I’m already a fan.

I’ll of course do a full review once I’ve completed it, which, based on my reading habits of late, should be about 11:00 PM tonight. I jest, of course – I have actual work to do, work work, not the work of disentangling Gaddis’ language of counterfeiting and futures and inheritances and the salvation of art in a world absent all semblance of order.

Speaking of salvation, I’m operating under the assumption (today, at any rate) that salvation comes in small doses, not big advances. The Pacific fleet won the war island-by-island, after all, and by the time the Big One was dropped, it was surely all over anyway. So, measured steps. Lifted eyes. Burdens eased, and recognized, and internal commentary re: same reinforcing the stupendous opportunity I’ve been given (actually, plural: opportunities!). Productivity measured breath-by-breath, beat-by-beat as my Bodyrox station on Pandora goads me ever along.

A beautiful Saturday! I ran this morning, sagging slightly at the start from creaky 38-year old knees, but warmth and purpose warmed up those patellar tendons within a half-mile.

Now comfortably ensconced at a Tully’s coffee, laptop and cappuccino and iPhone all within easy reach, taking those short steps.

Have a wonderful day!

Me at Victrola Coffee, doing a little coding and blogging and reading and such.  February 7th, 2010.

When talking bug tracking systems, the first question to ask is: self-hosted or SaaS (Software as a Service)?  I call this the “mode” of the system. The pros and cons of each are summarized below:

The next question to ask is: how much are you willing to pay?  For many organizations, especially smaller ones, the correct (and reasonable) answer is “nothing.”  This is not a severe restriction when talking bug tracking, as there are many free/open source offerings available.  In fact, many of the so-called “enterprise” offerings provide a free version for small software teams; the cutoff is generally around 5-10 users, although it can be as small as 2 or as high as 25.

The Master Mega-Super Comparison Table

The following table lists a representative selection of many of the common issue-tracking systems.   Some of them are pure bug tracking systems (identified by the “Standalone?” column, whereas most of them are part of a broader suite of project tracking tools.

We can redraw the large table listed above based on the two primary criteria I described above, the “mode”, and the cost:

It’s almost unfair to put Unfuddle in the “paid” column, as the cost per user per month is so low compared to the other systems.

My Personal Experience

I’ve used the following systems for bug tracking on various projects:

• SharePoint
• Trac
• FogBugz
• Pivotal Tracker
• Jira
• Unfuddle

As a pure bug-tracking system, FogBugz wins hands down for its ease of use.  Jira is powerful and configurable, but its sheer number of features and complex UI make it a second choice.  SharePoint is functional and pretty easy to set up out of the box, but its functional capabilities as a bug tracker are fairly basic – kind of like a shared spreadsheet on steroids.  I like Pivotal Tracker a lot, but its primary purpose is not bug tracking, but iteration management on agile projects, and so you have to “buy in” to their way of doing things if you want to make most effective use of the product.  Trac?  I didn’t like Trac all that much.  The UI was clunky, IMHO, and didn’t give me anything that the better competitors offered.  Unfuddle is nice, simple, and clean, but lacks some of the power-user features present in the heavier products.

The Microsoft Factor

Should a self-hosted solution be required, my friend has a tepid but justified preference for a solution that interoperates well with Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server, based on previous architectural investments.  That need would tend to favor the two .NET-specific self-hosted open-source solutions, namely BugTracker.NET and BugNET.  Of the two, BugNET seems to me to have a superior interface, but BugTracker.NET has a longer history and a more active release history.  Hm.

Final Recommendation

I have to admit a strong preference for outsourcing non-core functions.  The software industry is definitely architecting its solutions to support that model, what with all the talk about application service providers, which became talk about SaaS, and which is now talk about cloud computing.  Move your stuff to the cloud; let someone else worry (for the most part) about the nuts and bolts of system administration, leaving you free to do whatever it is that you are excellent at.

Given that background statement, I would recommend FogBugz, at $25/user/month, as my first choice.  You can be up and running in literally minutes, and your ongoing maintenance costs are virtually zero.  The interface is the best in the class, and the vendor is a first-rate software organization run by one of the leading software development gurus out there.

