Busy times...

Yikes, Christmas is over us. And I never got around to posting anything since late summer.

Apologies! It is not that this blog is dead (it just smells a bit peculiar), but I have been hung up on a number of high priority issues.

I (seriously) hope the issues will be resolved early in the new year, so I can blog a little again.

In the pipeline (yes, let's make some vapor-blogging):

• Enterprise deployment of IBM Rational products.
  As the name suggests, the "rational" approach would probably be to use IBM's installer. But no - I just had to go and invent our own deployment strategy. It is slim, it is fast, and we have full control of the deployment. What's not to like?
• Authorized Job Service
  We do not use our Continuous Integration builds in production for various reasons. Instead we have a manually invoked build server. To make it work I needed a way to authenticate and authorize users between servers.
  And as I couldn't figure out how to make a single sign-on solution that would use the user's existing Windows session credentials (with JAAS), I had to roll my own using SSPI.
  I suspect this will be a blog entry where someone points out the obvious to me...
• Our SVN backup and restore setup.
  The repositories are backed up at night and restored to a different server during the day. Lovely stuff. I hope we'll never have to make use of it - but if we do, I am much more comfortable with it than with our previous CVS setup.
• And before the new year expires, something about our new documentation system (it needs to mature a bit yet).
  We use the Mylyn WikiText plugin to write documentation placed in the repository with the source. On project builds, the documentation is translated to HTML. We have extended the syntax (Confluence) a bit to add extra features...

Hopefully there will be more than four postings next year. But consider this an informal contract about deliveries for the next year :)

Have a nice one!