I finally got hold of an svn dump of moo from my hosted svn repository, migrated it to git and pushed it up to the slice – It’s almost ready for its version one release!
Annoyingly Redmine (at the minute) doesn’t show git branch information – I can live with this for now (+ other features I lost in the Trac to Redmine, svn to git journey).
With all this server/scm set-up activity over with (for now). I can finally concentrate on nudging some of my creaking rails applications to edgy versions and throw them out for people to use (or not).
I’m slightly aware that this blog reads like mr geek lives here!
TinyMud
After an evening of re-remembering ‘c’ and fighting gcc warnings it ran! Seeing the text appear took me back a few years to times of playing text adventures.
Now all I need to do is design my flat and send some invites out. If this is too difficult then I will probably just opt for a vintage mud fest!
TinyMud
I’m getting back into AD&D at the minute as I have decided to write a simple role playing game for my daughter (age 6). I love role playing and reckon it might be a way for me to blend fun with maths teaching! Anyway I digress.
During some internet searching I bumped into wikipedia and TinyMud. The comment in wikipedia about instances of this old mud being rare made me a little sad so I have decided to resurrect it for a party in a couple of weeks time. This is similar to the “Brigadoon Day” except I will leave it running on the slice.
I have managed to find the ‘c’ source code from 1989 and I’m working on getting it compiled again – mainly just #include issues, so it should go ok.
Once complete I intend to re-create my flat and invite as many folk as I can for a party, given it allows basic construction of new objects I wonder what might result.
Update (2010-01-26), I have it running, just need to map out my flat!
Finally have redmine running at projects and a git(osis) set-up.
Nearly there! I’m a tiny bit worried about memory usage now – Definitely eating into swap. The two mongrel instances I’m running appear to be the worst offenders, but the more I read it might be mysql and InnoDb usage – Although top begs to differ. Ho hum, given that this set-up will allow me to replace my off-site svn repository the $/£ savings would allow me to go up to a 512MB slice.
Another few hours of head-banging – All my own fault though. So I’m setting up gitosis, all went well up to the point of cloning the gitosis admin repository on my local machine – The command failed with a “connection closed by remote host error”. After yesterday and my run in with scp I quickly spotted it was trying to use ssh port 22 – I have moved my port.
Searching was helpful, basically you just add a “~/.ssh/config” file and specify the host and new port. What none of the text said was this should be on your local machine not on the server! Another duh for me. Eventually I twigged. Ssh is fine now, but I’m getting permission errors, should be easier to fix…And they were.
Again, read the documentation! The gitosis install appended a new ssh key – Just removed the old one. This makes the user effectively for git development and I can’t ssh in – Which is fine and makes some sense.
Off to find a git browser – cgit looks good…
Needed to run a survey within the department. Our usual off-site tool was unavailable so I just spent an evening or two writing a simple rails based survey tool. It’s not great but it is functional. Again I’m being diverted from getting moo out the door. Still I learnt a few things on the way – Should put it up in case anyone would find it of use.
Plans are afoot from product management to start adding subjective value to requests (release plan) and raised defects.
When a story closes the customer rates the value it delivered and updates the overal status of the value delivered as they see it i.e. (+/-/none). This (the theory goes) will allow us to plot value and stop developers concentrating on burn-down’s and prioritize valuable items over non-valuable. It will also allow us to schedule clumps of “minor” defects over stories, because the value of fixing the defects will exceed a given story (polishing in disguise and a replacement for team improvement?).
I look forward to seeing how this pans out, but feel people have missed the point about Agile and are taping even more stuff around a simple system which takes active communication and participation over “long distance” metrics. I do think developers should have an understanding of business/commercial value, but the Agile process has at its centre an active customer who physically drives the backlog, the next story is the next most valuable item (defects = stories)? This feels like a proxy for the customer and a means to see the distance between them and the development team. “This is of no value”, “why did you accept the story”, “I didn’t” – Hmm, stories have lost their value?
Don’t get me wrong, I encourage experimentation and I really hope this pans out. Worry its not really been thought through…
Really want to get moo available soon. So I decided to move it from rails 1.2.3 to rails 2.2.2. Its up and running now, took a while though, silly niggles and broken bits. Spending some time learning rake and intend to document and add some unit tests – There is quite a gap from making something to “productizing” it. Still, I’m semi-committed and for now I’m not looking at automated mind-mapping!
I expect to release in the middle of February, how the world waits.
I have been wanting to make some rails applications available for people to use, all well and good. But for some reason my instinct has been to look for means to obfuscate the code – Providing only binaries.
Mulling over why I realise that I have lost some confidence in my coding skills (been a while since I coded at work, “professionally”). Also I seemed to have been infected with some sort of corporate disease and thought I might make money from them if I boxed them up.
On reflection this is stupid!
In terms of coding I will admit I’m a beginner with rails, but I made something for people to enjoy. Hiding it away will not help me develop my code skills on this framework, also it stops others from extending and improving it.
In terms of making money, this was just daft, I seriously doubt they have worth, even if they do I wouldn’t want to charge for them.
So, in conclusion. I have decided to put the source up for use and share it. This makes life far more simple and me happier.
The festivities are over and a new year starts.
Coding wise my mind maps from the web project has sucked away too much time, but has been really enjoyable. I think I will play with it over time, might go somewhere might not.
I have decided to complete getting “moo” out of the door as quickly as I can, given I run a repository on hosted projects – I might just keep on using it for now, rather than switch over to the slice (thus delaying my git/svn decision).
Toker, my (Tok)en manag(er) tool is also getting some updates, hopefully I can also get this released to the world, at some point. The rails code is terrible – It was the first thing I ever wrote with the framework. I even have someone collaborating on this!
In general I’m quite looking forward to this year. From a nerd point of view my slice host account is running, I have some applications to give to the world (whether it wants it or not!) and there are tons of things I want to try out and code.
My coding resolution is to have a successfull collaboration on something!
