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We are excited to announce that our website is now up and running… It’s nothing fancy, but at least we now have an on-line presence that highlights who we are and what we do. We will certainly make a few revisions of our website along the way, so if you have any questions or comments please do not hesistate to contact us.

Thank you for taking the time to visit our site!

Unfuddle Vs Basecamp

They both have similar features regarding messages and milestones but Unfuddle has all the other features that are great for developers such as code repositories and time tracking. One minor difference is that Basecamp has To-dos and Unfuddle has Tickets. To-Dos are great when setting low level development tasks but are not very useful for bug tracking. On the other hand Tickets are great for bug tracking but are hard to use as a Task list. This is my main issue with Unfuddle, but I understand that it wouldn’t make sense to have to-do lists and tickets in the same app. It would be very confusing for the users.

Unfuddle Vs GitHub Vs Beanstalk

Unfuddle provides an unlimited amount of private SVN and Git repositories for free but you are limited to 200MB. Beanstalk gives you one repo with 100MB for free and GitHub only provides public repositories for free. Sure Beanstalk has integration with a bunch of other sites, and Github has nice visualization of Commits. But if all you need is a place to commit your code and be able to browse it later, then Unfuddle will do, and it has the added bonus of being a Project management tool as well as a bug tracker (with very nice integration between the bug tracking and repository, you can close a ticket by putting comments like “fixed ticket #123″ in your commits).

Unfuddle Vs Lighthouse Vs Track

If you want to host your own bug tracking software then Trac is for you, but if you want a hosted solution, Unfuddle and Lighthouse are some of your options. I’ve used both Lighthouse and Unfuddle equally in the past year and I don’t really like Lighthouse. In Lighthouse, I find it hard to find which tickets are assigned to me and that are either open or new. In Unfuddle there’s the My Active Tickets list that does just that. Also, I work on multiple project at the same time, and Lighthouse doesn’t make it easy to switch between project. Unfuddle makes it easy to bring the tickets to the next status (New->Accepted->Resolved->Close) and it has a resolved Status, which is great when the developer has fixed it and needs the client to test and close the ticket. Lighthouse doesn’t have that feature, and I find that sometimes, clients end up recreating the same ticket if it wasn’t fixed or they “un-close” the ticket. Another cool feature with Unfuddle is that you can close or comment on tickets when committing your code to the Repo.

Unfuddle Vs Assembla

I know Assembla has similar features as Unfuddle, but Assembla didn’t fit my budget at the time so I can’t compare it to Unfuddle. Please leave comments if you have experience with Assembla and think it is better than Unfuddle. No flame wars pls.

Some say Unfuddle does too much

Even though Unfuddle does a lot, it isn’t too bloated and no details seemed to be overlooked. So if you like to have all these tool in one place I would suggest Unfuddle. It might not be the best for all of these features, but it is better at some than other sites.

Now the only issue with Unfuddle is that I can only have 2 users on the free account. Basecamp has unlimited users.

I’ll keep using Unfuddle for a bit longer as my project management tool to see if I can switch, but I’m pretty confident that I will use Unfuddle exclusively.

All the big shifts in distributed audio and video happened because of the arrival of a more convenient alternative. Lets start with audio, vinyl was replaced by cassette tapes, not because they had more features or better quality (which they didn’t have), but because you could easily carry them with you. Then onto the CD, sure the quality improved but they were even easier to carry around. Now that we’re in the MP3 age, it is now easier than ever to carry 30 albums with you wherever you go.

Video follows a very similar story, the reason we moved from VHS to DVDs is not because of features like not having to rewind it before you return it to the Rental store, if it were the case then why didn’t the Video Disk make it? Video Disks didn’t survive because they were HUGE!. DVDs, just like CDs are much smaller and easier to handle than tapes. Now here comes Blue-ray. To most people, Blue-ray can’t be any better than a DVD since it physically looks just like a DVD and that is the reason why Blue-ray is having a hard time. Sure 1080p looks amazing, but it’s just a feature and people don’t care that much about features, they want “easy”. Now, since audio went the digital MP3 route, it’s almost a given that video will be going that route to.

And I believe that is why Blue-ray will not make it. I still have my PS3 and I might go rent some Blue-ray movies once in a while, but I don’t think I’ll buy any Blue-ray movies, because I know that the future of video will be online downloads, just like music. Now if only we had good online video store options in Canada, but that’s a different story.

So I updated, and it made me realize something. KDE4 is to KDE3 as Vista is to XP. Vista has all the bells and whistles: new look, composite windowing stuff, gadgets… but it’s full of bugs. Now KDE4 is pretty much the same: new look, new compositing Kwin, plasmoids(“widgets”), and it’s fairly stable. The only annoying part about KDE4 is that it’s not as customizable as it should be(it soon will be, just not yet).

Now here’s a few differences between KDE4 and Vista. First of all, I didn’t have to pay to have a brand new buggy Desktop Environment. Second, KDE4 is pretty much KDE3 using QT4 instead of QT3 with added features, and that’s why it only took 1 year to port/develop, not the 9 years it took for Vista (I know it didn’t really take 9 years). And lastly, did I say I didn’t have to pay for this upgrade?

Now, what’s so special about KDE4, well, it’s very similar to KDE3, with some major differences. Plasmoids are KDE’s gadgets/widgets/gidgets. Basically, you can put them anywhere, on your Desktop or on the “Bar”. I don’t know what to call that bar, in Windows it would be the bar that has the Start menu, task bar, system tray and Time, in OS X, it’s the Apple Dock. Because in KDE this bar is a place to put plasmoids, you can have anything you want there. This means that the community will be able to change KDE into what the people really want. Windows and Apple decided for you what they think is for you, KDE will let the community decide what is best for the community: Wisdom of the crowd.

The release schedule for KDE4 pretty much includes a minor(4.0.2, 4.0.3) release every month until July, when 4.1 should be available. Now these minor changes don’t sound like much, but in the KDE world, they are basically the equivalent of Service Packs in Windows.
Oh, and one more thing, KDE can run in windows now, yup that’s right, all my favorite KDE apps work or will work in Window. So now, if I’m stuck working on a Windows machine, I’ll be able to use Kate, Amarok, Kopete, KTorrent, to name a few. This is cool.

Today, I called Irving Oil to ask them if they had a carbon offsetting program in place, something similar to Air Canada’s or National’s plan where you pay a bit more but they then take that money and help fund Environmental projects. I figured they didn’t have anything of the sort because I couldn’t find it anywhere on their website.

So I called them, and asked the rep if they had any plan like this and he said, “Not that I know of, but let me ask my manager” and of course the manager had never heard of anything like that.

I think I was lucky to get a rep that was interested in this, he then talked to the PR person in charge of the Environmental stuff, and after almost 30mins on the phone he was able to get me the phone number for the person in charge of the Environmental projects at Irving. He said that she would give me a call back. Well, after about 45mins, I received a call from her and she said that she thought it was a good idea and they will consider it. So maybe I will be able to fund Environmental projects by adding a little extra fee to my Oil purchases. GREAT! That makes my life so much easier!!

Now I CHALLENGE YOU to do the same with your Oil company, or your Power Company and ask them if they have a similar plan, where you can contribute a certain amount every month to offset your carbon emissions. It might take 30 mins of your time, but that’s not much if it can save a few years of your life. Pass it along… challenge everyone you know, if you, them, and the people they know all do it, these companies will see the value and they will do something.

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Jessy Ouellette