Happy Halloween!

The excitement for tonight is handing out candy to kids, cleaning the basement (as I'm finally finished with the duct-work and just need to clean things up for the rough-in inspection on Thursday) and heading over to mom and dad's to solidify plans for deer hunting this weekend.

On an interesting note, I've been quite busy with work recently on the bug fixing front. I've been hitting the lists pretty hard and done a reasonably good job of tackling a number of bugs. So I'm quite happy, and think r5 is going to be a much more solid release. One fun thing I did today was take a peek at my watch list in the feedback system. I went thru each report to do some touch-up work on it.

• Make sure it's still relevant. Test the report to see if it's still a bug in the latest release (or beta), and then mark the "Report State Change Request" field if it should be closed.
• Make sure you still care. Some of the feature requests I made a long, long time ago no longer make much sense to me. So I removed myself from those reports (and if I was the last reporter on there, I marked the state change request to be closed).
• Make sure anything marked as More Information gets updated. My own trend for items that are on my bug list is that if it stays as "More Info" for longer than three months with no new information, I usually close the report or at least remove it from my list of things to work on.
• Update anything which can be updated. Make sure the category and severity fields are set properly, make sure you specify which platform you're running on (and don't just say "UB" -- specify PPC or Intel, please!), attach sample projects/steps to reproduce, etc. By doing these things, the bugs are much more likely to be noticed and fixed. For instance, when a bug is assigned into a particular category, it oftentimes is automatically assigned to an engineer. But if the category isn't set, then it's obviously not going to be auto-assigned. More info and accurate info = Better

If you get bored, you should try running down your list and doing the same thing. Sometimes a bit of house cleaning can be nice.

Also, I want to thank everyone for their kind words and advice about Lis' and my engagement. We both appreciate your sentiments (and warnings!). :-)

Have a happy and safe Halloween!