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Author Archives: Jeff

Setting Up Trac on Windows

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

This is an adaption of this howto, without all the options. I’m setting up a test Trac project without SVN, and this is how I did it:

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Trac vs. XPlanner Death Match

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Trac kills XPlanner. Trac has more functionality. Trac has plugins and is easy to customize. Trac provides extensive reporting capabilities out of the box. Trac is more intuitive. The only thing XPlanner has going for it is that it makes use of buzz words… actually just a single buzz word: Story. And the UI is [...]

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Mad Command Line Skillz

Friday, March 2, 2007

I’ve been working with shell scripts recently. The *NIX command line has some really powerful tools, but I’m afraid to say I’m starting to feel pretty comfortable in my Java IDE land, or in Python land, hell even in Ruby land. And going back to shell scripting has not been fun for me. A few [...]

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Managed Processes Post 2

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

This is a follow up article to First Steps Toward a More Managed Process I wrote at the end of last month. I’ve been using Trac with the Timing and Estimation plugin now for about a month. I tried to promote it to my team for our next product but they never considered it and [...]

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Wiki Formatting Issues

Monday, February 12, 2007

I’ve had some wiki formatting issues lately, particularly when I try to add unix commands like scp and wget. The *NIX Command Line Tips section has suffered as a result. But no more. I’ve finally discovered a work around. If you’re adding something to the wiki page and you see a red underline under a [...]

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Executable Jars with One-Jar

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I’ve been working on packaging a batch process so it can be run by some other group… nothing’s better than passing off the work onto someone else… (gotta love consulting!) In doing so I’ve stumbled upon the problem of packaging and delivering a command-line app. This is where One-Jar project comes in. The promise of [...]

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First Steps Toward a More Managed Process

Friday, January 26, 2007

I hate to say I’m moving toward an agile process and risk becoming too buzzword-focused. But I’m quickly realizing how important it is to have an effective methodology for managing yourself as a consultant. I’ve used task lists for quite a while as a developer, and that’s fine for the most part. But as a [...]

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Holy Grail of CSS Layouts

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Jon Udell referenced this article yesterday in his blog, about the holy grail of the 3 column CSS layout. It’s amazing how illusive standards support is across browsers, despite the ubiquitous nature of the web today.

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Agile Anyone?

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

I’ve been reading up on eXtreme programming practices. I’ve really been in a world of hurt at my current project. The engineering team is adequate, the technology I understand, but the management and requirements are a nightmare. I’m thinking that if I don’t act I’ll really find myself in trouble; the use cases are a [...]

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Assembla Me Something Interesting

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

I found this site while trolling the blogosphere today: Assembla looks like a sourceforge kind of site, only with newer web tools. Looks like it provides Subversion, Trac, and other collaborative features…

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