February 2, 2007: Groundhog Day and the Ralstons’ Anniversary

Dominica wanted it mentioned on SGL that she remembered the Ralstons’ Anniversary all on her own.

Wheaton had a really good post the other day talking about the terror hoax in Boston which was actually just a mistake by the city officials and the local Boston media trying to get some ratings by claiming that there was a hoax when there wasn’t. He makes the point, which is incredibly valid, that if the police, government, media, et all don’t stop crying wolf then there is going to be no way to ever deal with a real threat. It is the Boston media who are to blame mostly, it would appear, for elevating kids with toys to the status of terrorist. If this is what the media what to think terrorist look like then we will all get bored and start ignoring the media. Oh wait, too late.

People probably wonder what I read every day. Actually, you probably don’t but I figure that I might want to look back someday at what I read every day in February, 2007 so I am going to make a list. I get RSS feeds for Google News, Wil Wheaton don Net, Linux Today, OSNews, Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog (CEO and President of SUN Microsystems), The Old New Thing (by Raymond Chen of Microsoft), The Jedi Council Speaks, Joel on Software, Freshmeat (just a feed of new software as it releases), Google’s Testing Blog, Labor for the Harvest Blog, XKCD and Scott Adams’ Blog. I have recently added several IT news services like eWeek, InfoWorld, MSDN and TechNet. RSS is a beautiful thing. I actually am not using an RSS feed aggregator because I can’t install one easily at the office so I use the Wizz plug-in to Firefox to handle the RSS feeds.

I worked from home this morning so that I could spend some time with Oreo. He can’t go to daycare so he needs people to stay home with him as much as possible. He has never gotten used to being home alone. We are keeping the apartment pretty warm so that he doesn’t cough so much – he normally only coughs when he is breathing cold air or he is exerting himself like when he runs around. So I took him for a walk and fed him his lunch at eleven. Our concierge is going to pop in around noon to visit with him a little bit and see how he is doing. Then Dominica is planning on going home around half past one or maybe two this afternoon to walk him again. So at no point will he be alone for very long. We are hoping that he will be happy enough with that arrangement. Given that he is fighting off a cold or something he is probably going to be pretty happy to sleep quite a bit today.

The original plan had been for Dominica, Oreo and I to head for Geneseo tonight so that we could do more packing but the weather looks as though it is not going to be in our favour to head north tonight so we decided to just stay in Newark this weekend especially as Oreo is not feeling well and being up in Geneseo in very cold weather would not be likely to help his throat at all. It will do him good to have a relaxed weekend in Newark with nothing going on. I do need to work tomorrow anyway so being in Geneseo is not as useful for that as being in Newark is. Although I was looking forward to installing Microsoft Vista tomorrow and seeing how it works. I have Office 2007 ready to install as well although I played with that in Beta so I am pretty familiar with it already. For those of you who are die hard MS Office fans, I think that you will like Office 2007. It has quite some learning curve compared to past updates but I think that the new interface, in the long run, is going to make life easier for application support staff.

For the longest time I have been meaning to put a link on SGL but I keep forgetting about it. In Rye Harbor, NH there is a restaurant that my parents and I went to one time when we were vacationing there. We used to stop in the area on our way to Bar Harbor, ME. Strangely enough, Andy’s family used to stop in the same area and he was familiar with the same restaurant. Possibly more strange is that both of us remembered that restaurant. Once, probably in 1999, Andy and I both took a weekend off from work and drove all of the way out to New Hampshire, ate and drove back to Rochester. Maybe not a record setting food road trip but definitely in the top few. You can check out Ray’s Seafood Restaurant online.

