Timothy Bowler

Before starting, I would like to tell you the two reasons why I want to share this. Firstly, the many books on scrum that I have read all talk about scrum in large corporate companies where the team might work on a project at a time. As I work in a small creative digital agency where we have many projects on the go, not to mention other influencing work - how does scrum fit in with us? The second reason is how to introduce scrum into a place where the core management do not really understand the scrum process and do not wish to know.

(more…)

After one and a half years of using scrum, I have finally been accepted as a Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP). But, this is only the beginning! I think the next step is to go for certified scrum trainer status. During the last year I have learned a great deal of scrum implementation which of course I will be sharing fairly soon.

Four weeks after the first London Scrum Users Group, Austin and myself devoted some of our free time organise the second meet up. The meeting was kick started by a small welcome followed by everyone introducing themselves to the group. Following that, I started off the main proceedings by presenting to the group a case study of introducing scrum into a small/medium sized digital agency. Afterwards there was a question and answer session (The case study and questions/answers will be posted as another article).

(more…)

Over the last few weeks the server logs, especially /var/log/messages seems to be filled with consistent ssh dictionary attacks. Of course this cannot continue, so what do you do to prevent it?

(more…)

After googling the internet for hours I managed to get the perfect trac + svn setup. Because we use contractors at work, I needed a setup where the security is global but at the same time based on project by project basis. Therefore trac uses a global .htaccess and svn uses the authz file for authentication. At the moment this is working greate. To set up a new trac project is simply a case of creating the project, copying a base projects database and config file and then editing the new project’s config file.

(more…)

Ubuntu 8.04 does not have sendmail installed by default. This was annoying when some of the php web apps that I created rely on sendmail to send out email notifications. But before going ahead and installing sendmail, I thought that I would try exim4. Installing on Ubuntu is very straight forward:

(more…)

Installing an SSL certification in plesk, looked straight forward. But, there are a few gotchas.

When pasting in your certifacte, in the certificate field make sure you copy and paste the private key first. Followed by the certificate. If you puchased an AV certificate (so your domain is green in the IE bar), make sure you get the root and intermediate certificates.

(more…)

There are two ways of doing this

svn export . ../new_dir

or

find . -name .svn -prune -exec rm -rfv {} \;

(more…)

Today I finally installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Sony vaio sz4. It runs like a dream, better than the SUSE setup which it replaced. My first thoughts are that the system runs very fast and all the components work out of box(web cam, finger print scanner have not being tested yet). I have noticed the wifi throughput has increased, using the eclipse IDE runs like a dream and best of all compiz fusion works on both the laptop and on a dual monitor setup. The synaptic package manager seems more complete overSUSE’s yast package management.

(more…)

I was refactoring a few developers code today, and one thing I see time and time again is two queries in favour of a left join, . The problem is symfony makes result set retrieval so easy (thanks to propel of course).

(more…)