An interesting video on online project management.

Trac is a great bug tracking, work ticket, action item management environment. It integrates well with SVN and other source control repositories.

Its Roadmap view conveniently order milestones by due date. However, the custom report queries it comes with order milestones by their name. Frankly, that’s much less useful. I understand that they are replacing the SQL-driven custom reports with a customizable GUI interface, but in the meantime here’s how you can fix the issue:

1. Go to Edit Report
2. Insert this clause after any FROMs and before any ORDER BYs:
   LEFT JOIN milestone m ON m.name = t.milestone
    
3. Prefix any ambiguous column names with a t.
4. Insert due as the first column in the ORDER BY list

The report will now sort by milestone due date while allowing for empty milestones.

See Also

• Trac Database Schema

My team just released the beta version of DB2 Express-C 9.5.2. It includes the built-in Text Search module for the first time — fast WHERE CONTAINS(column, ‘monkey’) searches, great for web development — as well as lots of other enhancements and fixes.

I installed DB2 on an Ubuntu Linux server via SSH and the command line installer this morning. This is not particularly exotic, but is different from using the GUI installer on either platform. Still, I should jot down my steps:

1. SSH to your server. On Windows, use Putty or the OpenSSL package in Cygwin.
2. Open up a text mode browser like lynx or links
3. Go to http://www.ibm.com/db2/express/
4. Download Express-C. Get some tea and snacks while that happens.
5. tar xzvvf the file and cd into the directory
6. If the next step fails, you may need to install some libraries. I had to sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
7. sudo ./db2setup
8. You now need to manually configure the DB2 server
   1. Set up users and groups
   2. Create a DB2 Administration Server
   3. Create a DB2 instance
   4. Create links to DB2 files
   5. Configure TCP/IP communication
      1. Configure services file
      2. Update database manager
      3. Set communications protocols
   6. Apply license (already done, verifiable by db2licm -l)

Extra notes just in case:

• sudo is the usual way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu.
• sudo su - db2inst1 is the way to switch users to, in this case, user db2inst1.
• Default settings in the steps above make db2inst1 the user with SYSADM permissions for DB2.
• For SFTP file transfer, you can use WinSCP or Filezilla with the same credentials as for SSH.