ShriKant Vashishtha

Chain-Link Pattern : Developer/Tester or Sales/Delivery Relationships

ShriKant Vashishtha · July 9, 2011 · Leave a Comment

In my last blog I discussed how in an Agile team “we vs they” (between developers and testers) phenomena can severly damage team dynamics. The idea is – it doesn’t work when two links of a chain consider them isolated and independent links. As soon as they think so, they are really not working towards one common goal.

Today I had a similar discussion with one of my friends on the dynamics of Sales and Delivery teams in a software development company. For software delivery (implementation) team, Sales is like a foreign word sometimes. For them Sales people must be working in their own islands. Similarly Sales team in itself might be very cohesive team but they again might be living in their own world. For them Sales in itself can be an individual topic which works based on the relationships, links etc rather than with the help of any technical expertise.

QuickTip: Passwordless login to localhost on Ubuntu

ShriKant Vashishtha · December 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Make sure you installed openssh with following command:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

If you have not generated an ssh keypair on your client, type

ssh-keygen -t dsa

In your $HOME/.ssh directory, create a file authorized_keys if not existing:
~/.ssh: touch authorized_keys ~/.ssh: chmod 600 authorized_keys

Copy the public key into the authorized_keys file:
~/.ssh: cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys

You should be ready to go now using “ssh localhost”

QuickTip: Playing .flv files on Ubuntu

ShriKant Vashishtha · December 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I downloaded some video presentations in .flv format and I struggled a bit to find right and the best player to run them. Ubuntu movie player complained even after installing certain updates. Finally I realized the best choice on Windows (Adobe Media player) should work on Ubuntu as well as it’s Adobe AIR based. To be able to install it, first you need to install Adobe AIR followed by Adobe Media player installation. The result is simply awesome.

Ubuntu QuickTip: sudo ant doesn’t work!

ShriKant Vashishtha · December 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

Today I picked up latest sources of Maven3 from its svn repo and started building it on Ubuntu. As part of the build, you need to run “ant” command which at the end tries to copy stuff to /usr/ directory for which it didn’t have access. So I tried running “sudo ant” and it started giving me exceptions like “JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly” which to my knowledge I exported correctly in my $HOME/.bashrc. After some research I found that while working with “sudo” you need to pass environment variables along with command itself. Something like this:
sudo env JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME ant

Working with Ubuntu: Infinitely Recursive Directory Structure on Windows

ShriKant Vashishtha · November 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment

If you are working in dual boot mode on Ubuntu with Windows, it might be quite tempting to use Windows drive as the shared drive to work on the same thing so that you can switch between OS based on your convenience. If you are working on a source code, you definitely would like to do that. However it creates some undesirable situations which are sometimes very hard to debug.
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