Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

A little while back, I described my search for a issue tracking tool to use on my personal projects. I think I’ve finally found one that I like in Collaboa. Collaboa is a simple, lightweight, and relatively easy to set-up issue tracker and Subversion repository viewer written with Ruby On Rails.

Collaboa has a lot of features that make it great for managing issues on smaller projects. The best feature is that it’s really simple. You only need to visit one screen to create an issue, give it a milestone, and assign it to someone. It’s the same screen to close it out. The same thing on our Jira install took about 3 page reloads and a couple flips between tabs. It really took a few minutes to create an issue in Jira, only a few second to do it Collaboa. It occasionally took longer to document the issue than it took to fix it. That’s just not a good use of anybody’s time.

In addition to repository browsing. Collaboa provides wiki-like syntax to linking tickets to changeset and vice-versa. No svn-hook magic and configuration required. Installation and configuration on a modern Linux distro is a breeze. The only problem I ran into was getting the Ruby-subversion bindings on Opensuse. However, this was solved simply by just compiling them myself. After that, it was as easy to get running as any other rails app.

Not surprisingly, Collaboa lacks some features that managment oriented people would like to have. There’s no support for Jira-style bulk changes in the interface. This is more minor than it would seem, since the interface is responsive and simple. Also unlike Jira, Collaboa, doesn’t feature hundreds of different reports, pretty charts and time tracking.

On the other hand Collaboa, is completely open source, and Ruby based so if there’s a feature that you just really need, you’re just some programmer time from having it. A cursory look shows the code is clean and pretty standard Rails. Adding new features should be straight forward.

There’s a lot to like about Collaboa, especially for smaller in-house teams and open source projects. A lot of the extra features that more prevalent products, like Jira, have are unneeded cruft in these cases. If the team has a core competency in Rails, then it becomes an even easier choice.

It’s finally here, the final version of Opera for the Wii. I just grabbed it and it’s a solid improvement over the trial version. I’m not too sure about stability yet, since I haven’t used it too much. The best new feature is the option to hide the menubar by pressing 1. The browser feels a little faster as well. Another little tweak is holding down B to scroll now puts a little vector arrow on your screen that helps describe how and where you’re scrolling. I think they’ve added single column mode (it might have been there before) which makes extremely wide pages fit within the width of your tv. In other words, no more left and right scrolling when attempting to read slashdot comments

So far, it seems pretty good, but we’ll see if it lives up to it’s potential in the coming weeks. About the only thing that would make it less useful than it can be is if it just crashes all the time.

We recently switched where we get our bandwidth provider from XO to FDN Communications. The complete switchover was supposed to be a few weeks away still, but of course something went wrong and we lost connectivity early Monday afternoon. After a scramble to get wires moved and dns entries updated, we still couldn’t connect to any of our servers, by IP or name, even after dns propogated.

We’re using monowall as our firewall and 1:1 server nat for our dmz. We thought we had changed everything, but we completely forgot about the proxy arp settings. So note to all monowall users scambling to switch over their networks, remember that section too!

Quite possibly the coolest part about getting the systems configured correctly again is the sound of the harddrives spinning to process the backlog of new mail is enough to tell that the systems are all working again. It took a little less than 24 hours, but by early Tuesday we were up and running again, and on a fatter pipe!

I’ve gone ahead and done the unthinkable, installing only non-apple peripherals to my mac mini. The crazy idea started a few weeks ago when I noticed that after extended periods at my desktop, my right elbow started to hurt a little bit. However, when using the Macbook at work, I never had that problem. At both locations I have equally un-ergonomic desks and use really poor posture. The only real difference is the size of the keyboard. The full sized mac keyboard is w i d e. The mouse was just too far off to the right.

Subbing out my mouse for the old trackball I had seemed to help a bit, but not all the way. I pulled out the old keyboard that I had before I got the mini, but I’ve always hated the action on that thing. As wide as it is, the mac keyboard is pretty nice to type on. The keys are placed sensibly and it responds really well. The best alternative was to bite the bullet and cough up the money for a Happy Hacking Lite 2.

I got the keyboard on Monday and after using it for the last few days, I have to say that this keyboard is awesome. My biggest beef with most keyboards available is they keys all respond differently. Some just feel slower than others. Every key on this keyboard responds well and quickly. Of course, I love the form factor. I barely have to move my right arm to get to the trackball. I also adore the few modifications to the standard key placements, such as moving control back to it’s rightful place and shifting delete down next to ‘]’. The lack of a lot of keys means that a good chunk of the keyboard is overloaded with different commands that can be activated through the use of the function key, just like a laptop keyboard. However, unlike most laptops, the keyboard has function keys on both sides.

It’s definitely not cheap, but I’ve probably spent a lot more on multiple crappy keyboards. It made sense to try and get one that I might actually like. So far it’s been working out.

Unfortunately, once you make one computer related purchase, you have to make another. To make up for the fact that I bought the happy hacker lite, and not the pro, I also got a 20″ sceptre widescreen lcd. This thing is so big, I can barely look at the whole of it at once. Re-wiring a good amount of my desk also got me to clean up the growing rats nest of ethernet and usb cables. I’ve finally got a really good home development environment. Now if I could only develop something….

If you’re a fan of the adventure game genre and mystery novels, I’d recommend checking out Hotel Dusk. Billed as an interactive mystery novel, it plays like a Dashiell Hammet novel reads, and looks like a very well drawn graphic novel.

Your main character is Kyle Hyde, an ex-NYPD turned door-to-door salesman on the West Coast. Kyle’s boss has a side business where “he finds things that people don’t want to be found.” Not exactly kosher sounding. Kyle’s change of fortune occurred three years before the start of the game, when his partner, Bradley, betrayed both Kyle and the department. Bradley has since disappeared and Kyle has been on his trail ever since.

Kyle finds himself at a dive called Hotel Dusk, where it seems most of the guest and staff have something to hide. Some might even have information on Bradley. The intrigue is sufficient to restart, Kyle’s dormant detective urges and you set out to investigate what’s going on in this hotel.

You play the game by walking around the hotel, interrogating people, making yourself useful and solving puzzles. The game tries to be somewhat realistic. For instance, many puzzles have multiple solutions that are analogous to the ones you find in real life. Also, if you attempt to grill your subject to hard, they will quickly clamp up and deny you the information you need to find Bradley. On occasion, if you’re not careful, the proprietor of the hotel, Dunning Smith, will throw you out of the hotel. He won’t even give you your money back.

While gameplay is geared towards realism, the graphical style is geared towards mood. All the characters look like they were drawn by colored pencil. The sets are more hi-fidelity, which creates some contrast. The game designers did an equally good job of setting the mood of the game through the score. The score changes depending on what Kyle is doing. For instance, during interrogations, the score becomes lively and fast past. However, it’s slow and jazzy when he’s just chit-chatting.

Overall, I thought the game was excellently put-together and worth getting. One draw-back of the games attempt to duplicate a novel is that it is very linear suggesting that the game does not have a very good replay value. However, some depth is gained through a few side quest. Also, there appear to be different endings that are triggered by specific actions performed within the game. I haven’t played it twice yet, so I can’t give a definitive answer on that aspect.

One more point in it’s favor is that it’s a great gateway game. My wife, who general does not like video games, loved this one as well.