After several weeks of downtime my server is finally back online. My colo provider decided to close their doors on Wednesday (Nov 17th, 2003) and gave me a couple hours notice which wasn’t enough to do anything useful. I decided to take the opportunity to rebuild my server to be a bit cleaner and ship it up to Tera-Byte in Edmonton.

The server is still the same hardware but it is now running OpenBSD 3.4: qmail, bincimap, apache, vmailmgr.

I’ve often been looking for decent issue tracking software that met the following criteria:

• easy to install (ie. not bugzilla)
• free
• simple to use and administer (not so many required fields, etc)
• simple reports of issues assigned to me
• complete audit log on issues
• ideally integrates with CVS so I can tag commits to issues
• web based (without using crazy browser specific crap)

Well today I came across a phenomenal project called cvstrac which meets all my criteria and more. It is unbelievable simple and slick.

The install was simply a matter of downloading the prebuilt Linux binary from the website and running one command to initialize the database and another to start it up in standalone server mode.

It is based around sqlite and includes that inside the binary so it is truely self contained. It’s very fast in its standalone mode but it can also run as a CGI.

It integrates very seemlessly with CVS and allows you to easily tag commits in your issues. It also includes a WIKI for documenting features / development and that also allows linking to issues or commits. It’s a very simple UI and it all just works really well! WOW!

We had an awesome weekend. On Saturday Anji, Kailey and I went to Erika’s birthday party. It was a great chance to see many of our friends from University. We sat around and talked for ages while eating munchies (everyone brought tonnes of good food – Anji made Mars Bar Squares). Towards the end of the evening we started playing Taboo which was a lot of fun, even with 16 players.

That evening Anji, Kailey and I headed over to her parents new house which isn’t moved into quite yet and spent the weekend. There is no furniture or anything like that but we dragged along sleeping bags, Kailey’s travel bed, and some food and it was a nice relaxing evening and Sunday morning. It was really nice being away from our computers and todo lists and just relaxing.

Sunday evening Pam and Ryan invited us over to their place and they cooked up some very tasty Pizzas. Again we sat and chatted for ages and eventually settled on playing Scattegories for a few rounds. Another good game.

So I was playing a bit more with the Python.NET beta and it’s very cool. I wrote the following class library in C# and compiled it to testlib.dll.

using System;
namespace testlib
{
	public class TestClass
	{
		private int mNum;
		public TestClass()
		{
			mNum = 1;
		}
		public void inc()
		{
			mNum += 1;
		}
		public void PrintNum()
		{
			System.Console.WriteLine(mNum);
		}
		public static void StaticTest()
		{
			System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
		}
	}
}

Now if I copy the testlib.dll to the Python.NET directory I can do the following:

>>> from CLR.testlib import TestClass
>>> c = TestClass()
>>> c.PrintNum()
1
>>> for i in range(100): c.inc()
>>> c.PrintNum()
101
>>> c.StaticTest()
Hello World
>>> TestClass.StaticTest()
Hello World
>>> dir(c)
['Equals', 'Finalize', 'GetHashCode', 'GetType', 'MemberwiseClone',
'PrintNum','ReferenceEquals', 'StaticTest', 'ToString', '__call__',
'__class__', '__cmp__','__delattr__', '__delitem__', '__doc__',
'__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__iter__',
'__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__',
'__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__str__', 'inc']

Very cool! Again this seems like a really handy way to test .NET assemblies by poking and proding them at runtime.