also started installing Redmine at my office as management is now starting to ask for project schedules on some of my long term projects .. woohoo :/. With our personal install, we were able to get LDAP Authentication working with our Zimbra server. At my office, I am trying to get it working with Active Directory. It seems to be working, but is failing on the search. Debugging Ruby is something I am new at .. which is a topic for another post another day!

EDIT::Fixed spelling.

So most people are talking about the rise of Firefox, and the market share it is capturing. But one thing people are failing to mention is the market that these stats are taking from. If I take one of my own communities (granted very small) which focuses on open source on laptops then you would find Linux OS 42% and Windows at 55% (amazing how even an Linux driven content still has a majority of Windows OS as it user hits in the past month). You will find Firefox at 61%, IE at 22%, Opera at 7% and Mozilla at 6.5%. While the OS scale isn’t what I expected, the browser market is about right (especially when considering the inflated Windows OS numbers).

Now, that was a tech market, lets move to the business market. Again I work for a Project Management training and consulting firm. I am registering Windows at 96%, Macs at 3% and Linux at .5%. This is about on target with other publishing authorities. For the regard, other OS’es registered are SunOS, PalmOS (my cell :/), iPhone and SymbianOS (the CEO’s cell). Pretty interesting. Now, for the kicker the browser market share. While seeing IE at 77%, Mozilla at 20%, Safari at 2% and Opera at 1% doesn’t shock me too much, what does it the versioning within the two biggest, IE and Firefox.

The majority of our Internet users are using IE 6.0, making up 50% of IE traffic. That is nearly 40% of our site’s visitors. Just under the other 50% is IE 7.0, which the other .5 percent being IE 5 and IE 8. Come on, are you kidding me. Their are still companies that haven’t moved to IE 7 yet. I understand not doing it the first year. But seriously. IE 7 makes a world of difference, for both the end user and the web developers. In my eyes, this is just unacceptable. If you have a corporate web site or app that requires IE 6, then you need to get on the move and get it updated to dump IE 6.

Firefox is moving along nicely. Considering it has only been released for a few weeks now. We are registering 30% of our users running Firefox 3.0. I am showing just over 1% using 1.5, with the rest of the FF users running some version 2.0. This is about what I expected. I am expecting by end of year to have FF 3.0 be over 75%. Unless they push FF 3.0 updates over their automatic update, then I expect that number to be closer to 90%. But as far as a web programming perspective, this isn’t as big as a deal, because FF 2.0 follows the specs set forth by HTML and CSS pretty closely, as does IE 7. The reasons for end users to upgrade remain the same, better security.

The last spec I thought was interesting, and have seen reported elsewhere is screen resolution and colors, these are very important. 98% of our users use a resolution of 1024×768 or higher, which 35% using exactly 1024×768, only 2% use 800×600. Which is great when desining a site, the extra width planning for 1024 verus 600 is awesome. Screen colors actually suprised me a bit. I would expect 32bit color to be over 95%, but it isn’t. it is just under 90%. 24 bit at 3% and 16 bit at 6%. Interesting.

I am not going to do any grand finale conclusion, as those are mostly crocs of shit anyways. What I am going to leave you with is the numbers and let you draw your on conclusions. These numbers don’t tell you how much better any one product is compared to another or better adoption of one to the other. Just the stats over a month.

I’ll admit it, I was a bit nervous about using b2evolution. The admin interface in wordpress had set my standards pretty high. But, much like my distro of choice, I like to choose things away from the norm. I can report that I have been pleasantly surprised.

First off the admin interface is very sharp. The new ‘chicago’ skin adds a nice tool bar type interface and a pretty good layout of everything else. While it doesn’t have some of the web2.0 features that wordpress has, that is okay. I don’t care that much about eye-candy in my admin interface, I just want a clean look and something that works. One interesting things to note here, is when create post, there aren’t tags like most modern blogging tools provides, but there are categories. You can choose your main category, and then add others, so in a sense, this provides your tagging.

