Skip to main content

I'm gonna be the Wiki-techie! (oh no)

I was recently contacted by Atlassian's Wiki Evangelist (yes, appearantly that's a real title!), Stewart Mader. He asked me to consider their new site, Wikipatterns.com, and also forward the site to my dear readership. Done!

In other but related news, I've been (somewhat unwillingly) appointed our next Confluence administrator. This means I'll be given full control over the wiki (muhuhaha) , meaning in effect I'll be able to try out new plug-ins, manage spaces, bully people around, etc.

It also means I'll have to do upgrades, booring user adminstration, figure out funky stacktraces that are appearing in Confluence for some odd reason, fix the database, etc, etc.

The main reason I have volunteered to do this job is that no-one else wanted to do it, and I believe our Wiki is far too critical to leave in the hands of our IT service provider like our CTO would've had it. When are you people gonna understand that Windows is not meant for hosting?

Additionally, I'll hopefully learn alot about Linux, DNS stuff, routing, network, hosting java applications, databases and user management (with LDAP).

These things aren't always relevant in my daytime job, but sooner or later the software we produce will end up in the hands of IT techies who want the software to work, log and do error reporting in a certain way.

And when all boils down to it, Confluence is still a java web application that runs on Tomcat, which is very similar to the products I develop. Having been responsible for hosting Confluence will therefore make me a better software developer.

I've got lots of other things to blog about, but no time to do them right now. Subjects include:

  • Finalizing the CMS requirements with its most important element: Extendability
  • How I became a certified Scrum Master (and what I learned)
  • The programming designer, the new breed of web developers
Stay tuned.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous4/3/07 23:19

    Thomas,

    If you need assistance translating those "funky stacktraces" please feel free to submit a support issue (with logs) at http://support.atlassian.com. Even better, from the same website, you can hop on live chat to discuss Confluence issues with one the Atlassian support engineers. As your company's new Confluence administrator, we're here for you!

    Cheers,
    Donna McGahan
    --Atlassian Support Engineer

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thommy Bommen4/3/07 23:44

    The Wikipatterns website is a good source of information if you need any Wiki Adoption Patterns.

    Looking forward to see the post on Scrum!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6/3/07 01:31

    I have two words: "Virtual Machine". Ok, four: "MindTouch Deki". I've just upgraded from the free version to the pro version. It's delightfully easy to use and install. Also, they update the application automatically. http://mindtouch.com/deki&subsection=Download

    I came to them by way of www.opengarden.org.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Stewart Mader9/3/07 21:55

    Hi Thomas,
    As Donna said, we're here to help. Thanks for mentioning Wikipatterns, BTW!
    Best regards,
    Stewart Mader
    Wiki Evangelist, Atlassian

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant
6 comments
Read more

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password
Post a Comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio
Post a Comment
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be
1 comment
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o
Post a Comment
Read more