Kermit the Blog: That’ll be… Aw, heck. No charge.

Over on the Kermit the Blog he’s having one of those days. Another friend gets free computer help, and now he’s wondering if he’s too nice or just a sucker.
Kermit the Blog: That’ll be… Aw, heck. No charge.

My take:

One of my clients, who runs a very successful jewellry business, explained it to me: When you charge little or nothing then there is no associated value. Which means there is no way to compare what you are really giving them to anything else they are familiar with.

So the next time you get a call to a ‘family or a friend’s’ house to fix something, interrupt them and tell them up front: “I am no longer able to help you for free. $$$ an hour, minimum one hour. When should I come by to fix things?”

Then things get really interesting! 😉

As he says “What’s your take?”

Installing Roundup on Mac OS X

I decided that I needed to install an issue-tracker for the support work I am doing, as jobs were trying to fall through the cracks.

This is the process I went through to install Roundup on Mac OS X 10.4.1 client, minus all the swearing, googling and reading the mailing list archives.

I grabbed the latest version, roundup-0.8.3.tar.gz, from Sourceforge and extracted it into a temporary directory. The README.txt led me to the Install Guide located in the doc folder.

From there I:

loki:~$ python run_tests.py

Which gave no errors..

Then I went back and followed the Basic Install steps:

loki:~$ sudo python setup.py install --install-scripts=/Users/davidr/bin

This installed everything as normal, except the administration scripts, which were installed in my bin/ directory.

I then created the storage space form my trackers:

loki:~$ mkdir ~/Documents/roundup/trackers

This is where the Support tracker will live, and any others in the future…

Then I installed the tracker:

loki:~$ roundup-admin install
Enter tracker home: /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support
Templates: classic-demo,minimal, classic
Select template [classic]: 
Back ends: anydbm
Select backend [anydbm]: 

 You should now edit the tracker configuration file:
   /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/config.ini
 ... at a minimum, you must set following options:
   [mail]: domain, host
   [tracker]: web
loki:~$ 

This is where things got confusing, as the references in the Documentation are to “MAILHOST, TRACKER_WEB, MAIL_DOMAIN and ADMIN_EMAIL.” Which do not exist by these names in the config.ini file.

Since the tracker will only be used by me, I am putting it on localhost, and email will be disabled.

I opened /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/config.ini and edited the following:

instant_registration = yes
# Avoids email confirmation for new users

web = http://localhost:8080/support/
# This is where I will access my tracker

In the section [mail] I also had to set these so the tracker would run, even though I will not use email;
domain = local
host = loki.local # my machine’s local name

Then in the [nosy] section I also changed:
messages_to_author = no
add_author = no
This is likely not needed as nosy gets disabled soon…

Now to initialise the tracker database:

loki:~$ roundup-admin initialise
Enter tracker home: /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support
Admin Password: (You need to create one!)
Confirm: (re-enter the same one from the previous line)

After that you need to get to the web interface, I decided to use the built in server and so all I did was to run:

loki:~$ roundup-server support=/Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/

and that notified me that it was running: “Roundup server started on :8080”, so I went to the page I defined in config.ini: http://localhost:8080/support/

Create a new user, and you are almost ready to use the system.

After that I needed to disable the email, and create a more automatic way to launch the server:

Disabled the use of ‘nosy’ ie. the email interface, see FAQ.

loki:~$ mv /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/detectors/nosyreaction.py /Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/detectors/nosyreaction.py_disabled

I then created a double-clickable terminal file which will launch the Roundup server. Open a new terminal window, and then go File:Save as: and named it “Support Roundup Server” and set ‘Execute this command’ to

/Users/davidr/bin/roundup-server support=/Users/davidr/Documents/roundup/trackers/support/

I also checked the ‘Execute this command in a shell’. Now when I double click the file it launches the roundup server and I can watch the log as it goes by. Once I get tired of it and am convinced it works without me looking at it.. I will figure out a way to launch it when I login, and run it in the background and have errors go to a logfile.