Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto After two and a half years at Smoothwall, I'm moving on - Friday is my last day. Since I joined the development team, we have adopted Agile development, set up a pretty nifty Gerrit/Jenkins code review + integration system, and introduced dpkg for package management. Along the way, I helped with a bunch of important features for the business, like a ground-up rewrite of the web filter, and time-based browsing usage quotas. ...

I've finally got around to deleting my Facebook account. I'd love to claim that this was a grand gesture against privacy-invading apps, or a bid to recoup vast amounts of my spare time... but it's not, really. I rarely logged in to the site, these days, so Facebook has very little of my personal data.

Michael Meeks gave awesome talks at FOSDEM, so Kate was inspired to hack on LibreOffice. I was inspired to write this blog entry in a list. She probably wins. Building LibreOffice master on Debian stable failed for her with a segmentation fault in GNU Make. A bit of searching threw up Savannah bug #20033, which is hitting everyone on the upstream mailing list. Bumped severity and offered to NMU Debian bug #622644. Then actually tried building make-dfsg in cowbuilder, and aclocal fails in the clean environment because /usr/share/aclocal does not exist. I think it's related to Debian bug #565663, but I'm still poking it.

Recently, I tried to get 3G working on my Lenovo ThinkPad X121e - it has an Ericsson F5521gw mobile broadband card. This is supported by ModemManager, but all I got were unknown errors (276 and 272). Searching online, there were very few results (hence this short note) - just previous unrelated Linux kernel issues. I found someone with the same problem on Fedora, but no solution, so I started off by filing a bug report with Debian. ...

So since my last post about perl tutorials, the Perl Tutorial Hub has leaped from page 2 to be the top result for the relevant Google search. The Leeds tutorial has dropped off the first page. I couldn't figure out how such a dramatic reversal could have happened, until I asked Mithaldu on IRC; the admins of the old Leeds tutorial have added a (delayed) redirect. So, Google has interpreted that as a 302 status, and given perl-tutorial.org all the old inbound links, presumably. ...

Hello, World! Last year, a bit of a fuss was kicked up in the Perl community about the low quality of search results for the phrase "Perl tutorial". Various ideas for fixing this were proposed, including the handy Perl tutorial hub, but kicking Leeds University off the coveted top spot is going to be a real challenge. The problem is, most Perl tutorials on the internet were written for Perl 4; modern Perl doesn't get a look-in. It's a miracle anyone manages to learn Perl at all... ...

So I was about to configure an FTP server to let a friend upload content for a website... and then I came to my senses and remembered sftp exists. It's supported by the same graphical clients, and avoids me having to figure out SSL certificates and so on. Next problem: we want to both edit the site. Okay, so I create a group, make it the default group for both users... and now I need to set the umask to 002 so that all group members can edit all files. There's no option in the client... ...

This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found. There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible. I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.) ...

Note to self: when disabling Range headers in Apache to fix CVE-2011-3192, be sure to read the updated advisory and also disable Request-Range headers. (Presumably not "Range-Request" as in the summary of that link?) Or just apply the handy Debian update, of course.

Some things I have learnt this week at DebConf: The cost of living in the UK is much higher than in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I feel much better about life when I am being a fun and exciting person, compared to boring and cynical. My laptop is not well-suited to travelling - poor battery life, and poor wifi. However, I have mastered the art of taking only hand luggage. I have quietly resolved to spend more time doing things that I enjoy, that maximise the use of my skills, and which help other people; and spend less time on the opposite. ...