WYSIWYG Wiki Editor
July 27, 2008
I’ve integrated TinyMCE when editing Wiki pages and Notes. This means that you don’t have to muck about with Textile/Markdown to add formatting to your pages, as a lot of people have problems understanding how that works and getting the formatting right.
I’ve also added support for wrapping code and such in <pre></pre> which turns off all WikiWords, autolinkification and task linking.
Drag and Drop scheduling in the GANTT view
July 8, 2008
There’s been some changes to the GANTT view, and you can now drag a task-bar or milestone indicator to change the due dates.
All changes done to the chart are kept temporary, until you either save the new schedule or revert back to the last saved state. Saving the schedule creates Acitivity Log entries, and send out email notifications if you want and have those enabled.
Editing a task outside of the GANTT view will reset the temporary data to the new values, if they change.
GANTT dependencies
June 29, 2008
I’ve had a go at making the ajax GANTT chart respect dependencies, which turned out to be quite tricky as this is happening on a webpage, and I can’t really spend much processor-time laying it all out.
It seems to work just fine on my test-cases, but I’m sure I haven’t thought of everything. 🙂
Work Log logging
June 24, 2008
I’ve added a small auto-saving text box to the right menu, which pops up whenever you’re working on something. Whatever you enter in there will be logged to your current work log, so it’s even easier to remember what you’ve done.
Translations…
June 23, 2008
When I added translations to ClockingIT I went with a really simple system where all the strings to be translated are defined along with their translations in a file, with one file per language. This worked great for initially translating the whole thing to a new language, but it’s broken down as I’ve added more and more languages, changed strings, and added new strings.
To get some new text translated these days, I’ve had to add the strings to 13 different files, and contact 13 different people to do update the translations, some of which don’t have Git and need to have the complete file emailed back and forth.
No more! New strings are now automatically added to a table in the database, and I’ve added a simple form to update the translation of your language. I’ve also added a couple of rake tasks to dump/restore this information to/from the normal language files so you have a backup in case someone makes a mistake.
Ruby on Rails and Memory Usage / Leaks
June 18, 2008
I’ve been running ClockingIT for quite a while now, and at some point something was introduced which made the memory usage grow and grow over time. I installed God to monitor and restart my Mongrels whenever they grew too big, but I can’t say I’ve been very comfortable with that solution.
Then, when I bought a new server to run on, I figured I’d get a bit more RAM and go 64bit to be able to use it. And found out that Ruby uses ~ 2x the memory, due to addresses in every object taking double the space.
I took some time to look for a better solution, and found something which works really great for me.
Enter Thin, Slim Attributes, Erubis and a Ruby GC patch:
Setup Time VIRT RES ----------------------------------------------- MRI/Mongrel 0m37.607s 181660 120720 MRI/Mongrel/Erubis 0m37.536s 181660 120920 MRI/Mongrel/Slim 0m36.399s 181672 119300 MRI/Mongrel/Erubis/Slim 0m36.020s 182696 120064 GC/Mongrel 0m37.416s 177560 119268 GC/Mongrel/Erubis 0m37.260s 172440 114484 GC/Mongrel/Slim 0m35.024s 164260 105656 GC/Mongrel/Erubis/Slim 0m35.049s 163236 104656 MRI/Thin 0m36.828s 172624 111512 MRI/Thin/Erubis 0m36.878s 175696 114724 MRI/Thin/Slim 0m35.457s 175708 113532 MRI/Thin/Erubis/Slim 0m35.087s 176732 114700 GC/Thin 0m36.208s 166476 108888 GC/Thin/Erubis 0m36.121s 166476 108724 GC/Thin/Slim 0m33.854s 155224 97060 GC/Thin/Erubis/Slim 0m33.832s 155224 97080
Keep in mind that this is on a 64bit platform, so a 32bit version would use ~ half the memory.
I’m getting a lot fewer restarts of my webservers with this setup, which can only be a good thing. It’s also been rock solid after ironing out a couple of problems with Slim Attributes.
Gantt galore!
June 17, 2008
I’ve had a bit of fun lately, adding a way to easily see your schedule and make changes. It’s not a strict gantt chart like MS Project uses, but rather an automatic one which shows remaining work as time passes and work is logged.
Whenever an estimate or due date is changed, the chart is automatically updated and re-scheduled to try and accomodate your wanted schedule.
If multiple people are assigned to the same task, it’ll be scheduled for when everyone has time free. This will probably be possible to specify with an option later on.
I’m also not sure if filtering the list makes a lot of sense, as you’d end up with either a bogus schedule (consider only the shown tasks) or strange gaps in the schedule (occupied by hidden tasks).
Hope you find it as usefull as I do. 🙂
More Flexibility
January 6, 2008
I’ve started working on making ClockingIT a lot more customizable, as it’s too rigid and geared towards software development at the moment.
Giving you control over the task types, as well as making most attributes / fields of a task customizable would give you a lot of flexibility for how you work. Adding a flexible and customizable workflow would really give you a system where you can work exactly like you want.
My local development branch (living in a git branch at the moment) is moving along nicely, and I’ve got support for custom task types, custom text fields and select boxes. I’ve still got loads to do before this is anywhere near done, but it’s coming along nicely.
The hardest part will be to integrate all of this flexibility into the browsing/filtering/views while not making the interface overly complicated and making sure I don’t forget any hardcoded properties from before this big change.
Another challenge will be to make the admin interface for all of this, and keep it simple enough to use. I’ll also have to provide project templates now, as configuring a new project take a lot longer than before if you have to start from scratch each time.
I’m also a tiny bit concerned about increased rendering time, as I need to do more database lookups per task than before, but by introducing caching again it should end up being faster than it currently is.
Visualizing server traffic
October 6, 2007
My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create a good visualization of server traffic and events in a short time, so I whupped this up on a Saturday evening.
The picture shows the traffic from a friends site, as well as some personal websites. Each blob represents a request to the servers, and the information is gotten by tailing Apaches access log and Rails’ production log, via SSH. The result is rendered in OpenGL using ruby, and is a real-timeview of what happens. If you click the image, there is a Flash movie showing what it looks like.
It’s a lot of fun seeing your traffic and custom events in real-time. At work we have events defined for each sale, and people often stop by and just watch the money roll in. 🙂
It's about time... 