Our BMW damage woes continue. After having our BMW get into an accident in the parking garage some months ago and after going through a lengthy process to track down someone who could actually deal with the situation and then after getting the damage appraisal we have since been running around for two months attempting to get the damage paid for even though Central Parking has admitted fault. They claimed in December to have sent us a check but we never received one. It was fishy as they never told us that they were going to send us a check. Awfully strange for them to just throw one in the mail and hope for the best. I spoke to them in January and they said that they would cancel the check that had never arrived and issue a new one this time to our actual home in Newark because the first check had been sent to a random address that they just assumed would be okay without ever checking with us. Then, after waiting several weeks, I called again as no check has ever arrived and now they tell us that they couldn’t send the second check as the first check was cashed. This is getting fishier and fishier. The whole situation sounds like a scam. If they were sending out a check why would they not have told us, ever, that they were agreeing to pay us until after the check was already “lost”? So next week they promise to produce a copy of the canceled check and we can see who they issued it to. While there is some remote possibility that we cashed the check somewhere I cannot imagine where or when. Especially as my bank account has had a total of four deposits since long before that check was ever supposedly issued. Pretty hard to hide an almost $1,000 deposit! So we will see. The BMW has been damaged from Central Parking for about five months now which is outrageous as we have only owned the car for about eight months! That car was supposed to be garaged this winter and we have not been able to do that either.

One of the guys at work introduced me to the Mvix device the other day. I haven’t had a chance to look at this device until today and boy was I surprised by how impressive this little baby is – at least on paper. My favourite features are Xvid and DivX video support, 1080p output, upscaling, direct DVD playing (no additional level of compression so you get them at full quality,) BYOH (bring your own hard drive,) DVI output, included remote control and Ogg Vorbis audio support! On paper this thing is truly amazing. And when I priced it out it was bad at all. Every shop that I looked at had it for $299. Add $199 for a good, large hard drive and for $500 you can have a potentially amazing how entertainment hub. Unfortunately it only holds a single hard drive which can be a problem as DVD content is often around 5GB in size and that means that a 750GB hard drive can only hold one hundred and fifty movies at full quality. And that is movies – if you start adding television shows it is going to plummet quickly. If you could fit four or five hard drives in it it would help a lot. But hard drives continue to outpace optical storage mechanisms so in a year or two a future Mvix model is sure to be able to hold a more impressive collection. But I would need a drive in the range of 5 terabytes to be able to store my current collection so I will need to continue to look for alternatives until drive sizes increase considerably. Ogg Vorbis support is very important to me as my entire music collection is currently converted to OV and ready to be transferred over to this player.

Even though I know that the BMW issue will be resolved and that this isn’t a big deal this is what I classify as a “blue event” – at least in my mind that is what I call it. No matter how much I know that this isn’t my fault and that there is nothing for me to do but wait and that it will all be fine and we will get to the bottom of it in no time and that even if things go horribly wrong and they try to take advantage of us that we have plenty of leverage and have nothing to worry about it still puts me in a funk. It sucks. I wish that I was better at taking these things in stride and not letting it bother me. It is too difficult to not become emotionally committed to these events and it isn’t good for you.

Construction going on at the office today reach a point where it was getting difficult to work. Not because of the noise level but because it felt like an earthquake and out monitors were bouncing all over the place.

A bit of my weekend work got canceled because other people were not ready for it. So that will give me more time to relax and to get caught up with other things. I am still working on getting the BugZilla installer working the way that I want but that is getting close.

I didn’t get to leave work until around seven.  I got home and Dominica and I immediately went out to Food for Life for dinner.  After dinner we went to the health club and got setup with our memberships which just started yesterday and got a little tour of some of the new stuff.  Then we went down to the basement and got a tour of the stuff that has been added down there that we haven’t seen yet like the bowling alley, media room and half basketball court.  The media room was supposed to have an XBOX 360 and a PS3 but they actually just got a PS2 which isn’t nearly as cool.  I am guessing that someone writing the announcement doesn’t know the difference and just wrote down whatever seemed popular.  So we plan to get some XBOX 360 and PS2 games so that we can use the media room.  We figure that since the systems are provided for us we should at least get some good games to play on them.  There are no good games provided for them.

February 1, 2007

I got up before seven this morning and got right to work. Oreo was hoping for a nice lie in today but no luck there. There is just too much needing to be done at the office to stay in bed late. So he trotted out to the living room and slept on the futon as close to me as he could get. He has totally taken over the futon as his very own, giant doggie bed.

