More Flexibility

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.

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Git trial

I’ve been trying git locally for the past few weeks, and I must say I’ve grown quite fond of the easy branching and stellar merging. As ClockingIT doesn’t run on Windows anyways, I guess there’s not much stopping me from switching from darcs to git.

Darcs back to normal…

.. after committing my (somewhat) large changes, the whatsnew and diff commands went back to normal speeds.

Although, now that Git has git add --interactive the main reason for staying with Darcs seems to have disappeared. I’ve managed to import my Darcs repository into Git via tailor, and will try to use both Darcs and Git for a while to see which one I end up liking the best.

Darcs is getting slow

time darcs whatsnew -ls
real    3m35.948s

time git status
real    0m0.450s

I’ve added and modified a few hundred files, but still..

Coming this weekend….

Visualizing server traffic

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. 🙂

Recent changes..

I’ve been busy the last couple of days, and it’s now possible to collapse/expand a client on the Overview page, Browse supports task grouping and sorting, users can have custom avatars, and both Overview and Browse have gotten a speedup.

In my case, Overview went from 1.7 seconds to 0.7 seconds, and Browse from 1.2 to 0.5 seconds. Quite nice for an evenings worth of optimizing (mostly :include but also a few TimeZone fixes, and rewriting so I use user.project_id.to_i == 0 instead of user.project.nil?

Darcs again…

For some reason, Darcs has started insisting that I’ve removed / emptied out some files that most certainly are there. This happened after I moved a plugin temporarily to disable it, then did some records, then moved the plugin back to re-enable it.

And now, I’m told the plugin is gone every time I record some changes. Git is still doing the right thing and didn’t get confused at all.

I guess it’s time to switch soon.

Forums!

I’ve integrated Beast into ClockingIT, allowing for installation/company/project-wide discussions. Looks great, and seems to work without any problems. I did have to munge it a bit to make it work with my current model, but no major surgery was needed. I also had to add some more security to limit regular administrators from messing with the public forums.

Anyways, here’s a simple screenshot from my development version.

Source Control

I’ve been mostly happy with my choice of Darcs for ClockingIT source control, even though it’s gotten slower and slower. But, today I ended up with a broken repository after aborting a conflicting pull. That’s not supposed to happen ever. So, I’ve converted the whole history to Git with Tailor, and am going to try using that for a while before I possibly swap.

I just need to wrap my head around all the git commands and try not to break things too often. 🙂