Nov 24, 2007

Bazaar Workflow Examples

I was poking around the Internet and found an excellent article describing various workflows using Bazaar (or any distributed VCS really) and thought it was worth sharing.

Nov 4, 2007

KanbanOnRails' Meta-Project

My current work related project is KanbanOnRails.

It's home page contains pretty much every thing you could want to know about the project but doesn't explain the meta-project at all. So I thought I'd do that here...

It turns out that I've stumbled into using a rather odd assortment of tools and services to manage this project, but it's working well, so I thought I'd share the recipe here.

I'm using Bazaar for revision control, Launchpad for project managment and Google Docs for most of the actual content.

There's really only two SCM tools out there that I would consider using right now; Bazaar and Git. I'm firmly sold on distributed SCM and from what I've seen so far these two have the brightest future.

I've decided to use Bazaar for this project and to try Git out on the next.

Distributed SCMs work best if you have some public web space available to share branches, with, mine's here.

I've generally preferred using Trac for project management in the past, it's a fabulous tool, but this time I wanted a third party host that could provide a permanent home for the project. That really only left me with one choice, Launchpad, which natively uses Bazaar. Currently none of the other project hosting services; SourceForge, RubyForge, Google Code, etc... support any form of distributed SCM.

I would of prefered a good reliable (free) public wiki for content hosting but wasn't immediately aware of one so I decided to use Google Docs. This is the most likely part of the recipe to change if Google's Wiki is ever released or I find a good alternative.

Nov 3, 2007

The end is really, really near

A lot of people have been predicting the demise of the major record labels for a long time and of course we all new it was inevitable but I've never thought the time had arrived, until now!

Big name backed independent distribution efforts like the one at http://niggytardust.com will be huge financial successes and convince all the fence sitting artists that this is the right way to go.

This of course will starve the big labels of talent, not that they could recognize it even when they did find it, and slowly drive them out of business.

It's about time!

Nov 1, 2007

Why Participate?

Today I was asked a question that went something like this....

“Why should we participate in a Free Software project if it's possible for our competitors to benefit from our efforts?”

I wasn't really comfortable with the answer I provided at the time so I'm going to take a second stab at it....

"You'll get better results at less cost choosing Free Software than you will from proprietary software and maximizing the benefits of Free Software can only be achieved through participation in the community."
Of course you can choose not to do this and stick with proprietary solutions or maybe even sit on the fence and be a passive Free Software consumer but that doesn't stop your competitors from doing the smart thing and maximizing the potential of Free Software.

The right choice is to use the best tools at your disposal in the most effective manner you know how and hope that your competitors are not smart enough to do the same.

Of course in most cases, today, it's unlikely that your competition will have come to understand the benefits of Free Software yet, so you'll have a considerable head start in learning how to effectively participate in the Free Software community.

In fact I'll even go out on a limb and say that the concept of Free Software is so foreign to most businesses and the benefits of using it so great that it could be a decisive advantage to any business able to grok it.

Something New

I've just recently started a new project, Kanban On Rails. This application is an electronic implementation of the kanban process. It's written in Ruby built on Rails and will be released under the GPLv3.

Like all of my project the best way to find it will be through my Launchpad page.