At one point Oreo fell asleep on his back and started snoring so I looked over at him. His eyes were open but he was in deep REM sleep. I could watch his eyes darting from side to side wildly. At one moment he would be twitching each of his individual toes and his paws themselves. Then he would stop and switch to twitching his entire nose. Then he would move his jowels like he was grinding his teeth. Once in a while he would heave his chest in a silent bark. It is so cute when he does that.

We have discovered that we really love The Little Penguin Cabernet Savignon from South Eastern Australia. It is a very inexpensive but really awesome wine. I think that I like it a bit better than Yellow Tail from the same region. Today I also tried Black Swan. All three wines hail from the same region in Australia and all three sell for about the same price. They do vary and I think the The Little Penguin is my favourite.

Dad went over to the house in Geneseo today and retreived several more stacks of my computer and technology books that are destined for destruction. He took pictures of the stacks before carting them away and I have uploaded to the pictures to Flickr so that they can at least be remembered. If anyone wants any of them take a look at the pics and let me know as soon as possible. They will all be gone by Saturday morning most likely. There are a few that we are hoping to pull out and send to the school in Castile. Better than just throwing them away.

Oreo would appear to have come down with bronchitis – known as kennel cough in dogs. He started hacking and weezing around ten this morning when he got up. He has been extra tired all week and that would indicate that his little puppy body has been fighting the illness through its incubation period and now it has manifest itself. If it turns out that that is what he really has then he will probably take ten to fourteen days to get over it and he won’t be able to go fo doggie daycare all of that time which will be very sad for Oreo because he loves going there. It will also be extra hard on Dominica because she will have to come home during her lunch breaks during the week which is very exhausting for her.

I went over to Food for Life for lunch today. It was just a quick lunch. I called ahead so that I was able to get breakfast before they stopped serving it. The occidental pockets that they make are just amazing. It is sort of a spicy salmon egg roll but not quite.

I managed to convert a large number of Are You Being Served? episodes into XVid today. As we convert them we are able to ship the DVDs back to storage and get them out of our tiny apartment. Space is very much of the essence. And once we convert them they are so handy that it just makes sense. Since Dominica wasn’t using her computer during the day today I was able to keep the conversion process running in the background without interrupting me much at all.

I started packing today for the trip tomorrow. I have a plastic bin that came down with us the last voyage and it is getting filled right back up again with stuff to take in the other direction. We are starting to get pretty efficient at this.

Dominica came home and we enjoyed a relaxing evening and ordered in some pizza.  Nothing much to report tonight.  Oreo appears to be improving but it will probably be several days before we know if he is actually getting better or not.  We are hopeful that he just has a cold.

Since SGL posts a day after most of the time, I will take the opportunity to wish a Happy Anniversary to Art and Danielle Ralston!

January 31, 2007: Topsy Turvy Day

I went to bed at nine last night! Boy was I tired by the time I went to bed. I went to the A&P north of the office on the way home last night and picked up a few basics. Dominica cooked Chili last night and we actually just ate at home. I got home after seven and was in bed by nine so our night was very short. Oreo was tired after two days of daycare and was more than happy to go to bed early. Dominica stayed up watching DVDs.

I worked from home for a few hours this morning. I got a good nine hours of sleep last night and feel much better today.

Today, in an email to Dominica, I used the term “pre-existing plans.” As soon as I hit the send button I realized that people rarely have instantaneous plans or after-the-fact plans. The term “plan” is somewhat inclusive of the “pre-existing” bit.

My copies of Microsoft Vista arrived today. I won’t have a chance to play with that for some time and I have no idea when I will be able to squeeze it in or on what machine I will be able to install it. Maybe I will install it to the HP d325 desktop that I keep in Geneseo. That is probably the machine where the “least impact” will be felt should the move not be so good for a while. I am sure that Vista will be the way to go down the road but moving over in the first week is always scary. Of course, that is just the first week of consumer off-the-shelf availability. Vista Business Edition – which is what I got – has been around for months now and is widely used. Still, there is a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. But I am interested to see how it is working and whether there are any major changes to be looking for.

