GibbonsR.net

Should be enough said, but apperently it isn’t. Yes, I had a dumb user moment, and had a space at the end of one of my inputs. Which the application saved, and passed on to another “plugin” and failed to make the connection, silently btw. The space should of been cleansed out in multiple places, especially a trailing space.

I am pretty sure I learned this in my first year of school, programming 101.

Reminds of a comic .. from xkcd

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.

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.

Browsing the web today, I found two nice tools for managing AD in Linux. First up is adtool. The home page is at http://gp2x.org/adtool/. This is a tool that lets you manage the objects in active directory without having to know too much knowledge of LDAP. You will have to know a bit about the layout in Active Directory, but you don’t have to worry about having to write your LDAP queries. This small little app lets you list out directories, modify attributes, reset passwords and more.

Next up is a package released by the ZenOSS group, they use it with their monitoring suite, and it is a WMI client. Again CLI only, but works great. I found it over at http://felimwhiteley.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/wmi-calls-from-linux/ and the package can be downloaded from http://dev.zenoss.org/svn/trunk/inst/externallibs/. It seems to be a python script with very little documentation. Based on the blog post, the syntax isn’t much different then that of the wmi client for windows.

Between these two tools, you could decently manage basic task from linux, and even write some nice scripts to do more. While these two tools won’t Network and System Administrators of Windows Domains out of a window enviroment all day, it will help those who still prefer Linux as the day-to-day machine.

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 had a strange issue last night. After updating a few X11 packages from git, I rebooted and everything seemed to work fine. I then shutdown and went over to a buddies, booted up only to see X was locking up my session. I would get a blank screen, and then the system would become unresponsive. I tried re-emerging a few of the applications but the problem still existed.

I instead removed all the keywording for the r500 drivers and the X11 beta applications, and then added back in just the things needed for xorg-x11-7.3. I downgraded everything else, and then my X came back. I then re-added the unmasking and kewording for the r500 drivers, updated everything is now my enviroment comes up. Crazy .. except one small issue. My AIGLX isn’t working. 3D seems to work, but I am getting strange errors.

First of glxinfo reports Direct Rendering: Yes. But when I run glxgears, I get an RGB error about double buffering. This seems to prevent any type of compositing manager from running. I tried running Frozen Bubbles, and it works fine. All my 2d acceleration is now working fine, just compositing/3d seems to be borked.

I guess this is the pain fun of working with live git packages http://gibbonsr.net/rsc/smilies/icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”middle” />

Finally I got my synaptics drivers to work properly. With the new HAL, you are able to have it hotplug your input devices into X, this means they don’t need to be listed in X. I tested this out on my laptop a few months ago, and it worked. Only problem is I couldn’t pass along the variables for my synaptics touchpad. Well, after months of waiting and research, I finally got it figured out.

I created the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptic-options.fdi, which, in Gentoo, are the user added hal policies, system installed are in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/. I then added the following into that file


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>


This turns on SHMConfig which allows synclient and gsynaptics to change synaptic settings on the fly. Sadly, in between noticing this taking effect I had moved to a few pre-release applications to get the 3d r500 accelleration with ati drivers. Below are a few application and versions I am running


[ebuild R ] sys-apps/hal-0.5.11-r1
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.4.99.906
[ebuild R ] x11-drivers/synaptics-0.14.6-r4


Also note, i just notice xf86-input-synaptic-0.15* has been added to the portage tree for the 1.5 prerelease, need to check this out.

The trip is over, and I am already back to the dail grind. It was a nice relaxing vacation. I wasn’t ready to come back, but I don’t think my wallet could handle another few days down there between the swim up bar and the casino at night.

Seems a lot has gone on in the OSS world, I am trying to catch up on everything. New drivers, new software, new blog post … oh my.

Tomorrow morning, less then 10 hours from this moment, I will be on a plane to the Bahamas. My wife and I will be there with her family for 5 days. I can’t wait!

I’ve been using WICD for the past week, and I think I like it better then Network Manager. It focuses on connecting your network interfaces to networks and does it right. IT doesn’t have the ability for VPN’s or anything else, it is merely I frontend to wpa-supplicant and iwconfig. I have had zero issues with connecting to wireless networks. It is actually connecting to them better then Network Manager was. My connections are stable, and I can switch between my wired network and my wireless without problems. (I had problems with NM b/c when I plug into a wired network, the BIOS throws the kill switch to the wireless radio, NM had problems finding it again after this).

The connection times are very quick, most of the time I am connected to my wireless before my gnome interface loads. It has a service that has to run, so it might even be connecting to it earlier then that … which would be very cool.

There is one issue though. When I first boot up my and if I have an ethernet cable plugged in, the WICD tray panel fails to load. And I am not sure why, I’d imagine though it might be loosely related to the same reason it won’t “auto connect” to the wired network when the cable is plugged in.

Besides that small issue, it WICD runs in a smaller footprint, has a better interface, and provides a stable Internet connection using the proven standards and tools already out there.