If you haven’t read it yet, you really should. The digressions into software engineering history alone are reason enough to read the book. The Chandler part of the story may strike some as a cautionary tale of what not to do when developing new software, but I found it an accurate description of the kinds of unexpected issues and challenges that crop up in any large software project.

Go out and get a copy from your local library or buy the new paperback today. It is a great read.

Rarely do I see a movie that actually makes my heart race like this one did. I sat in the third row and from that close to the screen you do need a strong stomach, at least in the beginning, as the camera work can be a bit disorienting. There was even a hastily printed sign outside the theater entrance to warn us of that fact.

I’m not going to give away spoilers for those who didn’t see it, you can find them other places on the Web. But, some of the deaths in this movie are quite disturbing. The monster itself is amazing, huge, and terrifying.

The addition of smaller, about dog-sized, parasite monsters create a immediate threat to the lives of the characters that keeps the tension high when the main monster is not nearby.

While the characters are not deeply explored in this film, I think their interactions and even conversations were very realistic. In the middle a crisis that stretches the boundaries of human imagination, the characters behave mostly as I’d expect them to. They are scared, often traumatized, but they are trying to survive as best they can. The most unrealistic aspect of their trek is Rob’s initial decision to go into the middle of the city in search of Beth and the nearly immediate decisions of the other main characters to follow him. It is especially straining credibility to think that Marlena would risk her life, going along with people she hardly knows, when she could just leave with the military evacuation. Thankfully for us, she does go along, as Lizzy Caplan provides by far the best performance in the picture.

Be sure to pay attention to the final footage of the film, in the upper right quadrant, in the ocean. Also, while the movie itself does not have a musical score during the film, if you stay for the credits, you are treated to a pretty good, monster movie theme score as well as a whisper at the end, that when played backwards, says, “It’s still alive.”

I’m not sure how successful a sequel would be, though. This movie is really an “experience” film. You need to see it in a theater with a good projector and sound system to appreciate it. I can’t imagine having the same kind of visceral reaction sitting at home, watching it on DVD. There really isn’t any depth to the film that can be explored on subsequent viewings, except in what can be glimpsed in the background of some of the complex shots thanks to the pause button.

Overall, I thought it was a great monster movie that fully lived up to my hopes and expectations. I wanted a gory, gritty, horrifyingly realistic take on a fantastical scenario. I got what I wanted in spades.

Of course, FogBugz 6 has more than just bug tracking features, but let’s be honest, that is its bread and butter and entering/updating/closing cases is what I spend the majority of my time doing. This means the UI needs to be fast and intuitive. For the most part, the Fog Creek developers succeeded. Entering cases in List view is fast and doesn’t require me to use a mouse, which when entering dozens of cases in one stretch, as I had to do when migrating my data from Mantis, saves a significant amount of time and carpal tunnel pain.

We use Subversion as our source repository. Supposedly, FogBugz 6 can integrate with it so that when I post a check-in comment, it will be reflected in the case history within FogBugz. Unfortunately, I could not get this functionality to work. I setup things on the Subversion side, added the commit scripts they provided, tested that they are parsing my comments properly and making requests to the FogBugz server, but still, nothing shows up in my case history. Now, it might be because I didn’t do the second half of the integration which requires you to setup FogBugz to automatically link to your subversion commits through a Web front-end like WebSvn. I don’t have a Web server running on the Subversion box, so I skipped this step. I just use SSH, which works fine for our two person group. I don’t see why it should matter and I didn’t find any errors in their commit scripts. So, I don’t know what happened. I’ll probably get back to trying again sometime before the Holidays.

Of course, the big new feature in FogBugz 6 is EBS or “Evidence-Based Scheduling.” However, I don’t have enough data in the system for it to give me anything accurate, yet. A review of this neat feature will have to wait a few months.

