wesgarrison.us

Never used Trac before. I like the way it’s laid out, so I definitely want to try it out. Having never set it up, I want to set it up for a new project.

First, you need a port to put your tracd daemon on, so put in a TextDrive Support Ticket first because it’ll take a little while to get it (my response time was 3 hours and 6 minutes.)
I started with the TextDrive manual for installing trac.

I’ve already got a subversion repository that I’ve been using for several months, so that part is ready to go.

I made my directory as ~/trac

Since my project is not on my primary domain, I had to write out the path to it so I didn’t forget. There’s not auto-tab-path-completion inside the trac prompts, and I just can’t type all that path stuff out by memory.
On chilco, I had to modify the trac-admin command by adding ‘/users’ to the beginning of the path:

trac-admin /users/home/wesgarrison/trac/sampletrac initenv

The same caveat about /users applies when running tracd, too.

I chose to put my trac start in a file and put it in ~/etc/rc.d/trac_start , just like my lighttpd and rails start scripts.

After running my startup script, I could see trac wonderfully on its port.

I logged into webmin and made my cron job, using the script as the job to be run on system boot.  Next, I turned my attention to setting up a rewrite rule to proxy to tracd from Apache.
Now, I need to add some tickets and start getting them done!

I’m looking to do some graphs. The data will be pulled via Rails, so if a graph component integrates with Rails, great! However, I’m not against a better and more flexible solution that uses PHP or something like that.

Graphing libraries or graphing components:

• Gruff – Rails: Can do line, pie, bar, stacked bar, area graphs. Requires ImageMagick and RMagick. Free.
• FusionCharts licensing is per developer: $69 for one developer ($149 if you want the source files) or $499 for enterprise wide. Flash-based. Lots of sample graphs for Fusion Charts and more sample charts for Instrumentation Suite, an add-on product.
• XML/SWF Charts takes input from an XML file. There’s a pretty decent gallery of charts and the reference looks pretty detailed. Requires Flash. $45 for a site-license, including subdomains.

I just got an email from Dell telling me a service contract was expiring.  Apparently, Dell farms this out to another company and that company must send a lot of spam, because they’re DNS blacklisted.

So, this message appears in my Spambox and it automatically gets converted to plain text.  The image header comes from www.customermining.com which really cracks me up.  I feel like I’m a natural resource to Dell, ready to be harvested for more money that I’ll never get a return on.

Man, just been beating my head on this for a while, and finally figured it out.

I needed to export a MS Access query out to a text file. I did the export by hand so I could create and save an export format, then used that format in a macro with the TransferText method. Worked great.

Then, I needed to format a currency field differently.
For instance: $1,234.56 => 01234.56. 5.2 with leading zeros included.

Unfortunately, MS Access doesn’t let you specify alternate formats for text exports. You can only select from the predefined formats. If I went to the query, I could view the field properties and set it to 00000.00 (use # if you don’t want a leading zero) and it looked fine, but it didn’t export correctly. So, I ended up doing this:

Value: Format$([value_calculation], "00000.00")

Then I set my export format to Text and all was well. The point is that you have to output the formatted value, not apply the format to the field in the query field properties.  In the example above, [value_calculation] is the field that needs to be formatted, but you would actually export [Value] in your query.
This would have been much easier if I could have typed in a format string in the export format OR if the you could change the predefined formats in the MS Access. I tried to find out how to change the predefined formats, but I couldn’t find any reference to it anywhere.

You can access the dell system restore partition on your hard drive by holding Control and pressing F11 during the BIOS check.

This partition has a ghost image of the system partition, so you can restore it back to factory state.

One of our Windows 2000 antivirus servers came up with this error after a applying updates, shutting down, installing a USB 2.0 card, then restarting. The Norton AntiVirus tray icon had a little red circle/slash around it. The error was:

Norton AntiVirus Realtime Protection failed to load

The Norton Event log just repeated the same error back to me, no help there.

After searching around, I found this article on Symantec’s website that solved the error. To summarize:

• Download the symevent file (sevinst.exe)
• Run from the command prompt as:
  sevinst NAVNT
  Your command line switch may differ depending on the OS you’re running.
• Restart.

Voila!

Edit: We had this exact same problem on another server, so either the updates, the USB 2.0, or the combination of them must have something to do with it.