Here is something that Windows Vista users (or potential users) will want to know: If you use Vista with the Aero interface (the Aero interface is the only piece of Vista that anyone actually cares about and is the one piece that works for only a few small percentage of current computers) then your power consumption will increase dramatically as the CPU and the GPU will be driven hard all of the time just displaying your desktop. In a climate of constant moves towards power conservation this is a big step in the wrong direction. AMD and Intel main processors are using less and less power all of the time and all kinds of technology is coming out to make our computers more power efficient and then we go and make the desktop use the power hungry GPU (graphics processing unit) and throw all of that gain away. The upside will be that power consumption of the GPU will now be a focus for efficiency gains so we will look to companies like AMD (ATi) and nVidia to find ways to get great graphics processing without the incredibly power consumption.

In other cool computer news, Peugeot Citroen in France has chosen SUSE as their desktop and server OS and are installing 22,500 SUSE machines! That is a huge Linux installation.

I was planning on heading home on the early side but I got caught doing little work here and there until my big evening work hit and then I couldn’t leave. So it is a late night for me but that is okay – tomorrow is my work from home day and I was in on the late side this morning anyway.

Tonight’s plan is leftover chili from yesterday. Not only did we make a break yesterday and cook at home but today we are totally going crazy and eating leftovers! I can barely recognize us as the same people who lived in our apartment last week. It must be topsy-turvy day.

I didn’t get to leave the office until after eight 🙁 That is pretty late.

Today I learned about a musical instrument that I had never heard of before: the Tromba Marine. It is an extremely rare and very old musical instrument that is rumoured to sound soft of like a trumpet. I can only imagine that getting a marine trumpet today would be very expensive. I managed to find a book describing the instrument’s organology.

We ate dinner while watching a “new” show that we are trying out: Jack of All Trades.  Jack of All Trades is a seriously quirky show starring Bruce Campbell as Jack – a spy working for Thomas Jefferson and sent to a small island in the South Pacific to thwart the international army of Napoleon.  The show borders on the bizarre but clearly falls on the bizarre side but just barely.  I read in reviews of the show how they carefully used only characters who were alive in 1801 and could have, in theory, run into each other on this small island.  However, by the second or third episode they were using long dead characters like Benjamin Franklin and Blackbeard and obviously there was no research being done at all about the time period.  From the strangeness of the show it would be a stretch to imagine anyone doing any amount of historical research for such a loose comedy.  What would be the point?  The show is tough to get into but it is so completely “out there” that it is enjoyable and you just have to love Bruce.  The show was made in 2000 for syndication and only lasted a single season.  It is hard to imagine any television stations picking up the show.

We were off to bed around ten.  Tomorrow I will be working from home.

Two Days with FogBugz

I have been aware of FogBugz for some time as I am a regular reader of “Joel on Software”, have read several of Joel Spolsky’s books and have listened to interviewers with him from sources like IT Conversations. Andy and I have been looking for a good bug tracking package for some time and being daunted by the complexity and the difficulty with installing BugZilla we decided to look into FogBugz.

Andy took the first leap and bought himself a copy of FogBugz. Now I should point out that FogBugz is a commercial software package made by Fog Creek Software here in New York City. FogBugz is licensed on a “per-user” level which works very well and it should be noted that your initial purchase includes a license for the administrator and a license for one developer. The package also comes with a ninety day, no questions asked guarantee so that you can feel confident trying the package even though there is no simple trial download.

Once I had purchased the package I was able to choose to download the versions for Windows, Mac OS X (deprecated PowerPC only) or UNIX. I found this strange as Mac OS X is every bit as much UNIX as Linux, BSD or any other flavour that I could choose from and yet the Mac OS X version of the software is apparently completely different from the UNIX versions as it doesn’t even get supported on the same processor architecture. I selected the UNIX version as that is our primary platform and the one that we are able to support the best (we can also deploy small applications like this cost effectively on small, low resource virtual machines very cost effectively.)

