First off, please forgive me if I'm posting off topic here.
I recently been giving the task to come up with a strategy to incorporate Lab Management in Test manager. Before I go down the road of leading the project manager and CTO into a "Rah Rah" cheer leading session of Lab Management, I would like to find any objective articles or testimonials of the pros, cons, pitfalls, and best practices of integrating this. If anyone has any personal experience (Positive or negative) with Lab Management or if anyone knows any resources where I can get an objective view of Lab management I would be appreciative.
So far if I decide to implement this I'll more than likely use a standard lab environment opposed to a SCVMM environment. The reason being is that VMWare is already being utilized quite a bit in out organization and I would most likely set up my Lab VM's using VMWare.
Thanks in advance,
Dean
Related
I am exploring various tools for automating our windows infrastructure like Puppet/Chef/Ansible etc. Recently I came across Otter (http://inedo.com/otter). This is relatively a new tool in the market so wanted to know if anyone has already used it and if yes would appreciate if they can share their experience.
We tried it for a while but dropped it again, we simply hit to many issues.
However, the product does seem promising and their support/dev team are quick at solving issues.
I would recommend trying it, as there are very few Windows "first" configuration management tools.
Im doing research regarding continuous integration tools and there benefits. For my research im looking at the following tools:
GitLab CI
Jenkins
Bamboo
GoCD
TeamCity
Now I wont bother you with all the requirements and benefits. But so far im not finding so many differences between the tools except for these:
Fan-in fan-out support GoCD
Community size, Jenkins and GitLab seem to have most contributors
Costs
Open source or not
Amount of plugins available
I was wondering if some people who have had to choose a continuous integration tool aswell could share there experience and why they chose that tool and if there are certain differences that are worth thinking about before choosing which I didn't cover.
Now im leaning towards GoCD because of fan-in fan-out support and the visualisation of the continuous delivery pipeline does anybody have experience with the support on issues for this tool?
Thanks in regard,
Disclaimer: I was an active contributor to GoCD before previous Fall.
I haven't used GitLab CI so won't talk about that :) Also, I haven't used any of these tools in the past one year.
I think TeamCity is a good CI tool. It integrates very well with IDE if you want to debug some failures. The test reports are brilliant. But I don't think they are that advanced in CD space and in my opinion you need both. But if you are interested only in CI, you might want to give it a look. However, you will miss on some of the good features of GoCD I've mentioned below.
Jenkins has a huge community but Jenkins has its own disadvantages. Many a times one plugin doesn't work due to another plugin for some compatibility issues for instance.
GoCD has Fan-in/Fan-out support which avoids many unnecessary builds saving a lot of build time and resources. The value stream map is intuitive and helps to get a better picture of the build stage from a developer's, QA's or even Deliver Manager's point of view. The pipeline modeling in GoCD is also very good. If you read Jez Humble and David Farley's book on Continuous Delivery, you will see the power behind such a build design.
Now, to your second question:
Now im leaning towards GoCD because of fan-in fan-out support and the
visualisation of the continuous delivery pipeline does anybody have
experience with the support on issues for this tool?
Good to hear that :P I love GoCD. The support is good. If you choose to go the Open Source way, the mailing list is pretty active. You can expect a reply from the GoCD team within a day or two. Of course, your questions have to be genuine and specific. Looking through the forums before posting a question helps :)
You can also choose to buy support for GoCD from ThoughtWorks. They used to offer multiple support tiers, not sure of the current support model. You might face issues only when your DB grows too huge (~5-7 GB) when you might want to go for the proprietary Postgres DB support from ThoughtWorks. I've seen very few users of GoCD with that DB size.
I have a lot of experience with Teamcity and some with Gocd. If you are interested in fan-in/fan-out it's also possible to do the same in Teamcity -- it's called Build Chains.
Also there is a good post about this topic on official blog.
If I could choose I would prefer Teamcity. It's more mature and more feature rich product suitable for use in corporate environment.
I've been looking at the plaintive entreaties for participation on cloud.com and eucalyptus.com
I have read much of their documentation and looked at cloud.com's videos, the introductory video on cloud.com in particular is a fine example of someone saying nothing for four minutes while reassuring you that what he's talking about is "cool".
I've played a bit of Call of Cthulhu in my time and am wary of getting involved with cults trying to invoke elder gods through bizarre rituals. When communities are so cagey, vague and inconclusive about what it is they do I have to wonder...