Another neat feature, or at least it seems to be b/c I haven’t dived into it too much yet is the Type of post. By default everything is a “post” But you can change the type to Link, Page or Podcast by default install. You can also define your own post types, I am not sure what all this defines, but it sounds cool, and it sounds like it would display them diffently. As for static pages, in my menu bar, I have added the plugin for to display pages, and then set the post type to page. It then shows that post as a page instead of in my blog … a different school of thought, but so far it makes sense and I like it

The other nice feature seems to be it’s skinning. While it doesn’t use a default skinning engine, it seems to be a pretty simple one. They provide default layouts for all the sections, so you can just copy and paste it, or if you don’t need to modify it, you can just include it in yours. The code seems to be pretty explanatory, and without a lot of fluff. Right now I am using one provided by b2evolution install, but I think I might look into convert a CSS theme over to b2evolution in the near future

Overall I can say I am very happy, and I am still just scratching the surface as to what it can offer. With multi-user and multi-views, the possibilities are really endless. (Okay not quite endless, but close to it)

It seems Gentoo has finally released the 2008.0, the first release since 2007.0 which was released early in 2007. This is huge, there have been many changes in packages and such in the portage tree that an initial install took a lot longer then needed to have an up-to-date system. Along with just the updated stage’s, we are also seeing a lot of bug fixes and enhancements. The profile management has changed to help reduce headaches, and the livecd will be switching from gnome to XFCE to further reduce space and headaches with the livecd.

Now I get to go around and migrate my profiles over to the new release, and then I am working on a new box to test this install out on, should be good times

You can Discuss the release or just go ahead and Get Gentoo!

To put it bluntly Hell No!

In a post over at Pratical Technology, they argue that it might be time to fork KDE, while I think the title was just meant to stir the pot, I really thinks his title should be true.

First, let me start by saying that Forking is not the solution. Go look out on freshmeat or sourceforge and see how many empty half finish projects are out there, or even the number that are 80 – 90% there, but just lack the polish or last few features to make the project really complete. That is the one problem with opensource, is when people don’t like what they see, they fork it. While there is nothing legally wrong with this, I believe technically this can cause problems. Most of the time projects are forked because of a disagreement between developers and either other developers and/or users. This leads to split development and re-inventing the wheel at times. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a split needs to happen because they want to take the project in a different direction. Sometimes projects split only to merge back together years down the road. But to split a project just becuase you aren’t happy with the current alpha or beta release is pretty sily

More specifically to this case, he spends the first 9/10 of his post talking about what is wrong with KDE 4.1 beta. While most of the time in the Open Source world Beta’s can give an accurate picture of what the final release will be, normally only small time bug-fixes are found in beta’s has most of the others are found in SVN or in the alpha’s. But his biggest compliant is he doesn’t like the new interface. He says it isn’t any faster (that he can see) and that it doesn’t allow him to get his work done any faster. Fair Enough. But isn’t this the same arguement Windows Users give us when switching to Linux. That the interface isn’t what they are use to, and it doesn’t “seem” any faster?

In his last paragraph, he mentions one thing, that could actually be usefull. To rebuild KDE 3.5 with Qt 4.x. This is actually very interesting. Moving to Qt 4.x should provide a small speed improvement, along with the newer features Qt 4.x brings, mostly visual changes to most people though. But you are still using the old framework which ties KDE 3.5.x together. While some like it, I’ve never really cared much for that system. And you are still limiting in moving forward by the fact all the other KDE apps being developed are being ported to Qt 4.x with KDE 4 in mind. KDE 4 provide a lot more to the table. Backporting KDE 4.x features to 3.5.x is really a waste a time. To keep from getting stuck in the past, we need to be looking at Porting the things people like about 3.5.x into 4.x. Be it the GUI, File Browser, Web Browser, whatever. But don’t fork it, and don’t limit yourself on an old system/framework

Well, I am now a Class B no-www site.

This means that I politely and quitely redirect all incoming www.gibbonsr.net to gibbonsr.net. Why? B/C it is a waste of time to type it and tell it to someone. Back in the day, I might see why this is necessary, and it some cases it might still be (where you want a different site under www.domain.com versus domain.com), But these cases are very rare. Most of the time, the redirect without www to the one with. A few sites don’t do either (digg.com and flickr.com).

Even though the site is active anymore, the content is still valid http://no-www.com