No drivers to install. No fuss. Ubuntu booted without missing a beat. It just works.

My son’s activity is mostly games. My daughter’s is mostly Netflix.

There are plenty of bug tracking systems out there. Conventional wisdom says it’s better to use one of those than build one. I’ve tried a lot of them. But they’re all too complex, too cumbersome, too expensive, or too ugly. (And, yes, aesthetics count.)

So I created Caravela.

Caravela is a simple and powerful bug tracking system designed from the ground up to be fast and to stay out of your way.

For example, Caravela doesn’t require you to register. Caravela creates an account for you the instant you land on the home page. You can create a new bug tracker for your project in exactly one click. No joke. It is fully configured and ready to be used in one click. And like magic, when you close your browser and return, it remembers you.

Creating bugs is just as easy. There is exactly one required field: the bug description. There’s not even a field for bug title or summary. Caravela automatically generates a title for you based on the description.

There are exactly four statuses and four priorities. And you can change them from the listing on the search results page rather than having to click into each bug.

Everything that can be updated can be done inline without a page refresh. Comments, status changes, administering users, attachment uploads, you name it. Want to update the status? One click, done. Upload an attachment? Click to open the file browser, click to select the file, done. Add a tag? Type it, press enter, done.

But all of that ease of use doesn’t mean Caravela isn’t powerful. You can have public or private bug trackers (as many as you like); multiple team members with different roles; comments, attachments, and tags; full-text search with sorting and filtering controls; tag subscriptions; email notifications; and there’s a lot more still on the way.

If you think it’s something you could use, I’d love it if you gave Caravela a try. And if you like it, I hope you’ll tell your friends (and me!).

And here’s a game called AutoTrafego that I just downloaded for my phone:

Exactly the same game. Arguably a little prettier. Also, my Commodore 64 screen could display 320×200 pixels in 16 colors. My phone can display 320×480 pixels in 65,536 colors.

They’re worried that Amazon’s newest e-book device has the potential to undermine the market for audio books. They’re right—it is a threat and audio book publishers should take note. But illegal?

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

What next? Sorry, kids, I can’t read you a bedtime story—go buy your own copy. It doesn’t seem like the Guild have been paying attention to what happened to the music industry.

Hey, Authors Guild! Want to protect the audio book business? Here’s how: make better audio books. Hire talented voice actors, make high quality recordings, sell at a fair price, and ditch the DRM that assumes every customer is a thief. I can’t believe those guys are actually talking about adding more DRM to prevent text-to-speech. Doomed, I tell you.

pasv_min_port=10000
pasv_max_port=10024
pasv_address=1.2.3.4

(Where 1.2.3.4 is your external public IP address.)

Then:

ec2-authorize default -p 20-21
ec2-authorize default -p 10000-10024

and restart vsftpd.

What this does is configure vsftpd to use ports 10000-10024 for passive data transfers. Then ec2-authorize opens ports 20-21 and 10000-10024 for active and passive connections.

I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my passive connections were hanging. I had everything in the config except pasv_address. When I added that, it started working perfectly.

You might also be interested in:

• Defining Active vs. Passive FTP
• Documentation for ec2-authorize
• vsftpd man page

On a related note, I noticed that Firefox has taken the lead among visitors to BigHugeLabs.com (and has since August). I wouldn’t take this as a general indicator of anything as BigHugeLabs.com isn’t exactly mainstream but it’s interesting to see nonetheless.

Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Venkman: What?
Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Venkman: Right. That’s “bad.” Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

–Ghostbusters

Unless you’ve been paying close attention, you probably didn’t notice that Apple threatened to destroy your iTunes music collection unless the Copyright Royalty Board¹ (CRB) froze rates. In a nutshell, the CRB ruled on a proposal by the National Music Publishers Association² to raise royalties which would cut into Apple’s margins, possibly forcing them to raise prices above $0.99 per track. In response, Apple threatened to close down the iTunes music store. A deal was struck last week and rates remained unchanged—for now³.

If the iTunes music store had gone dark, you would’ve lost the ability to transfer your DRM-burdened music to new computers and devices. The only way to continue to play the music you thought you owned after you upgraded your computer or iPod would be to burn them to CD and then re-rip them in a non-DRM format like MP3 (and take a quality hit during the process).

It’s reasonable to question whether Apple would have actually shut down iTunes. Who knows? Lots of people think they would never shut it down because it would hurt sales of iPods, the real reason the iTunes store exists in the first place. But remember this: Steve Jobs does not love you. Apple will shut down the store the minute there is no more profit in it. In a letter to the CRB, Apple wrote: “Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money and most likely would not continue to operate iTS [iTunes Store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.” You know, customers be damned.

But the point isn’t whether they would have shut down the store. The point is that they could have—and they will eventually. Apple essentially held all of its loyal customers for ransom unless it got what it wanted. Apple gambled with your music collection. Does it matter if they won this time? If you buy DRM-burdened music (or anything else) you will get burned eventually.

Just ask anybody who “bought” music from MSN⁴, Yahoo!⁵ or Wal-Mart⁶. All three music stores were shut down revealing the truth about billions of dollars worth of DRM music purchases: they are really just rentals. Think Apple will never close the iTunes music store? Really? You expect Apple to keep licensing your music to you forever?

Lots of folks are breathing a sigh of relief and claiming that the crisis has been averted. The truth is that the crisis has simply been delayed. Apple has been spinning this so that they look like they’re fighting the evil music industry to keep prices low; but they’ve been keeping pretty quiet about their willingness to throw every iTunes customer under the bus to do it.