How You Can Start Improving Your Software Process Today

Are you a developer who dreams about a better software development process in the organization you work for? Maybe you read something about fancy practices on your favorite blog or mayhap you even touched one of those old-style paper collections called books? Do you have some concrete ideas on how to improve, but don't know how to start? I was in the same situation a year ago. Here's what I did and what I would do differently today.

Today The Test Suite Broke

When I arrived at work today I fired up Outlook and checked my mail. I found five mails from our auto-build server telling me that the build broke. Since we introduced test driven development and continuous integration only a short time ago this was not out of nowhere - the build usually breaks at least once a day.

But today was the first day a unit test broke since we introduced TDD and CI.

Ubuntu Gutsy Ximeta NDAS Howto

A month ago I bought a TREKSTOR NDAS device. This devices promises on it's package to be linux compatible. So after I unpacked the hardware and everything was running in Windows I tried to install it in linux. Unfortunately the stock feisty debian package I found didn't work with my WLAN configuration.

Now after I reinstalled ubuntu and upgraded to gutsy which comes right now with a 2.6.22er kernel I tried to build the driver from source. I had to patch the sources to make it work, but since it works flawlessly right now I provide my patch and a little compilation howto.

Download the current NDAS sources and my NDAS patch for linux kernel 2.6.22.

# installed some packages. I don't know which exactly, but you'll need
# at least the following:
apt-get install build-essential checkinstall linux-headers-generic

# extract and patch the ndas sources...
tar xvzf /path/to/ndas-1.1-2.tar.gz
cd ndas-1.1-2
patch -p1 < /path/to/ndas-1.1-2_kernel-2.22.patch

# you only need to set NDAS_KERNEL_VERSION if you 
# don't want to compile ndas for the currently running 
# kernel for example, if you're compling from within colinux
NDAS_KERNEL_VERSION=2.6.22-6-generic
make

# ndas_root must be exported for make install and 
# checkinstall to work
export ndas_root=$(pwd)
# somehow I had to make install before checkinstall...
# this is no problem, since checkinstall will clean up
# the whole mess again
sudo make install
sudo checkinstall

After that you can start the NDAS service by issuing

/etc/init.d/ndas start

Configure your device by following the Ximeta NDAS driver documentation.

Mobile Ubuntu Colinux Setup

My Vista Home Premium finally arrived. Since I have a Ati 9250 at work, which is a smartly rebranded DirectX 8 card, I was craving for the full "vista experience". After doing some backup I installed Vista on my laptop and spent some time setting up the basic programs I need. Since installing colinux is one of the great challenges of the Game Of Windows I'll try to present you a step-by-step guide to a working mobile colinux setup in Vista.