What the hell would one do in contributing to these communities? What benefit does contributing confer apart from being able to play buzzword bingo on your resume?
For context sake. I am asking this because an outsource developer we are using is getting involved with amazon ec2 stuff and we've been having a look at those services. So that I can understand how all this whizz-bang IaaS stuff works I'd like to poke about in one but I'm not paying to do so out of my own pocket and, frankly, no one in our office fully understands how this all works and the venture is unlikely to attract budget until someone with the company credit card "gets" it. Usually I have found experience is the best teacher but I don't know what I am supposed to be experiencing or how best to experience it.
I guess this boils down to: is there any kind of cloud service similar to ec2 I could "have a go" with for free? And if not is there anyone who can explain it without using a thesaurus of current business flavours du jour sprinkled liberally with the word "cool"?
It's with some intrepidation that I try to answer your question (first time answerer, be kind :) ).
Your line of questioning isn't silly - it is just what I'm trying to figure out myself, what are the compelling reasons to implement cloud computing? I'm the technical writer for OpenStack, and I want to write some starter tutorials for some virtual "try it out" images we're creating.
The title question, "what to do to participate in a cloud community" really depends on the community. We're so early-on that community participation is pretty technical - get a Launchpad account, try out the code, talk to us on IRC and mailing lists. Other communities would have different participation patterns.
In summary, I think you could try OpenStack's developer preview out, get a feel for our community, and play with the cloud fabric controller (spin virtual machines up and down and so on) using VirtualBox.
So, if you want to try out OpenStack's Compute (aka Nova on Launchpad), download Virtual Box, and then get the image by downloading from here. Unzip the image, then start Virtual Box. There's a readme in the zip file that has step-by-step instructions (not super air-tight, but I'm testing them). What I'm trying to learn myself is "what's a good starter tutorial for *aaS?"
I think you'd find 10 Steps to Initiating an OpenStack Cloud Service an interesting read. It's all about how to get a major service (i.e. code contribution) accepted into OpenStack.
I don't know if there are any free Cloud providers - but EC2 isn't going to hurt you. I work with it daily in the office, billed to a corporate card, and I use it for personal projects billed to my own card.
Signup to EC2 is free, and if you already have an Amazon account as a purchaser then it's just a couple of clicks. Spinning-up a Micro or Small instance for a few hours to play with it will set you back a few pence. Leave it running and you'll venture into pounds territory - but we're talking £10 or £20 for a months' usage. Fire a Medium or Large (or larger) up, and you'll accrue charges at a higher rate, obviously. Terminate any instances and zap any storage you might have created, and the billing drops to zero.
EC2 pricing is here.
There are various options. However in my opinion, the most useful and easy options would be to go along with OpenStack. Read about it. Visit devstack.org, and OpenStack official website and install it on your system. Observe it and figure out how it works. Once you are comfortable with its working and code structure, go to launchpad and pick problems you think you can solve it then learn git( if you don't know already) then propose your solution. Get in touch with IRC channel associated with the project you wish to work upon. And with time you will start enjoying it.
For my university I (and three others), are searching for a project that utilizes at least one embedded device, web services or other web technology, and a Graphical User Interface.
Currently we are looking at developing a unified remote, that is an extendable application on a cell phone through which you can control your media center. Any ideas, or advice on this will be appreciated, though it is not the focus of this question.
We are having a hard time finding interesting (or funny) projects on which we can work a complete semester. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated. The software will be released as free software. (GPL or BSD license).
We all have a Bsc in Software Engineering.
EDIT: I am very pleased with the suggestions so far. Thanks to everyone, and keep it coming.
How about follower: carry a device, as you move from room to room in your house devices configure themselves to your preference - lights, music etc. If two people are in the room some precedence rules.
Is that possible just on the presence of a mobile phone?
Another idea (from the top of my head):
A work environment ensurance thing. We programmers like to develop in nice and quiet environments. Unfortunately some people tends to annoy us with their disturbing behaviour (or just by being loud).
So the project could be to create devices wich tracks the stress level (sweat levels, pulse etc.) of the individual and their impact onto others.
An example: One individual is very loud (the device should measure this), and others around him becomes stressed and/or unfocused because of this. The serverside sw, should then detect and warn him to quit down a bit to improve the work environment.
