This week, I installed Redmine to provide ticket tracking and documentation services for our web site, computers, life in the apartment, and other things. So far, I’ve been rather pleased with it.

Redmine is an integrated project manager combining an issue/bug tracker, wiki, document manager, and source repository viewer aimed at managing software projects. It’s rather similar to (and probably heavily inspired by) Trac. I’ve long had an affinity for Trac, and in some ways like it better, but Trac does not support multiple projects. Redmine does. This is fairly crucial for us; it lets us have the web site, computing infrastructure, and apartment each as their own project with their own sets (and types) of trackers while allowing us to view all open tickets in a unified view. With stock Trac, we would need to check multiple instances to see all our open tasks.

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One of my projects this winter break (besides enjoying family and studying for my preliminary exams) has been working on a little program to scratch an itch in my backup setup for our home network. I wanted a way to transmit backup files (in the current case, gzip-compressed file system dumps) from a VM to the host machine without the overhead of opening up a full network file system or shell access.

Thus, I give you rstash version 0.1 (very alpha!). It has a server which provides a set of drop boxes into which other hosts can write files. It allows no read access and no access to anything outside the box directories, so it easily handles this case.

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I’ve been using Firefox 3 for some months now (first beta versions, and now the final), and it’s quite slick. Definitely a worthy upgrade.

Though there are some differing opinions on this matter, I find that the Awesome Bar (the new-and-improved all-singing all-dancing bookmark-and-history-searching address bar) to be spectacular. It incorporates some nice features that the Epiphany browser has (keyword searches over your bookmarks by typing in the address bar), allowing for much faster selection from a large list of bookmarks. I’m a bookmark fiend, particularly when good search support is available, so this feature is making my browsing noticeably easier.

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