If the solution absolutely, positively had to be free, I would go with BugTracker.NET.  The setup and configuration of this particular product look to be pretty minimal for a Microsoft shop, and although you’re sacrificing a lot in usability, you do have the cost advantage.

I spent most of the day talking with some very interesting people about choice, hope, change, and control.  One effect of such lively, far-reaching discussion is that it urges – one might say forces – a sense of renewed perspective.  Items beyond one’s control recede to the side stage; items that one can control assume a more central position.  I found it interesting that this phenomenon is the same as that I’ve observed recently while actively journaling.  Perhaps just the act of paying careful attention – via written word or active conversation – is the catalyst for enhancing and maintaining perspective.

I used to be a very interested observer of clouds.  I always got some sense of relief, pleasure, or euphoria out of a broad diverse white vista spreading out for miles above my head.  I would occasionally take photos of interesting cloud formations.  Over the last few years I’ve lost that pleasure.  Clouds became part of the rest of the landscape – nothing special.  I’ve missed that.  I’ve occasionally taken it as a metaphor for adulthood, assuming that we lose the ability to take private, boyish pleasure in everyday things, to make them our own, to imbue them with secret meanings and metaphors, to uniquely identify ourselves by those different, innocuous interests we take in things.  “I like clouds” was something I could always say about myself through most of my life.

So when I saw your face, dark and looming, full of stormy portent, I was of two minds.  A reminder of things lost for good in adulthood, or an indication of wishful thinking for things past?  Fear of attempting to reclaim past feelings?  All? Neither?  Who can tell?  All I can say for sure was that I observed this particular dark cloudbank with a sense of perspective that I’ve lacked recently.   Instead of immediacy, I felt an appropriate distance.  Instead of poignancy, I felt calm.  Instead of numbness, I felt…strangely normal.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s hard to gauge progress in anything based on a single day.  Unless, one supposes, you’re one of those bugs whose entire lifespan is measured in hours.  Golf has four days to determine outcomes.  The EPL has 40.  Baseball has 162.  Life?  Life should be measured in months or years, not days, so it’s hard to put too much credence in the results of a single day, particularly when the signals one received are so uncertainly interpreted.  However, as days go recently, this one was good.  That’s been a big ask lately, but I was happy to have it.

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

That last sentence could describe the whole book thus far.

I’m only a quarter of the way through but just had to share my early love for this novel. Roth uses such evocative phrases – “the contamination of desire” is wonderful – that I will be sure to read his other novels when finished with The Human Stain.

is aimed at providing a widely useful set of additional cmdlets, providers, aliases, filters, functions and scripts for Windows PowerShell that members of the community have expressed interest in.

Short answer: you want this, if you’re a PowerShell user. However, there are some initial gotchas that may cause you problems. I’m running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit, and had to do a bit of tweaking to get the install working properly. Here are the notes from my session:

First, go to the PSCX website to get the latest download (version 1.1.1 at the time of this writing).

Next, run the following script one time in the ISE:

$path = "$((get-pssnapin -r pscx).applicationbase)\typedata\filesystem.ps1xml"
$config = [xml](gc $path)
$config.Types.removechild($config.Types.Type[1])
$config.get_outerXML() > $path
update-typedata

Close the ISE and relaunch it.

You’ll see a bunch of errors like the following:

Set-Alias : Alias is not writeable because alias measure is read-only or constant and cannot be written to.

For some reason, some of the PSCX aliases are set to read-only and need the -Force parameter to get them to work.

Instructions for fixing each of the issues:

C:\Program Files\PowerShell Community Extensions\Profile\GenericAliases.ps1
Line 8
Set-PscxAlias measure MeasureObject -Force

C:\Program Files\PowerShell Community Extensions\Profile\PscxAliases.ps1
Line 28
Set-PscxAlias start Start-Process -Force

C:\Program Files\PowerShell Community Extensions\Profile\Debug.ps1
Line 72
set-alias gcs Get-CallStack -Option AllScope -Description "PSCX function alias" -Force
Line 89
set-alias ebp Enable-Breakpoints -Option AllScope -Description "PSCX function alias" -Force
Line 103
set-alias dbp Disable-Breakpoints -Option AllScope -Description "PSCX function alias" -Force

Found this gem on there today: “Slogan Fail”. Take a gander and prepare to ride the roflcopter!

