Asymptomatic

We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it's something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.

All of my computers at home are named after "characters" in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin's Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.

I tend to be pragmatic about my server naming because there are just too darn many of them to remember, but many people and organizations give them more fanciful names. For example, A Small Orange uses characters from the show Lost to name their servers, as I noticed when editing some of my content on Hurley....

Every so often, you want to see how some code will look on your server before you actually deploy it there. Without setting up an identical server at identical cost elsewhere, you might consider testing locally on your desktop computer.

This setup describes what I've found to be useful, which is a system that allows you to host multiple sites on your local system, all resolving to different domain names, and configurable by adding a simple single line to a file and creating the directory to host the site. You don't even need to restart Apache to configure a whole new virtual host with this method.

The steps to do this are pretty simple, and all of the software is freely available. I recommend PSPad as a free text editor, which has a cool feature to let me mark these files as "favorites" to open them quickly without having to browse for them. You could also use Notepad, if you enjoy your own pain....

Where is it?

One of our clients for work has been on the hunt for an issue tracker to keep track of issues for our web development project and for their internal systems. We looked through a few options and eventually settled on FogBugz. I do not like FogBugz because it's another one of those programs subscribing to that crazy Creating Passionate Users philosophy that says it's great to have people that hate your product. Particularly because I am one of them.

The idea is that they've created the software to have a specific process flow. You either subscribe to their process wholly, or you fit your round process into their square hole. We're in the process of rounding the corners off of our peg just so that the licenses we've paid for aren't a waste. Am I wrong to think that there should be a solution that allows you to apply your standard operating procedure without having to codify it specifically in the software?...

Over the years I've had many occasions to work with different graphic designers in producing various types of output related to the computer. Of course, I've helped produce web pages, but also printed documentation and marketing materials all related to software releases.

Some designers have been better to work with than others, as you would expect in any field. There are many common threads that I've noticed between these designers of, shall we say, "things they could do that would make things go much more smoothly than doing what they're used to" in regard to getting software projects done.

Allow me to list a few ways that a graphic designer could improve relations with his coders....

To you know about Drupal? Here's a question...

I want to be able to track changes to Drupal sites like I can track changes to code using Subversion or CVS.

As I create a Drupal site, Drupal modifies tables and changes table data to reflect the new site structure. If I make a mistake, or someone else makes a mistake, I would like to be able to "revert" the whole site back to its original structure....