ClearDDTS? I have to ask…

Was there ever in the history of the world a worse bug tracking system than ClearDDTS? The user interface is so ugly, inconsistent and unfriendly that the only way they could have made it worse is if they’d used Lotus Notes as the front end. Slow? It takes a good 30 seconds to enter a new bug or process a change in an existing bug, something that should take way, way less than a second in any competent relational database.

And to top it off, recently it’s taken to kicking everybody off for 5-10 minutes at a time and not letting you log back in, while the sysadmin says “there isn’t anything unusual in the log files”.

The only reason for not throwing the whole thing away and switching to Bugzilla or something like that is that it integrates so well with ClearCase. And it has become apparent to me over the last few weeks that the only reason I loved ClearCase is that we had a really good full time ClearCase administrator, Steve. Since the powers that be fired him, we’ve got two guys struggling for a week at a time to do stuff that Steve could have done in a few minutes. And I no longer love ClearCase.

Let’s throw away the whole thing and replace it with that CMS that integrates with Subversion, ok? What’s it called, Trak or something like that?

Update: Just got an email from the sysadmin – evidently a process keeps dying. One called “update_htpasswd.sh”, which evidently updates the .htaccess file based on what is returned by “ypcat passwd”. Ok, I’m not an expert, but aren’t there ways to authenticate directly to NIS rather than building a .htpasswd file at regular intervals? Sheesh, talk about amateur hour!

Update 2: Minutes after posting that, the ClearCase vob crashed as well, and so I left for home.

All the fun of aircraft ownership…

As I wrote a week and a half ago the last time I flew the Lance the engine died on the taxiway and I flooded it and drained the battery trying to restart it. Nobody has flown it since and I wasn’t even sure if the engine would start.

Since I’m the club’s maintenance coordinator for that plane, the problem is really mine to deal with. So today I went out to the airport in the cold rain and hooked the battery up to a battery charger for 3 hours or so. Afterwards I verified that the engine started just fine, ran smoothly at full rich and leaned, and there was plenty of crank left in the battery.

There’s nothing that makes you feel more like an aircraft owner than standing in the pouring rain undoing screws with freezing fingers.

How to ruin team communications in three easy steps

Step 1: Create a mailing list for developers, but allow non-developers including higher management to join it.

Step 2: Tell developers off for using that mailing list to discuss things that development needs to discuss but that management shouldn’t know about until it’s resolved.

Step 3: Use ad-hoc collections of mail addresses for real development communications, and then yell at developers for missing meetings that they never got invited to because you left them off your ad-hoc collection of mail addresses.

Is anybody surprised that I’m both the developer who got told off for using the dev-list to talk about development issues and the developer who accidentally got left off the invite list for the Thursday weekly meetings and got told off for missing them? Is anybody surprised that the issue I got told off for using the dev-list for was a complaint that when I mentioned a particular issue in meetings people ignored me and went onto the next item, and the person telling me off said that he’d never heard me mention this issue, thus proving my point?

Painless upgrade

Not to jinx myself or anything, but so far the upgrade of my domU from Debian Sarge to Debian Etch has been very painless. It upgraded over 200 packages, and I only had to manually resolve about 10 config files, most of which involved taking what the new package provided. After moving /lib/tls to /lib/tls.disabled and rebooting, everything seems to be working right.

Fingers crossed that it continues to work.