Tim 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.

Early last year I heard about a management process called Scrum. As we didn’t really have any management process in place for the development team, I felt it necessary that we needed something. I began reading about Scrum, and could see the benefits that scrum would bring us. Before long, I booked myself on a SCM course, which was a 6 month wait. In the mean time, I decided to implement some of the scrum practices based on my understanding at the time. The first thing I done was bought 3 sprint boards, which were placed at the end of the office where everyone can view them. The following week we started to have morning scrum meetings. This was at most the very basic attempt at scrum that we employed.

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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 or two I have learned a great deal of scrum implementation which of course I will be sharing fairly soon.

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?

Well there are a few things:

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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.

We use a base project that is configured for all our core developers, which means im not adding the same permissions and groups all the time.

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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:

apt-get install exim4  exim4-config

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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.

Look in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf for the line like:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>

If it exists you have to delete/comment this default SSL virtual host starting from the
“<VirtualHost _default_:443>” line and ending with “</VirtualHost>“.

Then stop and start (not restart!) Apache server.

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There are two ways of doing this

svn export . ../new_dir

or

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

Either way, both will work. I personally use export, because if there is a problem it means that I do not have to checkout an entire project

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.

Although it is my personal laptop,  Ubuntu (7.10) was rolled out on all developer workstations at Or Media. This was a little shock to some of the developers, but everyone has seen the benefits. Some of which are: Read the rest of this entry »

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).

Example:
To see if an author has a comment
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Finally after having to wait an extra four days (Thanks UPS) I finally received my new Nokia 6131 NFC. The phone has quiet a few features and is small and compact. The reason for needing this phone is so I can start development on Near Field Communication (NFC). At the moment my PhD revolves around the world of NFC and this little phone is going to help me with my first prototype.

Resources
See it in action

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