Redmine on Oracle

I posted this issue to the Redmine group. It seems that Redmine doesn’t play nice with Oracle without some enhancements. This one relates to the nasty 30-character limit on Oracle table names. I’m anxious to see if they pick it up. I also added #7826. [Redmine – Issue #7825] [Redmine – Issue #7826]

Riding Rails: DoS Vulnerability in Ruby

Riding Rails: DoS Vulnerability in Ruby.

Note to Self

This helped me…

Open Source Support

Will we ever be past the point where management, in an almost predictable manner, rejects open source solutions on the basis of “lacking support?” Just the other day a friend of mine spend a good portion of his day troubleshooting an open source package with, get this, THE DEVELOPER who wrote the code! I cannot…

The Software Glass Ceiling: Software Management

The Peter Principle says, basically, that people are promoted until reaching a level of incompetence. I think the reverse of this can be true as well: An employee may not be promoted because he or she performs very well in a given role. This is just me talking, but I think there are a few…

The Software Glass Ceiling: Career Path?

This is a somewhat old article (2006), but it eludes to something that I have found a bit bothersome about attitudes regarding software engineering career paths. I recently interviewed for a Business Analyst position with the CIO of a large multi-national software development firm. This man was in charge of the company’s worldwide IT operations,…

Subversion Authentication Using Unix Accounts

Standard Subversion authentication using plain text user settings and passwords in the passwd and authz files in the Subversion conf directory. This is all fine for a very small installation on a localhost, but it doesn’t work very well in a work environment. Alternatively, SVN can be set up to use LDAP authentication. That’s okay…

Subversion Authentication Using Unix Creds

Here‘s a simple way to configure Subversion to authenticate  a user using Unix credentials (through http) with Apache, pwauth and mod_authnz_external. Its not really rocket science, and its not anything that others aren’t already doing (the post is over 3 years old), but it certainly is useful. I like authenticating Subversion users in this way…

Redmine Forked (ChiliProject)

Oh boy. Redmine has been forked now? There are many, many comments here, which I’ll be reading through. I’m a fan of Redmine, and I fully intend to continue using it. There are certainly a number of alternatives out there, but the appeal of Redmine is that it is widely used, and as such, all…

Move a Subversion Repo

Scott Sanders :: blog :: Move a Subversion repository from one machine to another.

Jenkins CI Thoughts

I got a laugh out of a link I saw on the Jenkins CI page today: “Upgrading from Hudson?” Of course, I’ll be using Jenkins going forward, as it appears that most people in the community are already heading this direction (because Jenkins IS the real Hudson). Comparing the Jenkins CI change log to the…

“We’ll refactor that later…”

Not that long ago a very wise coworker said this in a meeting: The biggest lie in software is, “We’ll clean that code up later.” Insightful. I admit, I’ve said this before, and, like others, I haven’t followed through. I suspect this happens often because, being busy developers, if a section of code works there…

I’m With Jenkins

It all started back in December, when Oracle claimed to own Hudson. From SD Times blog: It’s official: Hudson has been forked. The “real” Hudson is now called Jenkins. Of course, Oracle will say they’ve got the “real” Hudson because they’ve inherited the name. Or, rather, they’ve sat down upon the name and made it…

Ruby and NetBeans Part Ways

(Rather, Oracle drops Ruby support.) This is unfortunate. While many people use Eclipse and don’t worry about Netbeans, I actually prefer it. I suppose I’ll have to make the transition to Eclipse for once and for all. The founder of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, said in an email that he was “not surprised”…

Links and Stuff

Here is a list of random stuff that recently caught my eye: Hirelite Blog: What developers think when you say “Rock Star” JSmooth Eloquent Javascript Symbolicons Hudson’s Bright Future Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu in One Line Ruby and Rails in a Single Windows Installer Ruby Best Practices Book–FREE Fedora vs. Ubuntu, Is Either Better?…

Raleigh Area Ruby Brigade

My friend Eric is going to start a new Ruby on Rails Hack Night group in the area. Hopefully I have time to join him! (I plan on it.) Things like this may seem like just one more thing to do in a busy week (I have children and a wife and other hobbies), but…

Should a Form Button Never Say “Submit?”

‘Anthony’ at UXMovement writes: When you see a Sub­mit but­ton on a form, what comes to your mind? One could eas­ily rea­son that click­ing the but­ton sub­mits the user’s infor­ma­tion into the sys­tem for pro­cess­ing. A Sub­mit but­ton describes what the sys­tem does well, but it doesn’t describe what the user does at all. When users…

You Need a Personal Wiki

I recently decided to start a personal Wiki. I decided to do this, partially, not only because wanted to mess around with Github, but more importantly, because I often find myself spending a lot of time figuring things out only to forgot the issue a year later when having the same problem. I highly recommend…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 8)

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION BUILDS To answer the first question, before it is even asked: Yes, a software project should have continuous integration (CI) builds. This goes for projects with a large team as well as projects with a small team. While the CI build is very useful for a large group to collaborate there is tremendous…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 7)

USE THE ISSUE TRACKING SYSTEM FOR ALL PROJECT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT I propose that it is not enough to simply leave functional requirements in the software requirements specification document. This does not provide sufficient tracing, nor does it provide a clear path from idea to functional code. Here are the steps that I suggest: All…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 6)

So what’s so great about Redmine? The power of the wiki: Your documents have all of your project management details, work instructions, use cases, requirements and so on. Again, I think this information can be placed into the wiki, but that may be a step that not everyone is comfortable taking. That said, all developer…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 5)

RELEASING SOFTWARE When software is released it is typically given some kind of version number (e.g., 1.0). This is good, but it doesn’t tell us the specifics of what went into that build. It’s a good idea to include the Subversion changeset number somewhere in the release so that we always know EXACTLY what went…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 4)

VERSION CONTROL The earliest phase of any software project is the planning phase. At this stage, people involved with the project have meetings and discuss some very high level needs. There are probably some presentations and documents that are created. Project management plans have not been developed, but they should be thought about. And as…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 3)

ONE APPROACH After that long introduction, my desire is to write about one approach to handling design and development activities of a software project. This is an approach that works well for any software project, not just one in which a 510K is being pursued. Given the fact that the biggest needs are for good…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 2)

WHAT WENT WRONG? So what went wrong during this audit? The obvious and most simple answer is that I wasn’t prepared. Yet, even as I reflect, to this day I’m not entirely sure what the auditor wanted to know. The project manager was irritated with me for not understanding the questioning, yes, but what was…

Handling Development in a Medical Device World (Part 1)

Here’s a dirty little secret: You know those standard operating procedures that took so long to create and that you forced everyone to read? Of course you do! And assuming you have loyal employees who do what they are asked, the procedures were probably read, boring as they may be. That’s the good news. The…

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

I’ve always gotten a chuckle from job posts or emails that state that an employer is search for a “Ninja” or “Genius” programmer. I always assume this to mean that the employer is looking for a single person who can handle an incredible workload alone. I like this video because the presenters (Brian Fitzpatrick and…