Last time we had a look at how to acquire and install Hudson, a continuous build and integration system beneficial to software engineering. This week we take a look at how to create and run a job using Hudson, and then look at the job output. Hudson can run a wide...
Recently, we upgraded Confluence to 4.0, the latest revision and was pleasantly surprised by the process. The upgrade was seamless, well documented, and no major issues found. Upgrading confluence would have been really simple if we wanted to retain the same server....
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
The technology industry loves buzzwords. The decade of the '80s was all about synergy and paradigm shifts. In the '90s, it was the web and the Internet. The turn of the century brought talk about virtualization and social media. Today it's all about the cloud. Of...
Macs running OS X have been around for quite some time, but only recently have they gained enough traction with our customers at SPK to be used as their day to day desktop environment. Historically, IT organizations have been reluctant to embrace this change. This...
What is an SSD? The term SSD (Solid State Drive), can refer to any drive that uses solid state components to store information, or more to the point - has no moving parts. When we hear terms like 'Flash Drive' or 'Thumb Drive', we typically don't think SSD, but...
Attitudes are important things -- they are the lens through which we filter everything life throws at us, and they can either be the secret to our success or our undoing. We've all heard the stereotype that says IT professionals have bad attitudes, and maybe your own...
Some time ago, I wrote an article about CPUID’s wonderful tool, HWMonitor. Today I want to follow up on that and give a few tips on how to make it more useful. Firstly, HWMonitor is a free tool, but CPUID publishes a Professional version of the product, predictably...
Automated development, rather than just automated builds, offers a more holistic approach to automating the development process including building, testing and deployment. It is the cornerstone of Continuous Integration (CI). CI uses a model of small incremental...
Almost every programming book starts with an example of a small program which can be compiled from the command line using a simple call to the compiler with maybe a few flags. Known as “Hello World”, the few lines of code needed to output the text is almost universal....
Dell Latitude ST This is the Dell Latitude ST, which can be had from the Dell Outlet store for about $300. It’s a 10-inch tablet slate running an Atom Z670 and 2GB of RAM – like a Netbook without a keyboard. Instead, it has an N-trig digitizer that supports both...
I'm a huge fan of automation, especially when it comes to installing software. With a simple one-click solution, you can setup software on a user's workstation with little or no impact on your work load. In fact, you don't even need to do the installation -- users can...