Yes, its a cutsie name, but The Bug Genie is a PHP bug tracking system that is the opposite of Trac in the best possible ways.

First of all you create a MySQL database and copy The Bug Genie files to your web server. Then you go to your website, where The Web Genie greets you with a short setup. At the end, it gives you an administrator login and password and you’re ready to go.

It’s that simple to set up. No command line required.

The help is built right into the system in the form of little question marks strategically placed that you can click on. They usually answer any beginner questions you’ll have.

How to create users? Well you can do it quite easily, but why bother? Just let your users sign themselves up with their email address and create an account. Just like WordPress.

It’s very powerful and has Subversion integration. Actually, for my purposes, it’s a bit too powerful for the minor issue tracking I need, but after having worked at Microsoft and using their bug tracking, The Bug Genie seems better. It’s certainly prettier, and prettier than everything else out there as well.

I predict great things for The Bug Genie for a lot of great reasons, but maybe for no other reason than nobody can set up any of the other bug trackers without dedicating their life to them.

]]> http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/08/forget-trac-the-bug-genie-is-awesome/feed/ 0 http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/07/trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk http://designoplasty.com/2009/09/07/trac-bug-tracking-software-is-junk/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:30:46 +0000 Matt http://designoplasty.com/?p=952

I have just spent many hours of my life I will never get back trying to get the Trac bug tracking software set up. This software is truly junk.

It’s not just that I can’t get it work, it’s that it is written as best it can to make users not be able to use it. Clearly some people get it to work, and I imagine this takes many man hours to accomplish.

I’m even using Trac auto installed by Dreamhost, so I don’t even have to think about unpacking things or anything like that, I should have a Trac that’s just ready to go, but no, there’s no such thing.

First thing I want to do is login with my first username and password, right. Well I don’t have a first username and password. And when I click the login link, it says something like this Trac is not set up for user authentication.

Now, isn’t that just screaming to people “don’t use me!”? I mean, isn’t that the first thing everyone would want to do? Log in? Create users? But not with Trac, you have to prove to them that you’re worthy of using Trac. You do this by following many complex methods of manually creating a password file and then using various other methods of begging Trac to use it. This means configuring Apache and Trac, and if you’re lucky, various other Trac plugins.

And if you thought getting Trac to work was hard, just wait till you try to install a plugin! That’s another thing they’ve royally messed up.

I never got it to work. I never got a single user or password and never saw a login page. I also never saw a place where I might enter a bug, and remember, that was the whole purpose of doing this.

At this point I can say without doubt that Trac is not for you. It’s not for anyone. Don’t encourage them and don’t use the software. When you can log in (through the web) immediately after installing and create users, then maybe. But right now, it’s just junk. Trac is just a joke all the Trac developers play on their victims, don’t fall for it.

Don’t do it!

Once you turn it on, there’s no getting rid of it. It’s a bug, but unselecting the check box will no do it.

At some point I also went into Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts and pressed the “Restore Defaults” button because it said there were some conflicts. I don’t have any special keyboard shortcuts set up, so I just wanted the defaults. But now check out these two screenshots.

Command-Space now means “Select the previous input source.”

Control-Space now means “Show Spotlight search field.”

Huh? For my entire Spotlight history Command-Space has brought up the search field. But now it’s changed to Control-Space because of input sources? These screen shots show I’m not hallucinating, but can someone please commiserate with me or at least confirm that this is bizarre?

When I bought a MacBook a while ago, I got an HP C4580 printer/scanner for free. I didn’t really need a printer, but the idea of a wireless scanner enticed me. Well, once you get the printer out of the box and start reading HP’s instructions, you quickly just give up on ever even trying to set it up. The instructions are so vague, that I wasn’t sure that I would even be able to scan wirelessly if I got it set up correctly. So the printer has been just sitting there ever since I got my laptop.

After I read that Snow Leopard would download printer drivers automatically, I decided to plug the printer into my laptop just to see. It did recognize the printer immediately, but since I have no need for clunky wired printing I just looked around for a way to set up the wireless. There wasn’t a way that was immediately apparent.

I guess for some reason I decided to do a Google search to see if there was a way I just wasn’t seeing. It turns out there was, but you never even need to use the USB cable. The way is shown in this video.

I followed these instructions and never downloaded a driver or installed any HP software. In fact some instructions I read said “please do not try to install any printer software you may have.” Next thing you know I had the printer set up to print and scan wirelessly from two computers. No clunky HP software installed!

The scanning in Snow Leopard is truly awesome. Wireless makes it so much better. I always said I would never scan, it’s too tedious. But now, I might just scan some photos in. It’s not painful, for the first time in my entire life the process of scanning photos is not painful. Good job Snow Leopard!

After installing Snow Leopard on my other machine and thinking I found all the kinks my MacBook still won’t connect to a MySQL database from a WordPress installation. I have followed all the instructions, I have found more instructions online and figured those out.

I can connect to my mysql database from either the command line or a database utility program.

My webserver seems to be running fine with php enabled.

But WordPress just won’t work. Not a big deal? My business is WordPress and this particular machine has at least 10 different WordPress installations on it and none of them work. I literally can’t work on anything for my customers at this point.