Once I selected the UNIX option I was faced with a very small list of supported platforms. This is extra discouraging as the Mac OS X PowerPC platform is getting specific support instead of focusing on a good, broad UNIX strategy in general. The UNIX selection was dismal and disappointing. I don’t expect many supported platforms but from a product like this I have certain base expectations which include Red Hat RHEL 4 and Novell’s SUSE 10 as a bare minimum with hopefully support for Solaris 10 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. These are the four primary enterprise class platforms that the UNIX community is going to use with Solaris generally being used only by larger businesses. (I am not making any statements about the cost advantages of Linux vs. Solaris – I personally think that Solaris can be a great choice for small businesses as well I am just stating that small businesses seldom have Solaris servers.) For most businesses Red Hat RHEL 4 is the only platform needed and if this was the only supported platform I would understand. However, the actual support list is possibly the saddest list of supported platforms that I have ever seen from a commercial business application.

These are the UNIX platforms that are officially supported by Fog Creek Software for FogBugz: Red Hat 8 & 9 (these are very old version from the time when Red Hat did not have separate server and desktop editions showing Fog Creek’s penchant for running their products on desktop devices – current products supported by Red Hat are many generations newer than this with RHEL 2.1, 3 and 4 being the only reasonably new versions and only RHEL 4 being installed in most shops today and RHEL 5 due very soon), Fedora Core 3 and 4 (FC 6 is current and Fedora 7 is due very soon), Debian 3.0 (which has been classified by Debian as “archived”,) FreeBSD as new as 5.4 (but they are on the six series and have been for years now,) Gentoo 2005 (obviously not current), Mandrake 9.2 (Mandrake is no longer a product – it was superseded by Mandriva a few years ago), Mandriva 2005 (once again, old,) SUSE 8 and 9 (but not 10 which is the current series (10.2 is current) and 11 is due soon), Solaris 8, 9 and 10 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Of this entire list only Solaris and Ubuntu are considered to be serious and current server operating systems.

The problem with FogBugz on Solaris is that only Solaris on Sparc is supported and not Solaris and x86. This is one of the reasons why small companies tend not to use Solaris because its native platform is rather expensive and specialized. This severely limits the usefulness of Solaris as a platform for many customers. It is also completely out of character for Fog Creek to support one extremely enterprise platform while everything else is the total opposite. The only operating system option that remains as a sensible, broadly available platform is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. This is the one option that actually makes sense. Ubuntu is fairly popular as a server platform (although not in the league or Red Hat or SUSE it is at least a very serious choice) and version 6.06 LTS is the “enterprise” edition of Ubuntu that is both current and is available with support from its parent company Canonical. However, Ubuntu has yet to gain serious traction as a server OS and varies significantly from the common enterprise server Linux options so your usual IT staff will have a bit of a learning curve to switch over to it which is not what you want when deploying an important system such as your bug tracking system. You want simple and stable and you want something that fits into your current corporate architecture.

The other operating systems available under UNIX, that is not Solaris or Ubuntu which we saw are seldom good options unless you are big enough like us to have Sparc servers or have staff that have already standardized on the very unpopular Ubuntu Server, are all, except for FreeBSD, desktop targeted systems, especially Fedora (the “experimental” version of Red Hat) and Gentoo, and all are horribly out of date most of the options being several years old. So even those operating systems that once upon a time had the availability of support options from their makers (like Red Hat 9) have passed their End of Life by many years. No self-respecting systems administrator (or anyone who values their jobs) would ever take the kind of risk necessary to install such ancient, unsupported systems. These system are years past the end of their security and stability bug fixes and running them would leave your IT shop very vulnerable unnecessarily. This selection worried both Andy and I very much because we began this process by doubting the long term support and availability of the FogBugz product. Even if FogBugz continues to be available we have little confidence that Fog Creek will continue to make it available on modern, supported operating systems. We can only assume that Ubuntu 6.06 is the last version of Ubuntu that they will ever support and that in two and a half years when Canonical no longer supplies bug fixes to 6.06 that we will be stuck with no supported options whatsoever. Perhaps more worrisome is the impression that Fog Creek Software has moved into a “holding pattern” and is not making current software because they are no longer looking to innovate but just to get as much money as possible off of their past work and will just shut down when that is no longer paying enough to keep the lights on. The platform selection available is extremely indicative of a company on the verge of closure. If they do intend to be in business for a long time they are definitely not running the company that way.

