Just found a a contest site with a chance to win $1000 cash. They are calling it Project No Name. The site says that two companies are coming together and are wanting a new name. So they are holding a contest, and if they select your name, you win .. that simple.

It's pretty cool to see companies using the internet for things like this. I had to Dig it http://digg.com/design/Project_No_Name_Wants_You !

I must say I am pretty impressed with Microsoft on the speed of their support. It took about 3 - 4 days for me to receive the packaging material they provide. Then I sent it off on a Friday and I received back a new one Last night, the following Wednesday. I had to "test" it out, to make sure it wasn't broken, so after about 5 hours of Madden, I concluded that this unit seems to be problem free.

Now it is time to go out and buy Maddon '09!

Yep, the title pretty tells the story. I'm getting the damn RRoD of on system, I have it just short of 1 year and it is crapped out, freezing in the middle of play. I'm getting the general hardware failure lights, which luckily MS has extended the warranty for this failure out to 3 years. I am not sure if this is lucky or not, b/c of the extreme number of problems they have been having. Some people are speculating that the numbers are over 30%, but with some of the newer development on the 360's the number has dropped to 10%, that is still a hell of a lot.

Oh well though, I signed up to http://service.xbox.com and had a service repair registered. They are shipping the the box and information to ship it back, they are paying for everything. I've read they say 2 - 3 weeks for a replacement, but some have reported getting one back within 10 days of the day they started the process.

It's going to suck the next 3 weeks with no Madden :/

Just got down spending about 3 hours trying to get a simple gallery page to render the same across multiple browsers. It is crazy trying to get all browsers to work. I think we are dropping IE6 and FF2 from strict compatibility tests. As long as the data is rendered, we are calling that good. But that still leaves, FF3, IE7, Opera, Safari and Chrome. And we have IE8 around the corner, which will initialy just be a render data in a readable format.

The issue we are having is inside Webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, Midori, and many others). The have our CMS applying a wrapper to a basic php gallery page. This page uses jquery and galleria to handle the image transitions and such using ajax. Works great on the browsers by itself, and after a bit of CSS work for IE7 works great on that and FF3. But once done, Safari and Chrom wouldn't display the ajax content when the page is loaded directly. Hitting refresh though, the ajax / javascript engine inside these browsers decides to work, and everything works great. It is the craziest shit I've ever seen. Nothing changing besides hitting refresh.

Which brings on to my biggest compliant, UI design sucks. It isn't even for Web Design, but designing applications to work on a variety of interfaces is going to cause problems. Windows has done a decent job of not changing things too much between major backends, so apps developed for 2000 should look find in XP and Vista ... should, but not always. But look at java apps, that share the same code for Mac OS X, Vista, XP, Linux (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, etc) and it has some small issues that araise, you got font issues, DPI, resolution, window decorations (or the lack there of). It is a huge issue. And people (end users) don't look toward the person resonable for their platform (firefox, IE, Apple, Gnome) but instead to the individual developer to create special cases for all these different idiosyncrocies. And we, as the small developers, bend over, take it, and try to get all the wrinkles ironed out.

While choice is good for the consumer, it sucks for those trying to create things to work for the most amount of people. Next to writing a custom interface for every single option out there, there are going to be some that run in a degraded mode, ignored, and in the extremem cases not even work.

Okay Rant Over - back to work.

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 Gnatt 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 gnatt 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 gnatt 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!

I grabbed a new theme for my blog today. The original theme was Vector Lover over at style styleshout I've got most of it implement. I don't have the active link highlight working, as well as a few css bugs, especially when logged in. Over all though I think it is going to stick.

Well, the issue with the 3D seemed to be that that the xorg-server-1.4.906 release wasn't quite good enough any more, and that I needed xorg-server from git. This of course means dependencies on other git libraries as well as re-compile all the x11-drivers ... woohoo for me. But the plus side to all of this is I got my Compiz back. I really like the Scale and Expose fucntions.

I don't know where last week went. I had about 10 things to write about, but nothing come of them. I've got to get better about at least jotting down my thoughts throughout the day, as I can't remember anything right now.

I've looked at a few software packages. Played with a few other programs, nothing huge. I went to a FWLUG (Fort Worth Linux User Group) meeting on Saturday, It was my first meeting, and a good one, the presenter talked about building your own Live CD. During the presentation there were some down times, and during those time I fixed my AIGLX / GLX issues. Not only did I need the git versions of mesa, drm and ati drivers, I also needed the git version of xserver. Everything works like a charm now. I am back on Compiz-Fusion. I was on Openbox (can't stand metacity) and I was happy, Openbox with xcompmgr maeks a very nice app. I just missed my expose and scale plugins. Other then that my compiz settings are pretty dry, and my emerald theme just mimics the *Box style with a bit of transparency.

The other cool thing is I was able to score a DEC Alpha while I was there, at no charge. I am pretty stoked about that. I can't wait to test out VMS (currently installed) for a few minutes before I wipe it and load Gentoo on it. That should provide some interesting discoveries, I can't wait.

I have also been looking into getting a 3G card for my laptop. It looks like all the Sierra Wireless cards work with linux, they even provide the code for the modules. But with this , my wireless bill goes up another 50 or 60 bucks a month .. great. I've been looking at the iPhones, but I have some outstanding issues with their design and Apples and AT&T's philosophy on how they are running things. One issue is they don't allow you to tether it to our laptop to use it has a modem. Luckily, you can't keep a good tech down, and people have found several ways of allowing you to connect to it. Despite Apple's effort to thwart people from loading 3rd party software on the phone. That might be enough to have me think about getting one!

After all of this, I am leaving for Vacation in 4 days and a wake up. I'm can't wait, we are going to the Bahamas, Nasau to be exact. It will be good to get away. I am afraid it will be a long week trying to wrap everything up before I leave the country .. which stresses me out just thinking about it. Oh well, heres to a good and short week.

And now I have more proof. Thanks to my dad for passing the link along.

http://www.kevitivity.com/geeksquad.html

Unbelievable. This sort of thing erks me so bad. There are people in the IT business that give all of us a bad name. The ones that understand the issues top to bottom, enjoy what they do, and bend over backwards trying to get people working comfortably on their PC's. Why would you cut the cables, why? The only reason I can think of is trying to hide what you really did!

I've had my own personal issues with Best Buy. I've had several instances where personal friends and friends of the family have gone to Best Buy with a "Hard Drive Crash", and where told all the data is unrecoverable. I end up getting wind of it, and take a quick look only to find out that a quick restore from an XP disk fixed the problem. Or even better where that wouldn't even work but hooking it up to another Windows box was able to open the drive and view all the files. The most common type of recovering for me is hooking it up to my laptop and pulling off all the data inside Linux. Yep that's right, using Linux to recover all the lost for a File system failure. There are livecd's that provide the same functionality.

This is just ridiculous. And yet another reason I boycott Best Buy and refuse to do business with them to the best of my ability.

Yeah, so ... Don't leave your laptop power adapter at work over a 3 day weekend. It sucks. Especially when it would of taken me two hours to pick it up. I opted to go without it for the weekend. It was a long weekend