The feature I have been using the most recently is the new Wiki. I have been writing a functional specification for an iTunesU application in it. I have tried to use different Wiki platforms in the past, but they have either been too complicated to setup or were easy to setup, but inexplicably failed to work right. The Wiki in FogBugz is both easy and works great, with some minor issues.

The best part of using the Wiki for writing documentation is that the rich text editor they created is fantastic. It is FAST, simple, and lets you quickly accomplish the four primary work flow tasks you encounter: writing, formating, linking, and inserting pictures. Writing is easy. Formatting is as simple as clicking tool bar buttons. Linking is nice because there are some shortcuts. For instance, if I just add a link to “Technical Specification”, the wiki assumes I mean an article within the current wiki, called “Technical Specification.” But, if I put in a full URI to an external website, it works as expected.

A nice feature that is only appreciated when you need it is the real-time resizing of inserted pictures. You just grab a corner and drag to resize. There is no need to resize things in Photoshop and then re-insert. It is a small thing, but it saved me a lot of time today.

The only issues I’ve had so far were first, a nagging problem with the drop-down menus not dropping when running in Firefox. I upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.10 and that problem vanished. I also continue to find it a bit frustrating that I can’t seem to set a default font, so I have to constantly highlight and reset fonts for body text and headlines if I want anything besides the defaults used. Finally, this may be more of a browser problem than anything about the wiki, itself, but when I view my article, my chosen fonts don’t look very good and spacing seems to be off, but within the rich text editor, things are peachy. I may have to adjust the template the wiki is using.

Overall, I think FogBugz 6 is a great tool. It is by far the nicest bug tracking software I’ve used. I am generally a big OSS user and I feel a bit guilty using a proprietary bug tracking tool when we have an embarrassment of riches of respectable bug tracking software in the OSS world. But, frankly, nothing is quite as polished and integrated as FogBugz. I shall continue using this software for the foreseeable future and when I get my own micro-ISV up and running, I’ll definitely be considering a personal on-demand account. I recommend it.

I can use a slow Web-based IM client to send messages to my friends list or post on a public feed (a la Twitter) or I can use a barely functional Adobe AIR application on my desktop. While I like the attempt at a limited taxonomy of message types, their implementation doesn’t seem to do much with the different types beyond formatting and styling their appearance in messages. So, an “Event” shows up as a message with “What, Where, When” fields, while a “Link” shows up as a button-like icon. The only type that seems to provide some functionality is the “File” type which displays as a button to download the file or an embedded player, depending on the kind of file it was that I uploaded. Unfortunately, even this limited innovation is squashed by the paltry 10MB limit on uploaded files. Even a “Pro” account only nets you 100MB per file (for a fee of $20/year).

Oddly, there is currently no SMS support, so I can’t post anything from my phone. I guess I could configure my account to send notifications to the Verizon SMS gateway to get SMS messages of updates, that is if the updates actually worked. They don’t seem to be working for me.

Finally, there is no API access. I could forgive the current, sluggish interface and lacking feature set if I could hook my own app into the Pownce platform. I think it would be great if I could hook my IM client into Pownce and provide a single, rich interface to Pownce in the same place as I connect with other IM networks. Or, I could write a plugin for WordPress to cross-post certain blog entries to my Pownce account or vice-versa, like is being done on Facebook. There are countless ways an API would be useful and I know the Pownce team must be working on one, but I think it was a big mistake to release what amounts to a lackluster Web-based IM client/micro-blogging tool without the ability to integrate it into the many other IM and blogging tools that people are already using.

I think there is a lot of potential in a service like this as a platform on-top of which sharing and collaboration tools can be built. But, the service, as stands now, feels like an Alpha build. I am a proponent of release early, release often, but with so little to offer in its initial release, the Pownce team is risking losing many of the early adopters by the time they manage to implement significant expanded features.

Despite all of this, I’m not going to count out the Pownce team, just yet. For now, I’ll continue to play with it, but I’m going to probably stick with Adium and email for my primary “stuff” sending needs. I’ll see how things stand after their next major feature release.