Anzac biscuits Sunday, October 25, 2009

Had my first attempt at making ANZAC biscuits a week ago. Google search, top recipe was the BBC recipe, though they are all about the same: rolled oats, flour, coconut, sugar, butter, golden syrup, bicarbonate of soda, water; combine into a doughy substance, place onto baking tray, bake.

The BBC recipe works fine, except I found I needed to cook the biscuits for 15-20 minutes rather than 8-10. Then again, I didn't quite realise the little tidbit others such as Jamie Oliver quote:

When these are removed from the oven they will still be soft, but they do harden up a bit on the tray. They are cooked if they are golden.

Right on, with that little bit of advice they really did turn out to be easy:

A bug tracker survey Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Starting to think about bug/issue tracking.

Open source / free bug trackers

• Bugzilla - maybe the most popular open source bug tracker? It's a bit ugly, functional, not particularly easy to administer, or use, or anything much. But it works well and is fairly solid. Uses Perl / mod_perl.
• Mantis - fairly straight forward bug tracker. Haven't really used this one to any degree. Implemented in PHP.
• Flyspray - used to use this years ago. Simple bug tracker, lacks support for more advanced things like LDAP authentication other software listed here has. Worked well for a smaller project.
• Roundup - receives fame for being the bug tracker used by the Python project. Seems to be aimed to be more of a general framework that can easily be hacked rather than a specific bug tracker. By default looks like a fairly simplistic bug tracker.
• Trac - includes a wiki and subversion integration and so on and so forth. The bug tracker that comes with Trac looks quite reasonable.
• Redmine - looks like something targeted at project management: issue tracking, gantt charts, diff viewer, wiki, etc. etc. Ruby on Rails based thing.

Proprietary bug trackers

• Fogbugz - still haven't used this. It is Joel on Software's flagship product, and gets fairly wide praise. The most common description I have heard is that it isn't as adaptable as e.g. Jira, but if its workflow works for you its great. A bit Windows-centric, the current version has yet to be released for *nix.
• Jira - the bug tracker by Atlassian. By default, comes across as a good, full featured bug tracker. Log in as an admin, and you're consulted with all sorts of opportunities to customise, and e.g. set up your own custom fields and workflows and the like.

GDB 7 and Python

Python-GDB support is cool -- that is, Python scripting in GDB. Been playing with it over the last few days as I've needed to do some debugging and it's come in handy a few times. More documentation and examples would be good, but it appears to work very well.

Starting to see one or two interesting bits and pieces / examples on the 'net: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=412 - http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/10/09/gdb-over-irc/ - http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/11/18/gdb-is-dead-long-live-gdb/.

I have to admit, when I first installed it, I couldn't find a single use for the Python extension. But a couple of days later, I was using it in earnest to solve real problems. Quite useful for just formatting output of complex data types, but the above links show it can do quite a bit more than that with some imagination...