In addition to poor operating system selection and horrendous version support, FogBugz also only supports Linux and FreeBSD operating systems on x86 32bit! I realize that many shops are currently still using 32bit Intel and AMD architecture systems and my plans are to perform my installation no a 32bit system but many shops have invested in AMD64 technology with Opteron processors or they follow-on Xeon processors with EM64T. In either case many IT departments have moved to 64bit and do not want to be installing 32bit products anew. More importantly many shops may have been planning on including FogBugz on a large intranet server that is pre-existing. Often today this server would be a 64bit server and FogBugz is not supported in this arrangement. Of course, no shop is running any of the “toy” operating systems that are supported by Fog Creek on any current production servers so the availability of existing web servers is irrelevant.
That was our first tip that something was wrong. Windows is the only broad platform that seems to have any serious level of support and it is, IMHO, clearly the wrong choice for a product such as this. Windows has its place but for a small application such as this it is not it. The only thing that would make me reconsider that position would be if FogBugz leveraged the very impressive ASP.NET platform available on Windows 2000 and 2003. That brings me to my next point.

Possibly the most troubling aspect of FogBugz is that the application is written in Microsoft’s very old Active Server Pages or ASP platform. ASP is available on Windows products still today but it is old, slow and no longer developed. It is also not significantly available on any other platform nor does anyone really care, as far as I know. I have never heard of ASP being considered a competitive advantage for any platform and I was not aware that any serious shop was still using the technology for new products. ASP was a moderately acceptable technology in its day but that day was many years ago and much of the current web based product architecture has matured since then and ASP was long ago relegated to the annals of web history. ASP is not a fast, stable or robust as ASP.NET. I have read Joel Spolsky’s defense of using ASP in Fog Creek products in the past and I have personally found his arguments to be thin and questionable. The thing that leads me to believe that ASP is even more of a bad choice than it seems is because ASP is not available, at least not natively, on Mac OS X or on any other flavour of UNIX.

On the UNIX platforms inclusive of Mac OS X FogBugz is written using PHP. PHP is a scripting language used on the server side and is very similar to ASP. The differences are that PHP is currently being developed, vastly more widely used, can be accelerated through many different means and is far more robust and feature rich. It is also platform agnostic so you can write in PHP for many platforms without needing to port your code or at least with only minor porting needs. Instead of writing FogBugz in PHP and making it available on every platform using the same code base Fog Creek writes FogBugz in ASP and has the PHP code generated by the ASP. It is good that they are using an automated build for this process but it tends to make one think that the PHP being generated is ancient and not kept up to date at all. It also tends to lead to limiting powerful PHP to the rather wispy feature set of ASP. (I can just imagine how embarrassing it is for Fog Creek when interviewing programming candidates when they tell them what tools they will be working with!) From the supported UNIX platform list it is clear that FogBugz only leverages features of PHP available up to version 4.0 which is quite old at this point and there are many significant enhancements that have occurred since then that should be being taken advantage of by any current production software of this nature.

Our final shock, prior to actually touching the software, was the list of supported databases. On the Windows family there are three options: Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Jet. SQL Server and MySQL are both big, enterprise class databases and are very reasonable options. Supporting Jet is just silly. Jet is a “toy” desktop database used by Access when the people working with Access don’t bother to go to SQL Server (which is freely available on every platform using Jet.) Jet does have the advantage of being file based instead of using a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) which means that for really tiny installations of FogBugz where you want it to take up as few resources as possible that FogBugz does not run a database server and instead just stores everything in a file. This would work for really tiny shops, I guess. But personally I would go to SQL Server even if for just a single developer. SQL Server 2005 Enterprise is free and a really great product and extremely easy to use.