First: what’s a good goal?  There’s the well-known dictum about SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timeboxed (the terminology varies somewhat, but that’s a typical construction).

So let’s take my mystery goal and apply the SMART test.

Specific?  Oh, very.  I have it all laid out perfectly in my mind.

Measurable?  Yes, any objective observer could determine if this goal was achieved or not.

Achievable?  This is thornier.  I mentioned that I didn’t know how much my efforts could actually contribute to success – it depends in large part on other people – some specific, some general.

Realistic?  Again, I’m not quite sure.  I hope – with every ounce of my being – that this goal is realistic, but there’s a lot that could go wrong, and I’m not privy to all of the information necessary to really know if this thing can be done.

Timeboxed?  A big FAIL on this one. I have no idea what the best timeframe would be, and again, it depends on other people.

So, looking back over this analysis, how could I make sure the goal is realistic?  Hm. I could start asking questions about those areas of which I’m currently ignorant.  Sometimes, however, and with some people, that gets a little touchy, particularly if one is dealing with sensitive information.  And I wonder – how important is it for a goal to be 100% realistic anyway?  Some of humankind’s most remarkable achievements – climbing Mt. Everest, landing a man on the moon, the perfect World Series game – probably seemed unrealistic to most observers.  The important part was that the participants believed they could do it.

Maybe the important part is either (a) absence of doubt on the part of the goal-setter, or (b) the absolute desire for the outcome.  Or both.

Let’s move on to timeboxed.  Could I set a date by which, without fail, I could achieve this goal, assuming all other parts came together?  Thinking about it, I suppose I could.  The rationale for this characteristic in the SMART system is to get your ass off the couch and start working toward the goal.  I read a recent article in Newsweek magazine titled “Why We Procrastinate and How to Stop that describes the phenomenon of “psychological distance” the notion that vague/abstract tasks are easier to put off than specific/concrete tasks. This is at the root of the S and M in the SMART process, but the article also talks about you can also consider a timebox – “I will finish this task by 12:31 PM on Monday, May 25th” – as another way to get your task into the specific/concrete arena.

You’ll notice that throughout this post I haven’t mentioned what my goal was.  Some of those close to me will be able to guess, but the point I’m trying to make is about goals in general.  My next mental excursion may talk about how different types of goals – career, fitness, relationship, hobbies – may need to be treated differently than the classic SMART definition would have us operate.

You can adjust to these rapid-fire (and sometimes unwelcome) changes in one of two ways. I’ll call this the Parable of the Boat and the Butterfly.

[...]

One day, after a long period of calm weather, the wind started gusting.  Over the course of the morning, the wind blew harder and harder.  It shook the houses.  It knocked over recycle bins and sent newspapers flying down the street.  No one in town had ever seen wind like this.

At the harbor the wind caused huge waves to crush into the piers, which rattled the docks and sent the merchant fisherman scrambling for cover.  Out in the middle of the harbor, a lone boat which had become unmoored floated amidst the huge waves.  But despite the howling wind and roaring waves, the boat did not capsize.  It flowed with the forces acting on it.  When the waves crested, the boat rose.  When a trough came, the boat dipped.  Having no sail and no hand on the tiller, the boat floated where it would, not fighting the chaos but temporarily merging with it.

At one precise moment, a butterfly, blown in from who knows where, was fluttering out at sea.  The butterfly kept flapping his wings, trying – vainly – to go in this direction or that direction, but was stymied at every attempt by the overwhelming power of the wind.  The butterfly flapped left – and went straight.  He flapped right – and went straight.  Up and down – he went straight.  He tried so hard to go in different directions other than with the prevailing wind that he finally tired and, unable to keep himself aloft, folded his wings in and was crushed into the roiling waters.

Eventually the wind died down, and the little boat was recovered and brought back to land by the fishermen.  Aside from getting wet, there was no damage.

End of parable.