Also there’s nothing in the error logs to give me any hint as to what’s happening.

Fun!

Update:

Oh My God! For Snow Leopard on my MacBook apparently the host in wp-config.php needs to be ‘localhost’ instead of ‘127.0.0.1′. On Leopard it was exactly the opposite. But either should work fine. Whatever. And ‘127.0.0.1′ works fine on my other machine running Snow Leopard. This is just truly junk.

I know I tried this before but that my have been before I did all the other MySQL wrangling. Whatever.

Update:

I just checked and my other machine also requires ‘localhost’ and will not work with ‘127.0.0.1′. However, I don’t remember changing it. It must have either worked all along on that machine or I changed it in passing. Bizarre.

Pre Snow Leopard Installation Warning

Be sure to back up your

/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

file before you install Snow Leopard. It is going to replace that file without backing up the one you had before. That is not a file that’s included in Time Machine backups.

Post Snow Leopard Tasks

1. First you need to copy the vhosts file you saved back where it belongs. Otherwise you need to recreate your entries. Luckily I had two computers with this setup so I had the one on the other computer to look at for reference.

2. Next, MySQL probably won’t be working. In my case the was because the Snow Leopard install deleted the

   /usr/local/mysql

   symbolic link to my current version of MySQL. You just need to replace this using the following terminal commands:

   cd /usr/local
   sudo ln -s mysql-5.1.30-osx10.5-x86 mysql

   Your current version of MySQL will of course probably be different than that, but you get the idea.

3. There is a bizarre issue where Snow Leopard deletes the php.ini or reacts differently if it isn’t there. The symptom is that when viewing websites on your local server PHP will complain about not having a time zone set. This web page has the solution for that, and it’s not difficult, but long enough that I don’t want to repeat it here.

For me, these three steps got me working again. Hopefully they will work for you or will at least get you started. Good luck.

I feel a little nervous like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing. And I know what it is. Buying and installing Snow Leopard!

I kind of feel like doing a complete reinstall, but I have so much stuff I don’t know if that would be possible. And even if it was possible, I don’t know if I’d want to do it. It would take a lot of time between fonts and photos, applications and subversion repositories. If there’s an option to completely reinstall and pull data from time machine, then maybe.

With Windows I always wanted to install fresh. But the truth is, with the Mac, I really don’t see any need for it. My computer hasn’t slowed down at all. It doesn’t feel crusty. But actually that’s it. It’s kind of crusty in a whole different way. It’s been so long since I’ve had to reinstall I don’t have my process down for doing so. It makes me feel a little uneasy. How funny.

Intuit Website Creator 2009 is very popular on Amazon right now. I think this is for two reasons. One is that it is a sort of iWeb (part of iLife on the Mac) for the PC. It allows people to create websites without having to anything about HTML or CSS. The other reason is that, at least at this moment, it seems to be very steeply discounted.

Amazon: Intuit Website Creator 2009

Firefox has released a security update. Firefox isn’t my primary browser, that’s Safari, so sometimes I feel like there’s a security update available every time I open Firefox or Opera.

Of course I test on them, though. I like that there are multiple browsers now, it’s a much healthier community. And they’re all better than Internet Explorer. Open source also seems to really work for browsers. I think any time you need to conform to standards, your product should be open source. If there’s predefined work that people can do for free, by all means, allow them to do it! I wonder if Microsoft is aware of that concept?

One thing I would like is for Firefox to render form elements, such as text inputs, the same as other browsers. Firefox adds some space around them that’s not styleable, so firefox inputs are always a couple of pixels bigger than they are in other browsers.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 today. I downloaded it and am really hopeful that, well, basically that it will cause less trouble in my life than previous versions.

I have a long history with Internet Explorer. In some ways it’s kind of weird to be watching it from afar. The entire Internet Explorer group, including me, started to work on another project right after IE6. I think only one or two people still work on it that worked on it with me in the IE6 days. I have to admit, I feel sentimental about those times.

The goals are different, too. When I worked on it, standards were important, but there wasn’t much competition. When people say IE wasn’t standards compliant, that wasn’t because we weren’t trying, it was mostly because there just wasn’t another point of reference. Things were different from IE7 on, and I’m sure it must have been a challenge to transform an engine toward standards compliance and not have as much freedom. I’m sure there were a couple of small, but important bugs that required huge changes.

Anyway, congratulations, and here’s to standards!

I thought Painter was near death. Corel is in an odd place. They are a company that is clearly working through some issues. But thankfully they have released Painter 11. I’m very very glad to see the png support, which was oddly missing in previous versions.

I also hope that they have started to fix up the product. Painter 10 works, but it just feels very much like a product where all the good developers left and took all the knowledge with them, especially on the Mac. Like there’s not even anyone left to say, “Okay, regardless of features, our user interface is very clunky. Let’s fix that.”

This version drops OS X 10.3 support, so hopefully that means they’ve updated their basic user interface a bit. I’ll post more about it after I buy it. With Safari 4 beta also released today there’s a lot to think about!