In the end, all three supported databases are very reasonable options although if there is ten minutes being put into Jet I would question it. But whatever, features are good things. What I am surprised by is the lack of support for PostgreSQL which is less popular than MySQL but is still quite popular and gaining in popularity all of the time. PostgreSQL is an enterprise database that is often considered to be superior to MySQL and is freely available, like MySQL. It is common for software the supports one to support the other. With a good database abstraction layer supporting many databases (Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQLite, Ingres, etc.) would be very easy indeed. MySQL and PostgreSQL are very good option, though, because of their broad support, licensing terms, stability, features and cost. Both can be used for an unlimited number of users without having to pay per-user for licenses. In a large installation of FogBugz it could become a cost issue using Microsoft SQL Server as the user licenses would add up very quickly (in a large installation the free version would no longer be adequate and the enterprise scale and cost would be needed.) MySQL and PostgreSQL offer their enterprise features for free so smaller businesses can enjoy similar benefits to companies paying for expensive Microsoft SQL Server.

For these reasons I would have been happy to see broader database support as adding additional databases should be relatively easy. I am not asking for every database to be supported but one or two additional choices would have been nice. As it happens we would have chosen MySQL in either case but I can easily imagine shops that would have liked other options.

All of the factors that I have mentioned so far seem to point to FogBugz being designed thinking that it would not be purchased by serious IT shops with real systems administrators and real servers. It really appears that they are envisioning this as a product being purchased by people who are developing software at home, on Windows and aren’t particularly worried about stability, speed, features or availability. In which case making this product a web based product seems to be a strange choice. A Windows native application would seem to make more sense. It light of the issues that I have mentioned it is hard to imagine very many actual enterprises or serious businesses being willing to even evaluate this product as it would violate IT department standards in many situations and falls beyond the range of “best practices” anywhere.

Companies need to realize that a bug tracking system is almost always going to be used as a critical corporate function even if it is just being used for the software developers to use themselves. No developer is going to be effective if their bug database is hacked or lost or unavailable. The cost of the potential lost developer time is not worth the risk of a product like this, IMHO. I just find my developers to be highly valuable and using amateur software to support them is a risk that I cannot justify.

All in all it is a dim picture before we even attempt to install FogBugz. We chose Ubuntu 6.06 LTS running on VMWare Server 1.01 which means that we have to use MySQL as our database.

After finally getting a supported platform in place it was time to begin the actual process of installing FogBugz. FogBugz is a commercial product and have certain expectations for the installation of a product that I am purchasing, more or less, for its ease of installation. There are several competing packages on the market, more notably BugZilla, that are free and open source. The biggest drawback of using these packages is that we were unable to find one with a good installation system so this was a driving factor to try FogBugz.

Unfortunately we discovered that the installation process was not as simple and straightforward as one would hope. Instead of providing a standard RPM package or even a DEB as the supported platform is Debian based Ubuntu the software was only available as a tarball which is not a preferred distribution format for enterprise environments.

If the only issue with the distribution was that it was a tarball (a file that has been “tape archived” and then compressed) it would be relatively minor. Several major products are distributed this way although I recommend against it as enterprises like a simple, standard deployment system (like MSI on Windows) that allows for easy tracking of deployed applications. But the installation is not that simple and requires a bit of manual intervention, file copies and more.

Given the amount of manual work that had to be done and that there was no package management system being used it was quickly discovered that I had to spend a long time dealing with manual package management that should not occur under Linux. It is similar to dealing with a Windows system with manual DLL installs except this is Linux and there is a system to automate all of that and it was not used. Very unprofessional. The installation process was not documented even for the supported platforms so I had a lot of trial and error to do to get the product up and running. It seems as though I am the only person to have ever installed this product and that they were just guessing that it would work properly. Not encouraging.

