lifebsideben

While installing PHPEclipse, I ran across this plugin called Mylar. What does it do? Hmm, basically, completely change the way you interact with Eclipse to do your job. It’s amazing. It took all of 5 minutes to get it set up and working with my Bugzilla that tracks prince.org issues. You can interact with issues/bugs entirely from within Eclipse, and have everything you do magically tracked and associated with the issue. Let that sink in. Every file you open and stays “relevant” is “more surfaced” within the interface panels, and things that are less relevant magically fade out (are hidden). So, you can really concentrate on just the bits of code that you really need for that issue. And the context is stored, so you can easily flip between multiple issues and get the contexts snapped in as appropriate. Wicked cool! When you want to commit your work on an issue, it bundles up the changes and prefills the commit message–primitive changesets for CVS. And yea, it works just fine with the PHPEclipse stuff too, so you don’t have to code in Java

You say you work on a team? Just attach the built-up context to the bugzilla bug (a couple clicks), and it’s saved right there–anyone else who decides to look at the issue, can see exactly the context you had going. That’s pretty awesome and I can see it driving some serious productivity gains.

I am super impressed with this. It actually does even more than I’m outlining here. If you are bought into the premise of task-based work (this is absolutely a perfect fit for Agile/Scrum, and the way we do things at work, and the way I do them at home), this is a lifesaver. You really owe it to yourself to go watch the first 30-35 minutes of the intro screencast thingy to understand what it can do. It’s enough to switch to Eclipse alone, in my opinion. Wow.

These guys really need a ‘donate’ link for the project!

I haven’t actually been writing a ton of code lately, mostly small stuff for work, and that’s pretty much all Emacs (in console mode, over ssh…) although I actually did hack out a small PHP script entirely in vi last week (the horror! I totally suck at vi, but it was necessity.)

Based on an email I got today, and a comment from a co-worker, I decided to take a quick survey of some of the state of the art in web-friendly IDEs–for coding in PHP5 (my primary language these days), JavaScript, CSS, and the language I keep making false starts at, Ruby.

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I’ve been continuing the work I was mentioning in the other Bacula post recently. A couple tasks, especially:

1. Making incremental backups work from the Mac. Full backups work fine, but incrementals just die with the client claiming it doesn’t know what an incremental backup is! Weird.

2. Getting long-distance (over the public ‘net) backups of my website working.

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There’s lots of new goodies you can add to your ‘tar, including a bunch of Oscars outfits and backgrounds… here I’m sporting the tux pants and “red carpet” paparazzi background. Nice, eh?

Tags: avatars, movies, Yahoo

Caught the announcement of the nominations for the big categories of the Oscars. Salma Hayek co-presented, and was wearing this big triangular dress thing. Seriously, she looked pregnant… so henceforth I’d like to officially start the rumor she’s carrying my child. Thank you, thank you…

I spent probably 6 hours today trying to get Bacula working fully. I’d never tried it, but have been thinking about trying to implement a “real” backup system for some time. By “real”, I mean, something that can back up the most important bits of my two Macs, my remote webserver, and even bits of the RAID5 array that are “super critical”, to a separate harddrive, handle incrementals, and not involve lots of hackery on the clients. Bacula does seem to fit the bill, and I picked up a 400G eSATA drive to add to the server last week for about $100 to be the backup media (tapes? we don’t need no stinkin’ tapes!)
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Tags: bacula, hardware, linux, mac, NAS, software