Quite a few teams start with a Wiki style system - eg. MediaWiki. Wiki’s are great as a starting point for teams to capture their own knowledge, whilst you work out what information you want to capture for the overall IT department. Here are some tips to make the most out of a Wiki in your company and team.

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There are a great range of open source tools out there for creating 2D and 3D graphics, to help you create stunning visuals for your website development or livening up your presentations. Here are some of the most widely used tools.

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Using Git for a coding dojo gives you a lot of support and should help your experiments and hacking go much smoother. As its easy to branch different ideas and throw them away, its more likely you will have something still to show at the end of the evening. Here are some tips on how to use Git at your next coding dojo.

A coding dojo is a place where developer gather and practice together. Dojo is the name for the training halls in Japanese culture use by martial arts students.

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You can very easily get netbeans to use your full name when it generates code from it templates, rather than what ever you set your account name to be.

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Cloning an existing virtual machine is not an obvious part of the VirtualBox user interface, even in version 4 of Virtualbox. You have three options as far as I can tell

1) Export an existing virtual machine and import as a new machine
2) Create a new virtual machine using a cloned hard drive file
3) Create a new virtual machine using a copied hard drive file with a changed unique identification number (not official supported)

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It seems Oracle lawyers have advised the Netbeans team that they can no longer ship JUnit with the Netbeans IDE. I originally did not understand this issue (see update below), but it seems that the Netbeans team have a neat way to deal with this “advice” anyway.

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On the third Thursday of the month the London Scala user group runs a Scala coding dojo at Thoughtworks office. The event has a great atmosphere and is a really fun and friendly place to learn and practice the Scala programming language (and some TDD / BDD).

For the Scala coding dojo I use the Simple Build Tool (SBT) to create a new scala project as well as run the building and testing of that project during the dojo.

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I took the bold (all right, crazy) decision to run with Ubuntu 11.04 whist still in heavy development directly on my Lenovo X201T tablet laptop, partly for the experience of the new Unity and Compiz desktop and partly to help with the testing.

As the 11.04 version of Ubuntu is still being written, I prepared myself to experience a few problems, but apart from one upgrade last Friday (my fault as I didnt look closely enough to see what apt-get dist-install was removing) I have been using Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity quite productively.

Occasionally I get the odd rendering problem with the menus when I login to a new Unity session, so I run the command unity --reset and all is well again.  I leave the terminal window open to see if there are any useful error messages.

I did have a little bit of a crash today with Unity (core dump), but as I also run byobu in my terminal window by default I was easily able to recover without loosing any work or any windows or applications closing.

The unity core dump made my desktop unresponsive to keyboard, though I could still drop down to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1).  When I logged into the virtual terminal, as byobu is set to run as default it picks up the same session I used to reset Unity and I see the core dump message.

So all I needed to do to get back to a working Unity desktop was issue the unity --reset command in the virtual terminal and jump back to my Unity desktop (Alt-F7).

So thanks Byobu, you have saved the day and I have found yet use for this great piece of software.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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Software development tools such as JIRA, Netbeans, Eclipse, Git, Maven etc. are what most people consider when mentioning tools. In the context of this article I consider tools in the wider scope, a tool can be a process or a particular practice (TDD, pair programming) or a persons creative thinking, these are all tools that we use to help us achieve some goal.

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When running Scala on Ubuntu Linux, scala myscript.scala, if the network configuration in your /etc/hosts file does not have a loop back address you can experience the following error:

Could not connect to compilation daemon.

Edit your /etc/hosts file, gksudo gedit /etc/hosts and ensure there are the following lines at the top of the file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 mycomputer

Where mycompter is the name you gave your Ubuntu computer when you installed it.

It would seem that the scala compilation daemon does not pick up the network address when running scripts. The same problem occurs when there is no network, but I have not found a workaround as yet (except to find a wireless hotspot).

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket