Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
September 17th, 2009 | 
Author: We have a new system for filing issues for our applications. We have migrated all of our projects to use Redmine, a very cool ruby-based project management/issue tracking/wiki/swiss army knife tool that will help us better serve the folks that use our services.
With this migration, we say goodbye to our old trusty system, Lifecycle. Lifecycle was a good project, but one that we just didn’t need anymore, so we have moved on to bigger and better things. To check out our projects, file issues, or download our code, visit our new site at http://ot.ncsu.edu/code/.
Posted in 
We have migrated our website over to a new domain, http://ot.ncsu.edu. All of the old URLs to http://webapps.ncsu.edu should still work, but you should update your bookmarks to the new site.
The purpose of the migration was to move our team over to servers that are part of the web hosting initiative that we have been working on for a few months. The web hosting initiative allows us to manage our own web space, databases, scripting languages, etc. all through CPanel! This is a great project that has lots of potential down the road.
Also, we have changed our theme over to be more like our parent organization, OIT.
In a post last year, we made the comment that we were famous because we were mentioned in a Zend DevZone article that was a roundup of ZendCon 2008. I guess if that made us famous, we are rock stars now! (HA!)
Move That Bus, an article that we wrote, is being featured on Zend’s DevZone site! Head on over and read about how we got our start, how we discovered the right way to work, and why we are skeptical of employees at KFC.
We get very little storage dedicated to email on campus. I believe by default you get a few hundred megs, and I personally have about 350 megs dedicated to email. However I have almost gone over quote many times, and since retention laws are what they are for State Employees, something’s gotta give. That is why I decided to move all my campus mail to gmail, and here is how I did it.
Step 1: Create a new Google Account
I briefly thought about forwarding everything to my personal GMail account, but that is really not a good idea. The laws covering email in the state of North Carolina say that you have to retain all business-related email and that they can subpoena it at any time (at least that is my understanding), so I didn’t want people sifting through my personal emails in the name of public record. So I created a new GMail account, we’ll call this jason_work@gmail.com.
NOTE: I actually setup a GMail account on a separate domain that I owned that runs Google Apps for Domains. By doing this, I am able to stay logged in to my personal GMail account and my new jason_work account at the same time. Helpful when wanting to stay in touch in multiple places.
I’m not going to go through the steps of setting up a new GMail account. Just go to http://gmail.com and create a new account.
If you guys aren’t familiar with the State of NC’s operating procedures, we function on a fiscal year starting on July 1. This means that about this time every year, we get a note from above asking us to put together our accomplishments for the year. We just put ours together for 2008 – 2009, so I thought it may be interesting to share all those with you all!
Tags: UNC Cause 2008 is officially over, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts as far as how the conference went.
UNC Cause is different in many ways to the standard “conference”. It seems a little less formal in lots of ways. Perhaps it’s the lack of keynote, or session tracks, or something I can’t really put my finger on. Either way, it continues to be different than things like ZendCon and the ResNet conference. Here is what was good, and not so good, about UNC Cause 2008:
Garrison and I will be doing a presentation for UNC Cause 2008. We are presenting on “After the Project Project Management”, which is a fancy way of saying talking about how we do what we do, and what tools we use to do it.
Our presentation is on Tuesday at 11:15 in the “Triad West” room, so join us up.
Also, for any of you who are attending Cause, we are gonna use “unccause08″ as our folksonomy, so tweets, blog posts, tags, etc will all be tagged “cause08″. Everybody join in and we will have an easy way to track whats going down!
I posted this followup to our webdevelopers list here on campus, but wanted to post here as well.
—————–
One of the things we heard loud and clear from our discussion Friday was that there was no good place for our web developer community on campus to share news, have discussions, see who is doing what, etc.
I looked at several solutions (phpBB, misc. wikis, etc) and landed on one that I think will work, Ning. If you aren’t familiar with Ning, it is a custom social networking site where you can setup your own social network.
Complete with a forum (we can customize the forum categories, so if you guys have suggestions, let me know), blogs, member profiles (we can customize questions), events, photo and video uploads, and a lot more. We don’t have the ability for total control over it, but it is a free service that multiple people can administer. I have done the initial setup, but you guys can feel free to give feedback.
http://ncsuwebdev.ning.com/
Posting this here as well as sending to every email list on campus….not really, it just feels like it 
Our group is part of the web services team, so come out and let us know what you want us to do!
===================
The OIT web services team would like to invite any who are interested to join us in a discussion on the future of delivering web services to campus. We have some ideas about where we think we should go, but it is important to us to hear from you, our customers, before moving forward.
Our focus will be on hosting strategies, deployment of open source applications (like Drupal, Wordpress, etc), database management, etc. We will start out by letting you know the challenges we are facing, and a few ideas on how we may solve these problems. The majority of the time will be a conversation about your needs, expectations, and what you would like to see from OIT. We are interested in hearing your opinions, whether they are about server setup, customer service or anything in between.
Please join us in David Clark Labs room 101 on Friday, November 7th from 1:30 – 3:00PM.
===================
We have started really taking advantage of some the hotness that is jQuery. As we have started learning more about it, we have found more plugins that rock, and flexigrid is no exception.
http://www.webplicity.net/flexigrid/
Flexigrid basically provides you with a sortable, pageable, searchable table using jQuery and JSON. We are working on implementing it in our base framework, and in a couple of new apps we are working on.