I selected activeCollab with the hope that the 1.0 release would be sufficient to manage the development of a series of software projects. Part of the requirement was bug tracking: we used tasks and task lists to track bugs with the hope of migrating them to the 1.0 version of activeCollab. Key to enabling activeCollab for bug tracking was the ability to attach comments to tasks. It was not an ideal solution but believed 1.0 would be worth the wait. Unfortunately, the wait was too long and we decided to transition to trac.

I wasn’t able to find any utility to move the tasks to trac so I decided to write my own, mostly as a collection of SQL code and offer them for those in a similar predicament. (more…)

I just purchased an ElmScan 5 OBD II wireless scan tool to peek into the dynamics of my engine. That tool, coupled with my Nokia N800 and some cool software called CarMan sent my mind wandering.

I am able to capture the engine load at a point in time. What if I calculate an average load for a commonly traveled route? I can then take variations of that route and determine which path minimizes the impact to the car. I could factor a lot of variables including time, distance, average engine load, gas consumption, frustration, etc. I could then determine a set of heuristics that could suggest the optimal path.

This could be useful for frequently traveled routes like to and from work daily. Or any other profession that does a fair amount of repetitive automobile travel. I believe the software could just sit there gathering information with little input from the user. This would allow it to collect a vast amunt of info and make decent determintions based on user preferences.

Many of us with vacation homes don’t need to have full-time phone service at the second location. In fact, typically we only need it in one location at once. It would be great to have a little appliance that would allow us to share the service between the two locations.

If I have high-speed Internet access between the two homes this problem should be trivial to solve. All it takes is tunneling the dial tone across the Internet. How awesome it would be to have a box that I could plug in at home and connect my phone line and a network connection. Then, in the vacation home, I can take a sister appliance and plug into it a phone line and network connection. Even better would be some type of proximity configuration so the two appliances could discover and validate each other. The only task left after that is the tunneling of the dial tone and possibly dealing with being behind a NAT router, both of which are not difficult problems to solve.

I repeatedly see many examples of aspects of software making full 360° cycles over time. Recently surfacing is the command line interface and it is coming back. I’ve always been a fan of command line; it lends itself well to repetitive and programmatic practices and has excellent ability to maintain history and promote process improvement (if used correctly).

I’m often seen reverting to a Cygwin prompt (typically in an XTerm Window – another technology that has made a reappearance in the shape of AJAX) to get stuff done. Repeatable. Reusable. Reliable. Command line: It’s the new black. (The last sentence borrowed from the Information Week article).

I purchased and activated my iPhone without incident Friday (unlike a lot of others) but have not been very successful at getting some items to work the way I would prefer. One example is access to email. I’m hesitant to open the secure IMAP port (IMAPS, tcp port 993) and would never open IMAP (tcp port 143); I would prefer to connect at a port greater than 1024 but can’t seem to find any settings on my iPhone that permit this configuration. So, I obliged the iPhone and opened port 993 and could not get it to work. Looking at my application event log revealed the culprit: a bunch of errors for Source IMAP4SVC, Event ID 1051 – Unexpected error condition: call to function CEncryptCtx::CheckServerCert() resulted in error code 0x800cc801.

Turns out this is an easy fix; I didn’t have the certificate installed on my Exchange server (as I never configured IMAP or IMAPS for use). Right-clicking on the IMAP4 Virtual Server, clicking on the Certificate button on the Access tab and installing a Web Server certificate fixed the issue right away. Now I get to enjoy more functionality on the iPhone.