Division By 0

It’s kind of sad that, even though I know Subversion (svn from now on) existed since long ago, it was just until a month ago or so when I finally started working with it. What can I say? It has totally changed the way I work not only on group projects, but on individuals too! Easy to install, easy to use, plug-ins for each IDE I use… Version control isn’t only a good way to keep a project history and work with more people, but a development philosophy catalyst that ensures changes in a project will have sense.

Just a moment after my first two commits (true story) I became interested in the project management possibilities svn granted, even though my work philosophy tended always to ad-hoc and little to none organization, always enphasizing the work core.

Now is when Trac comes in. Trac is simply awesome. Each time I browse to a trac project page I get really excited. Trac is project management system that has what I consider to be the best feature: As non-intrusive as possible. Svn integration is wonderful, it is really easy to install too, and it lets you manage your project as you feel right.

And how does this work? The project lives in a single host as a repository in the svn server. There are two basic operations we can do with each repository item

• Update ->Update our local version, if we have one, with the one in the repository if it’s higher. This is the way to get the last version of what we need.
• Commit -> Update the repository with the changes we made. The client first checks if the version we used to develop the changes is the one on the repository. If not, another developer changed the base in which the changes have been done, so it is mandatory to check the new version and get things good. All of this is really easy to do. It is possible (I would call it a must-do!) to asign a record text to each commit so we can track all those changes easily.

Regarding basics, that’s svn. Regarding trac, it’s a web application with the following elements:

• Wiki: A useful wiki to keep the project documentation or info about the project development stage. Extremely easy to use.
• Timeline: Lists all project related events: wiki edits, svn commits, ticket creation and closure… Everything that has happened since day one!
• Roadmap: Here we can create milestones or assign tickets to one already created. Each milestone has a percentual gauge that will fill when all tickets of that milestone are closed.
• Browse Source: A handy svn repository explorer with diff capabilities. Sweet!
• Tickets: Tickets are trac’s power backend and the organization magic for our projects. A ticket can be anything: a task, a bug, a feature request, a comment… Each ticket belongs to a milestone and it is possible to assign tickets to a user of the system.

This way, trac becomes our project’s main page, and a reference about what to do and when to do it. A task gets more complex? Create more tickets. We finish something? Close it’s tickets. Easy! There are also hook scripts with which we can automagically close tickets, do incremental backups and more.

Some links:

http://ariejan.net/2006/12/01/how-to-setup-a-ubuntu-development-server-part-1/

http://ariejan.net/2006/12/02/how-to-setup-a-ubuntu-development-server-part-2/

http://cachi.temiga.org/2008/02/11/montando-apache-ssl-subversion-webdav-websvn-en-ubuntu-server/

http://blog.odonnell.nu/32.html

http://www.reviewingit.com/index.php/content/view/62/1/

http://www.hosted-projects.com/trac/TracDemo/Demo

http://subclipse.tigris.org/

http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/

http://www.assembla.com

It was just until some time ago that I thought about board and card games in a very classic way; When the idea came to my mind, it came with examples like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit or Scattergories. It’s actually weird considering how much I like playing and mastering pen & paper RPGs (the ones most based on interpetation, of course) since more than 10 years ago, and because of that, me being so close to other board and card games. I could say Magic: The Gathering was a short time exception.

Things changed when I played Arkham Horror. Since I always enjoyed a lot horror, investigation and occultism games like “Call of Cthulhu“, it came as no surprise how much I do enjoy this game. Given it’s complexity, options, elements and everything, it seemed like a perfect match. As positive as the experience was, it wasn’t still time for those games to become another hobby. It was difficult enough to find time and people to role-play, it seemed impossible to also get running some sessions of those fun boxes.

Some time later I could play “Fairy Tales“, “Once upon a time” and the excellent “Citadels“, all of them Atrus’ games. I liked a lot the first and second, and really loved the third because of how easy but deep and engaging it was. A lot more people I know started to be interested in those games too! Another thing we understood was that board games required more interested players and quite some time, paying back with deep gaming. Generally speaking, card games were the opposite.

I recently decided to buy Arkham Horror and two expansion kits and Bang! The Bullet and Atrus bought Doom and it’s expansion kit. Everything has proved to be quite a good buy by now, especially Arkham Horror and Doom.

Those board and card games have been a great discovery. Try them, you won’t regret it

Some links:

www.boardgamegeek.com/
www.planetongames.com/