Comments?
What do you peeps like doing? Build an app for it.
So, if you like drinking coffee build a application which will find the nearest frothy coffee shoppe (or if you're particular, the nearest Peets/Starbucks/Whatever-ocino). This idea works for beer too.
If you buy stuff off e-Bay build a sniper app.
If you enjoy playing frisbee build an app which locates your nearest friends and sends them a text asking whether they want to goof off lectures and go to the park.
Heck, you could even build an app which monitors your SO questions and alerts you when you get an answer (although I don't know whether the data services SO currently offer will be up to the job).
The standout companies that have made great universal (programmable) remotes are : logitech, and philips.
One of the big problems with these types of devices is the ability of the general consumer to actually program all of their various devices. Logitech has done an outstanding job of providing a fairly simple Web based user setup experience that then implements a very usable universal control.
I would definitely look at what they have done for some ideas on universal remote controls.
How about an app and hardware that will tell me when my wife's plants need watering? (It's somehow my fault if they don't get watered.)
OK then: the recipe generating fridge. Rfid tags on the contents know what's available and the expiry dates. The database knows the recipes. The fridge emails/texts you to say "buy some mushrooms and you can have a delicous ham and mushroom omelette while the eggs are still fresh."
Benjamin and all those aspiring to do embedded projects ...
When you start a project, especially in embedded systems, you need to understand that the hardware is not your PC but some special device. And every sensor will be a transducer in itself. The only thing that would matter to students is that everything costs and are costly
So, it will be good to make sure that the idea is such that,
It can be completed by the
project members within the given timeframe
All the required development
tools like hardware etc can be
really bought
Of all, it good to ensure that the
project enables you to learn
something useful for your career ...
To do all this it is better set some achievable goals
Develop a system in which you can program the lighting system of your house. You can set up their schedule one time and everything should work automatically.
I really love working witht the Atmel ststk1000/stk1006/stk1002 development boards for tht AVR32. ATSTK1000
2x Ethernet
QVGA lcd
USB 2.0
SD/MMC
Conpact flash
Supported embedded linux
IR
Audio
ps2 interfaces
uarts
++
familiy atmel page:
AVR 32 family home
online forums
Forums for CPU
I want to add a "Community" section (Bulletin Board) to my website so everyone can communicate, but I don't know what I'm doing.
How would I go about adding this and which one offers the most documentation and support?
Whatever you do, make certain that you read the instructions on configuring your discussion software to protect you and your community for the worst parts of the internet: spam, spoofing, and abuse.
Make certain that you immediately change the admin password from the one that comes with the installation.
If you leave your communities wide open to all kinds of posting, harvesting, and general mis-use, you'll spend your days playing whack-a-mole with thousands of idiots. Develop your acceptable use policy, configure your boards to support it, then enforce it.
And if the software you are looking at doesn't support things like e-mail verification, moderation, abuse reporting, anti-spamming controls, etc., just keep looking.
Be prepared to spend time managing your community so that it doesn't become another one of the millions of web forums out there full of off topic posts that drive people away from your website.
I think what you needed is a forum software, there are tones of free and open source ones available on the net. DotNetNuke is a .NET one but can be expensive to host and phpBB is another popular choice and there are a lot of cheap hosting solutions.
is your site based on php/mysql or asp/sql? Chances are if you do not know where to even find tables, that you are not able to what you actually want.
HOWEVER, if it's php/mysql, i recommend Cool Php Scripts book. It covers creating sort of a community forum/message board.
As i said again, you are probably not going to do it alone, at least, without a long frustrating learning curve.
You can always post a job and someone would be more than willing to bid on it at elance or rentacoder or any other site of your choice
Wikipedia has a big honking list of forum software. Pick the one that best matches the programming language(s) you're familiar with, the features you need, etc.
This is what you need.
Edit: They don't offer a hosted version there. You can use this instead. It's hosted on it's own site, free, and doesn't require a download.
I find Vanilla to be a much better forum application that phpBB for reasons of aesthetics as well as extensibility. I have not seen/used it in a situation where many sub-forums were required, so depending on your scope it may not be the right choice, but for small-to-medium sized forums I'd suggest trying it first.
First, you need to choose a forum software that matchs your requirements.
Then, just follow the Installation Guide provided by the software you have choosen.
More information at Forum Software Reviews