Ionrock Dot Org

I have been working on creating an installer for some programs I wrote. This task has been exceptionally simple thanks to Visual Studio. Visual Studio definitly has its warts of course, but when it comes to placing random files on another computer, it rocks.

In other news I spent a good deal of time with Trac. Trac is a project management tool aimed at creating a simple and concise interface for bug tracking, a wiki and viewing a subversion repository. In getting things setup we revealed some bad decisions made in setting up the server it ran on, so we are going to backtrack a bit and see what happens. In the few minutes that I spent working with Trac, I really enjoyed it. There is a current disjoint between the sales staff, support staff and consulting staff that will hopefully be addressed with Trac when everything has stablezed.

Yesterday I also worked on my TourManager project. Just to recap it is a tool for organizing shows and a tours that will facilitate distribution of show info among people who want or need to know. Right now I am still getting around the basic issues of working with TurboGears. This is frustrating at times, but in general the learning curve seems to be leveling out. The design of the system is starting to take shape as well. There are two main components that I am interested in building. One is the actual Manager interface. A band and booking agent could use the tool to keep each others tour schedules and provide helpful information. When we went on tour the last couple times, we had a great book of contracts and everything that could easily be integrated into this sort of system. The other component is a TourXML reader that will function (more or less) like an RSS reader, with the major difference being that it will read the show lists on MySpace. This portion is pretty far off and will be based on some basic code to read TourXML.

With the system design coming together, there are feelings of urgency and excitement. This is such a small issue for bands and yet there is no solution for it that seems to work. My hope is that by the time it is really ready for primetime, I will need to use it pretty consistently.