I have experienced many people in middle management who have a delema over whether to provide training and how much budget to set aside. All to often there has been an unwillingness to invest in people and sometimes there is just an expectation that no training is ever necessary.

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Scribus is an open source desktop publishing tool that helps you create professionally laid out documents, from simple documents to full blown magazines, corporate brochures or even books. Desktop publishing tools are not a replacement for word processors, instead they give you the freedom to create uniquely designed documents and help you manage large sets of text and graphic content. Scribus is similar to Adobe InDesign or Quarq Xpress and gives you a wide range of tools to layout content in either print or digital media form. Scribus is pretty easy to get to grips with and has good documentaton on the project website. The Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide is a really handy guide through the workflow of desktop publishing and helps you clearly understand how to create professional looking results.

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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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Wallboards are a great way to manage communication and tasks for any team. There is always a decision as to whether to use a physical or online wallboard. Physical boards encourage a far greater interaction, however they are much harder to use with a distributed team.

For a physical board with distributed teams, here are some things I done successfully

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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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Atlassian, the people behind JIRA, Confluence and other agile development tools have created an Ambassador team to engage with local technical communities around the world. I am proud to be Atlassian’s first Ambassador, focused on the UK region and based out of London.

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An overview of Ubuntu Linux, an open source operating system designed for people.

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I have really enjoyed trying out the new Ubuntu 11.04 beta release with the Unity gnome shell (desktop) and find it very fast and stable (after a quick upgrade).

As Unity is now using Compiz to drive lots of cool 3D effects, there are lots of new keyboard shortcuts to make use of.  Here are a selection of useful keyboard shortcuts using the “Super” key - the one that has either a windows logo or an Ubuntu sticker on it.

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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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Events coming up

There is another fun and engaging Clojure Coding dojo on Tuesday and is as popular as ever as the event is full. It will be the last dojo before my “Getting started with Clojure” talk at JAX London, so am looking forward to learning some more things I can put into the talk.

Simon Maple and Zoey Slattery are also running the “OSGi: Lets get started” event on Tuesday. This will be a great way to understand OSGi and what it can do to help your Java development and deployment.

_Please see the list at the end of this email for a full schedule of up coming events.

News

Time is running out to contribute to the community testing of the Java SE 7 Developer Preview Release. The latest build is feature complete, stable and ready to roll – so download, test and report bugs. If you submit a bug report before April 4th, the Java product team will sing your praises on the Java SE 7 Honor Role, plus they will send you some Java swag. Bugs reported later on might not get fixed in time for the initial release, so if you want to be a contributor to Java SE 7 do it before the April deadline.

Firefox 4 was officially released last week and has already broken all the browser download records, with twice as many downloads as IE9 in the space of 24 hours. In less than a week there have been around 37 million – which you can see if you head over to the neat looking download stats page, a great example of data visualisation and interaction. Its good to see Europe beating North America at something, as we are still ahead in numbers of downloads. Inside of Europe, Gernany is well ahead of everyone else and has more than twice the downloads of the UK.

Ubuntu Full Circle magazine #47 is out and includes more programing in Python, LibreOffice and eBook Reader Software. There is also a special edition: The Perfect Server detailing how to build a an Ubuntu 9.10 server and configure lots of common server services, available in English and Italian. Even though its based on the older Ubuntu 9.10 server, all the steps are pretty much the same for the lasted 10.10 server version.

There are more videos available from The Server Side Symposium, including this short about Java 7 from two people you may recognise.

Summary of Last weeks events

At the Weekday testers event, there were over 40 testers online across several countries trying out different aspects of Firefox. Javascript processing is much improved and makes certain sites much quicker to load.  Flash support seems much better and watching flash videos seemed quicker to load and start than in Chrome. If you get the very latest build of chrome (or chromium on Ubuntu) then firefox was a few milliseconds slower, but the page rendering differences were hard to measure as they were so close.  I still use Firefox and Chromium together for my browsing, mainly so I can have different accounts on the same sites.

Cuke Up was a great day of behaviour driven development and acceptance testing with many of the project leaders and influential people speaking or chatting between talks. Highlights of the day for me include:

• Matt Wynne – Mortgage Driven Development 
• Dan North and Liz Keogh – Deliberate Discovery

• Aslak Hellesoy – Keynote and Cucumber update - It was great to hear that Cuke4Duke, the cucumber style acceptance testing framework will be getting a major upgrading to make it simpler to use.  Currently it runs via JRuby and a few other libraries, so the plan it to make it more Java like so you can use Cucumber.java.

• There is also active development in the management of all your scenario files with the development of the Relish tool, a web based tool to manage and navigate through your scenario files. You will also be able to work with your cucumber files via a website, allowing you to edit your scenarios and features, making it very easy for non-technical team members to work with cucumber.

To see some of the soundbites of the conference, look at the twitter tag #cukeup

Podcasts

• Applying Lean Software Development Principles Throughout the Organization
  Agile testers – Weeknight testing in London Cuke Up – BDD and acceptance testing conference
• LJC – Modern Java Concurrenty with Ben Evans,
• How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency with Mike Barker
• Hacker news

If you have write-ups of any events, please let the list know or send them directly to me.

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