Work in progress

According to health and safety rules employees are entitled to nine square meters of space (eight if you've got a flat screen). Which led to a certain amount of measuring and checking before we enacted the latest stage of our push to become more agile - creating a more flexible environment.

The basic plan was to free up the one blank wall available to us by moving all the desks forward. Now we've done that we can use the wall to hold project documentation where we can all see it, along with things like a list of holidays and other shared information. It's a little bare at the moment, but we're planning to fill it out.

We're also thinking it might be time to add a sofa to create some space for impromptu brainstorming, chilling and thinking.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While not an ideal way of doing things I thought I'd tinker with using Watir to drive Internet Explorer to scrape data from our Request Tracker instance then use Ruby code to generate SQL for import into our Trac PostgreSQL database, and low and behold it works a charm!

The only real problem is the RT attachments which I cannot (easily) grab using Watir. Instead my script generates another script full of wget commands, and that in turn determines the file sizes of downloaded files and generates SQL statements to tell Trac the file sizes (since RT doesn't tell me). It also generates mkdir and mv commands for placing the attachment files in the right Trac project directory locations.

So now I just need to improve the script a little to strip ENH from the start of ticket subjects and mark them as enhancements instead, to fix some unicode encoding problems and some duplicate key violations I'm seeing (in a v small number of cases). In all I migrated 336 tickets!

I'll upload the scripts somewhere when I get a chance so you can learn from them (or teach me how to do it properly ;-)).

Posted by Ximon Eighteen at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The nice thing about having a big basement is that you can lend it out to people. More about this event later - but much was learned. For now

Blogpost at Fngtps
Pictures at Flickr

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've moved one of the projects I run (our intranet project) onto story cards, arranged nicely on the window (with Blu-Tak!). (There's a spreadsheet under version control as well, but I like the physical display). No sooner had I done this than outside agencies attempted a hard reset of the display medium...

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think we're making progress when this kind of thing breaks out spontaneously in the office

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe it's looking at all David Heinmeir Hansson's slides of 'really big code' but when I was in the Tate Modern this exhibit struck me as looking less like art and more like source code

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our developers is currently taking time away from the heady world of payment processing systems and email tools to crew onboard the Esperanza.

You can read about Alex's adventures at http://weblog.greenpeace.org/oceandefenders/, sadly their web connection went down yesterday - just after Alex managed to post her first entry...

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin and I have spoken before about setting up Trac but there didn't seem to be a good reason to do so at the time. Continuing frustration with RT plus a new project based in a vendors Trac application needing to be taken over by us have now given me more reason to setup Trac finally and so it's been done.

Read on for the nitty gritty of what still remains to be done...

The underside needs some work, creating a project at present is partially automated (in terms of creating a repository and database and trac project all at once) but configuring that new trac project isn't done yet, for example I have to manually go in and fix the style of the new project after creation. Also new projects don't know their authz svn module name but at least the default behaviour is to block access because / is not readable to all according to our access policy.

One thing I wanted to do was to take the tickets from one Trac and place them into ours, but I realised I can't easily do that. I can get the ticket data by RSS feed in XML and so I think I might write a Trac-RSS-To-Trac script, although I'll probably get my hands on the raw data in the other Trac instance before I get that far.

I also need to look at what Trac plugins to use, oh and I definitely want to setup Trac so that we can post email into the tracker. After that I can go back to having Subversion update tracker tickets when commits mention issue ticket numbers, I saw some functionality for Trac to do this the other day, contrib Subversion hooks I think.

I was suprised to find that the default Trac templates don't show the "project" name anywhere in the header. For now I'm just centering the project name at the top of each page. Also the project index page is remarkably bland compared to the rest of the Trac pages.

Our Trac is running in CGI mode at the mo because I couldn't get either of FastCGI or Mod Python to work. I need Mod Python 3.2.9 which isn't out yet, and I can't remember why I couldn't get FastCGI to work. For now I just wanted it up and running... I might need to go back to an earlier version of Apache if it becomes a problem though since 2.0.x is bound to be more compatible than 2.2.x.

Posted by Ximon Eighteen at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At least in part because of my relentless evangelism we're going to be working harder on being agile around here. Or at least learning more about the methodology and trying it on more projects. Which means it's time to start working out where this could go wrong.

This post from Jason Yip provides a good starting point. For me the thought that comes through strongest reading this material is that some agile practitioners are ceasing to be pragmatic. Indeed they've become very dogmatic (they have, I've met them).

I'm currently reading 'Agile Estimating and Planning' by Mike Cohn, which has this to say in one of it's forwards (by Jim Highsmith) "in reality you are Agile, Extreme or otherwise when you know enough about the practices to adapt them to the reality of your own specific situation" , and that seems like a good way of looking at any methodology. If you understand it, you'll recognise it's limitations, and know when it's time to look for something else.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Due to my having too much free time, a nerdy love of trying new things and a burning need from some of our users I tried my hand recently at writing an import mechanism to our cms, GCMS (internally known as Planet 2, an OpenACS based content management system also used by others out there -- but who are you??).

I tried many tools including Sahi, Twill, TestGen4Web, and Watir amongst others. I couldn't login to Planet 2 with Sahi or Twill (5xx error with Sahi, and Twill refused to accept there was a form on the login page). Using Watir to drive Internet Explorer via Ruby scripts however worked an absolute treat so I thought I'd share it with anybody out there who uses a GCMS based system, it might be useful to you (but not having seen other GCMS implementations its hard to be sure).

Grab the Ruby script from here.
Grab Watir from here. I tested it with Watir 1.4.1, Ruby 1.8.4 and IE 6.
A test script to drive the class can be found here.

You can also watch a Wink flash video here!

Posted by Ximon Eighteen at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(the title of this post is largely for Google, so little information could we find on this bug when we searched)

Lars Pind, who develops our intranet has just deployed a fix for one of the most annoying bugs I've ever come across. If you clicked a link in a MS office document to access our intranet the intranet would ask you to log in, and then show you it's homepage.

If the link was anywhere else (a web page, an open office document...) it would ask you to log in and then show you the target page which was much more use.

The issue was down to the very odd way office handles requests - and it took Ximon several hours of looking at request logs to work out exactly what was happening. Once we had a diagnosis Lars was able to provide a fix, which he talks about on his blog.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tell us what you think of Write A Letter

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via the ThoughtWorks blogfeed I found Darren Smith rhapsodising about the value of BluTak to a project.

Not only can I not find BluTak in the Netherlands, I can't find anything similar. And I'm certain that my projects suffer as a result.

Must import some next time I'm in the UK.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)