I finally did manage to get the package installed and working with the exception of the PHP acceleration detection. No matter what I did that portion of the FogBugz software would not work properly. As there was no proper documentation I was working blind and, as far as I could tell from my limited experience with PHP caching and acceleration, the FogBugz software was not working properly in its detection routines and everything else was working just fine. But this caused me to never get a “clean” install but always with errors.

Once the system was installed and running we tried it out for a day. The package itself is fine but not ground breaking. It is a nice package but I found it to be rather unintuitive but I am not a full time developer and perhaps for someone who is using this all day long the interface is perfect. I cannot make any good statement about the product itself. The interface was far better than other products that we looked at – much cleaner and simpler and ready to use out of the box.

In the end, after discussions with the development lead who’s call it was to decide to keep the software we finally decided that we were not happy with FogBugz and would return it. If the package installed without manual intervention or even if it was predictable and simple to reinstall I believe that his preference for the interface and ease of use would have made us decide to keep the product. But having our IT support have to support a new operating system just for this one product, have it licensed per user instead of free and open source, written in ASP and so difficult to reinstall that we could not provide reasonable assurance that it could be restored after a failure made it a dangerous product that we could not recommend to any serious business who will rely on the functionality. It is a good start but Fog Creek Software needs to, in my opinion, think of this as a tool for businesses and not as a toy for single person start-ups and they may have a new customer in us. But the focus from the ground up appears to be as a toy and not as enterprise business software and we can’t justify the time and money necessary to make this software work.

In the end we returned our license and got a refund.  The customer service at Fog Bugz was awesome.  They asked some questions and took our responses and seemed genuinely interested and concerned as to our reasons why we couldn’t use the software as well as our suggestions, like supporting Red Hat 4, that would make us even more likely to use it in the future.  The customer service was so good that it made me wish that I wasn’t returning FogBugz and tempted me to give it another try.  But in the end the software just isn’t ready for prime time yet and we are going to move on to BugZilla as ugly and difficult as it is.

Cannibal Cuisine

It came up at lunch the other day about the choices that cannibals would make in selecting the people that they ate. I pointed out that cannibals would want to eat vegetarians. Everyone thought that this was very strange but I have a fairly strong argument for this belief.

Cannibals have health concerns like anyone else and as such need to make careful dietary considerations. For reasons of convenience, let us group cannibal food into three general categories. These categories will be vegetarians, omnivores (people who eat vegetables and meat but not human meat) and other cannibals. Of these three, vegetarians should be a cannibals top choice, omnivores the second and other cannibals as a last resort.

Why would a discriminating cannibal want to each vegetarian meat before other types of meat? In reality, the arguments for eating vegetarians are fairly obvious. Just like free-range, corn-fed chickens are the most desired chicken meat for omnivores, vegetarians are naturally healthier, leaner and are less likely to carry life-threatening parasites and diseases that are transmitted through meat. Cannibals have to be extra cautious about this as their food source is 100% parasitically compatible with them – not a factor that normal omnivores have to worry about.

The last type of meat that a cannibal would want to consume is the meat from other cannibals. Cannibals are the most likely category of all meat sources to be carrying a wide array of human to human transmitted parasites and diseases. Many of these diseases are practically isolated to cannibals as they can only easily be transmitted via consumption making cannibal meat extremely dangerous – rather like eating steak tartar made from mad cows.

Probably the hardest thing about cannibals attempting to eat well is that healthy food is harder to catch. Vegetarians are by their very nature more likely to be health conscious and will be more likely to have a regular exercise regimen. These heart healthy, fit individuals will generally be able to outrun and outlast a chase from cannibals who have been eating fatty, disease ridden meat for any length of time. Cannibals will find the most available food source to be of the “couch potato” variety. Any extended “meat of potatoes” diet will surely lead to heart conditions.

In the end it is a struggle for any cannibal in today’s world to maintain a healthy diet. While food sources continue to become more widely available and even though vegetarianism is on the rise cannibals continue to face hostility, armed prey, disease and parasitic pests.