I've been working on some changes to mtrack (a software development tracker implemented in PHP) this weekend, with a focus on improving the user experience for the mtrack administrator. To be brutally honest, it was at best a meagre experience for the administrator, but now things are better. They're still not perfect, but it should be a low enough bar to encourage more folks to play with mtrack. I've also spent a little bit of effort to add some caching to improve performance for certain pages.

For those that have tried it in the past, there's a ...

Another OSCON is done. As usual, it was a great mix of folks and ideas across many different areas of OpenSource technology.

The most valuable track at these conferences (for me, at least) has become the hallway track. This is due in-part to my becoming a big-headed know-it-all; you pick up a lot of knowledge after you been to a good number of these conferences/conventions. But it is really important to me to be able to converse with fellow OpenSourcerors, whether they are working on the tools that I use on a daily basis or are working ...

Update: the session is complete; you can find the slides on slideshare.net and the code on bitbucket

I'm speaking at OSCON again with another new topic. This year, I'm spreading the news about Gimli, a Server Process Monitoring and Fault Analysis framework that I built at Message Systems and will be sharing with the world at OSCON.

In a nutshell, Gimli will supervise a process and capture an extensive crash trace (using DWARF 3 debugging information if possible) if the process crashes or wedges, and then restarts the process.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on future development in mtrack, and solicit some feedback. Some of these are driven directly from user requests, and others are things that I've been thinking about on-and-off for a little while.

I really want to hear your thoughts, whether they relate to ideas and feature suggestions, or whether you have some experience or anecdotes on these topics.

Custom Fields

I was hoping to avoid having to enable this as a feature, as I find the implementation approach taken in the original Trac to be sub-optimal, both ...

Update May 2010: This is one of my most popular blog entries, so it seems worthwhile to modernize it a little. I've added an example of a generic REST helper that I've been using in a couple of places below the original do_post_request function in this entry. Enjoy!

I don't think we do a very good job of evangelizing some of the nice things that the PHP streams layer does in the PHP manual, or even in general. At least, every time I search for the code snippet that allows you to do an HTTP POST ...

I'm letting thebrainroom.com lapse this year after holding it for 11 years. For those that weren't with me back then, The Brain Room was my consulting company, providing graphic and software design services.

When I joined OmniTI, I chose netevil.org to use for my blog in a kind of self-mocking move; I equated my efforts at taking over the world with superior software with the effectiveness of Dr. Evil. A lot of people thought I was styling myself after Dr. Evil, which wasn't quite right, but close enough :-)

Since I've been going ...

Some of the feedback and questions that I've gotten about mtrack were around making it easier to deploy and use in an open or public facing environment.

To that end, I've added support of OpenID authentication and bot detection via reCaptcha.

To enable these features is quite simple; for OpenID, add the following lines to your config.ini file:

[plugins]
MTrackAuth_OpenID =

You should also remove any other Auth plugins that you may have there, as how they interact with OpenID is not currently defined.

This will cause mtrack to keep users classes as anonymous until they either request to log-in ...

[Updated to add IRC and Google Groups links]

I don't know if it's just me, or whether everyone in software development finds issue tracking software frustrating and/or broken in some way.  They're all either way too complicated to set up, configure or use (the Bugzilla's or the Jira's), or have annoying "features" (such as Trac's you-lose-your-edits-if-someone-else-changed-something).

We've been using Trac at Message Systems for several years now and have been enjoying its pragmatic approach of keeping the interface simple but expressive; just enough structure to be helpful but not too much that it intrudes. We've added/modified a couple of plug-ins ...

Lukas is making another attempt at jumpstarting PDO development.  I welcome this effort, and will do what I can to help fill in details and make suggestions.  Unfortunately, I'm just way too busy with work to be able to commit to more than that.

I also wanted to share some of my thoughts on why PDO has been in a holding pattern for a while, so that more people are aware of it and can work to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The first thing to note is that the guts of PDO were hard to develop. The PHP ...

I've opened up the code behind EvilDesk, my Windows Shell replacement, and made it available on BitBucket under the terms of the GPLv2.

Enjoy!

http://bitbucket.org/wez/evildesk/