Codename “Burlan”

To make matters easier for me in my internal code tracking and analysis systems, I’ve code named active development projects. Burlan is a Dacian word meaning “spout” or “water pipe” and is the codename for Bugdar 1.1.

Speaking of Burlan, work continues rather steadily on the project. I’ve been focusing my efforts on the administrative section and implementing APIs and creating a new navigation system (well, the same type of one that exists in Edoc 2). This will lead to the implementation of numerous features that all require admin-side options (like sorting and column arrangement).

And if you have been watching the bug tracker, you’ll notice that Atom syndication has been added!

Working Away

Over the past few days, I’ve been merrily working away at features for Bugdar 1.1. If you haven’t been checking the bug tracker, I’ve already knocked off four features… including notifications.

At the moment, the emails are not very pretty or well-written, but they are sent at the right times. That will all be cleaned up later. I don’t think, however, I’ll add HTML emails for 1.1. That’s something that can be done at a later point.

Amazing Mac Software

Per the request of a few switcher friends, I’m posting great Mac software that I use in my regular day-to-day life:

• BBEdit – Even though it does look a tad retro, it’s an amazing text editor that does everything I want and then some. Other editors do have some similar big-name features but the fact that BBEdit has everything a text editor needs is just perfect. From snipits, to a full HTML tag library, to HTML Tidy, to the most amazing search tool ever made, to all kinds of text-processing features, BBEdit has everything.
• Yojimbo – Made by the same great people who wrote BBEdit, Yojimbo is a personal information manager. It can hold PDFs, notes, passwords, and serial numbers. I previous used Apple’s Keychain for the last two, but things got all muddied because of auto-save information, etc. Yojimbo may not be feature-heavy, but it does things right. It’s simple, has Spotlight integration, and just quite simply works without having to give it a second thought.
• Quicksilver – A lot of people are just now starting to talk about QuickSilver, but it has been a favourite of mine for quite a while. It’s hard to explain this application, but basically, it allows you to control your entire computer without ever having to navigate via mouse. It has stunning visual effects and what’s great is that you can always find new ways to use it with plugins.
• NewsFire – NewFire is an RSS reader that just looks and feels like it belongs on the Mac. Unlike other readers, there’s no toolbar buttons or complex preferences. It just displays the information in a way that’s quick-to-access and very clean. This is the kind of application that takes five minutes to learn and then you’re off–no reading a manual or help files necessary. It’s a great alternative to Safari which has a tendency to add duplicate items on frequently-updated feeds.
• Synergy – Quite possibly the best $5 I’ve ever spent on shareware. There’s a lot of applications that allow you to control iTunes via the keyboard, but this is the best one that I’ve found. It fetches album art covers from Amazon, too!
• SpamSieve – If Apple’s junk mail filtering doesn’t do enough for your inbox, take a look at this application. Since training it, I’ve had absolutely no spam reach my inbox and only the rare false positive. Currently, it sits at 99.8% accuracy and it’s been that way for over a year.
• SSHKeychain – It crashes occasionally but it’s usefulness is far more important. SSHKeychain will load and save your SSH keys to allow password-less connection to remote servers. It’s essential for me because this is how I backup a lot of my things with CRON.
• SuperDuper! – I used to use EMZ/Dantz’s Retrospect backup to perform the incredibly important function of nightly backups (yes, nightly). However, in the now-famous comparison of backup software (which I happen to have lost the link for), SuperDuper came out on top. I also changed because SuperDuper allows you to clone your entire drive so you have a bootable backup in case the stuff hits the fan. All you do is change your startup volume and go (it also makes testing your backups much easier).
• Awaken – What’s better than waking up on a Monday morning than getting your favourite tunes played to your groggy self? Awake in an alarm clock that plays iTunes playlists when it wakes you (and your computer) up from sleep. You can schedule playlists for different days and times (for instance, I make sure “Walking on Sunshine” is played on Monday mornings to help take the edge off of having to go back to school).

Of course, Apple Mail, Adium, Interarchy, Photoshop, Xcode, MS Office 2004, and Keynote are all essential applications, but those are all fairly common and well-known.

Notifications Underway

Over the past two days, I’ve been working on one of the biggest features for Bugdar 1.1, the notification system. Luckily, the API system in 1.1 makes implementing this rather straightforward because all the change data is in two arrays (this also made the new logging system much easier).

As a user, you can control the types of email you get based on your relation to the bug (reporter, voter, etc.).

At the moment, I’m implementing the various notice messages for editreport.php. I still have to work on the code for new comments and attachments, but it’s getting there.

This is #11 for your information :).

Work Continues

Just because I haven’t updated the blog in a few weeks does not mean that Bugdar is being left unattended. For the past week or two, I’ve been creating a bunch of APIs and implementing them. This has significantly cleaned up the user-side logic and I’ve caught a few bugs doing it, too.

When I was creating these APIs and reworking the code, I also decided to rewrite the logging mechanism. One of my least favourite things about the 1.0.x branch was this logging system. It was extremely unwieldily and very hard to understand and get right. The new system, however, is much, much, much cleaner and should work better while slightly boosting performance.

I’m currently finishing off implementing the APIs and cleaning up the code (I’m going to be tackling the message reporter/error manager) and then features can finally be added.