Trac is a fantastic, world-dominating software project management and bug-tracking system written in Python. It integrates with Subversion and has a wiki and just works. Even the Rails guys use it. It’s possible that if Trac and Chuck Norris walked into a bar, only Trac would leave.
But unfortunately, the comment-spammers and wiki-spammers have noticed Trac and have been updating their scripts. Hence the 12,000 15,000 hits for “trac spam.”
Two and a half years ago I wrote a review-like essay on six weeks spent using FreeBSD and KDE as my primary desktop system – when I was between PowerBooks.
As hinted at in a recent post, I now have a second machine alongside my 15" PowerBook. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 4000 running bleeding-edge Ubuntu 6.06. This includes GNOME 2.14 with the Deskbar – which gets compared to Quicksilver but is more like a hybrid of Spotlight and LaunchBar.
I don’t remember when I bookmarked this URL, and I don’t know how long this has been a problem or how long it will last (presumably not very long if word gets around), but I hereby present for your amusement the Magical Endlessly Redirecting eBay URL:
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayLogin
(You have to be signed in to see the MAGIC. Also, it’s only theoretically endless – your browser will eventually give up.)
Tonight I had to get some data off a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has a totally screwed up W98ME installation. Rather than struggle again with burning CDs from the broken system, I decided to see how hard it was to get at the hard drive itself.
I didn’t have any directions or anything, I just flipped the laptop over and started unscrewing stuff (I’ve done this since I was a kid, but have gotten a little bit better at putting things back together). My first impression was, “Boy, look at this ugly design. Little bulges and seams everywhere. How inelegant.” Somewhere in the middle of that thought, having removed three likely-looking screws, I was pulling on an odd little hatch on the side and, whoosh, there’s the hard drive in my hand, mounted on its little sled. A minute later it was in my external FW enclosure and connected to my PowerBook.
Browsing some programming blogs this evening I came across Ken Arnold’s provocative “Style is Substance” post from October 2004. In it, he argues that coding style variants should be eliminated by including style in the language definition:
…the only way to get from where we are to a place where we stop worrying about style is to enforce it as part of the language.
This isn’t that shocking to Python programmers (perhaps that’s why he mentions Python twice in his list of “mature” languages?). Python enforces whitespace style. To me this is one of the great joys of working with Python – my code from two years ago, or somebody else’s code in an open-source project I’m looking at, uses exactly the same indentation “conventions” that I do – because they’re not conventions, they’re requirements.