From the monthly archives:

March 2009

How to choose a root password that you’ll remember

March 31, 2009

Root passwords and Administrator passwords: Too simple, and you expose the security of the whole machine. Too complex and (if you’re like me) you forget them. With the number of passwords we all need to retain now, what do you do?
A greybeard Unix admin once let me in on the answer to that question, and [...]

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UK Job: Build Manager in Southampton

March 30, 2009

Update: they found someone for the role. All done.
I’m not planning to make these a regular feature, but the nice guys at
Specsavers in Southampton are looking for a Build Master. Details in the PDF. Do tell them that you saw the role here if you apply.

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Continuous Integration is not a silver bullet

March 25, 2009

It’s very easy to implement continuous integration as part of your enterprise agile transformation. Install some software and point it at your enterprise version control system. That box is ticked. But you just failed to implement CI. Why?
CI is a human process. Automated Continuous integration is meant to make it easier to implement that process. [...]

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links for 2009-03-22

March 23, 2009

Introducing the Bob the Builder Anti-Pattern – AnthillPro Blog
Are you Bob?
(tags: ci)

A Small CruiseControl Fix, and a Critique of Spring – Renaissance Developer
I look forward to the day that XML and Java are no longer so closely correlated.
(tags: ci CruiseControl)

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Update on St Patricks Day

March 17, 2009

Apparently some people who do .NET would like to hear my opinion. I’m actually shocked. I’ll try and throw in the occasional compare and contrast with the .NET world.
The results from the survey are in. Thanks to those cast their votes. Most people don’t seem to mind job ads on the blog. What was surprising [...]

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links for 2009-03-15

March 16, 2009

ControlTier | Open Source
For some reason I had thought these guys were a closed source vendor. Interesting.
(tags: deployment)

Agile System Administration | Google Groups
OMFG: an Agile Systems Admin group. Joined. This is precisely where I want to be.
(tags: sysadmin agile)

Thread.current.to_s: Functional test automation through UI is hard, part 2
You can't throw this over [...]

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VIDEO: Atlassian Bamboo 2.2 released with EC2 support

March 12, 2009

I met Kirk Wylie last night at the QCon London conference party. He had some good things to say about the new Bamboo release.
The Atlassian guys did email me about the release, but Kirk got there first with an eloquent speech …

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links for 2009-03-08

March 9, 2009

Column info : Secrets to Automated Acceptance Tests
Jeff rules. Automated acceptance dogma will eat your brane. Seen this a lot.
(tags: testing)

2009: The year of the Agile Sysadmin ? | JEDI: Just Enough Developed Infrastructure
Really interesting look at the sysadmin related talks at Agile 2009. I hope I get to go!
(tags: sysadmin agile)

John [...]

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Job survey, redux

March 1, 2009

I posted a survey on Friday, and yanked it the same day. Sorry, it was pants. Sorry too if you got an RSS feed entry or a tweet about it. My bad.
I have made a different and hopefully better version. If you could take the time to answer 3 questions, you get to help steer [...]

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