With Jira you get a bug tracking system that is extremly flexible and can be adapted to a variety of specialised applications featuring a workflow based approach. If this sounds like an empty marketing phrase – rest assured it is not. It is really that flexible and has many hooks where external systems can be attached. Also the community produced an assload of plugins to extend Jira further.

My main focus however is Confluence. This is the enterprise wiki from Atlassian that is quite frankly the best wiki software available period. Due to my current job and out of personal interest, I have been in contact with many wiki systems, approaching them both from the users and administrators perspective. Even the actual fork of Twiki called Foswiki which can be described as the best available opensource wiki product, doesen’t even come close to Confluence. I won’t go into detail here because I am still at the beginning regarding Confluence, but what I have seen so far, really blows my mind.

Together with Crowd, the single sign-on identity management software (again from Atlassian) one can build an easy to administer integrated ecosystem. And that is not all. Bamboo (continuous integration server) and Fisheye (source repository frontend) complement it.

It took me two hours to set up Crowd and Confluence under Gentoo Linux. I followed their highly amusing “Dragon Slayer” quest [2]. I am looking forward to work with Confluence and arrange my knowledge and the knowledge of those in my vicinity in interesting new ways. I will hit the 10 user limit soon for sure but that’s another story…

Why I wrote this? Pure enthusiams, that’s all. Im not payed by Atlassian to penetrate the blogsphere with fake positive reviews. I am happy that I have found something I like very much where I can live out my compulsive urge to organize informations

* Clover and Crucible were left out of the starter pack
[1] http://www.atlassian.com/starter
[2] http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/Here+Be+Dragons

1. Hide the +Button in the tabbar.

I don’t need this superflous button to open a new tab. I am using the keyboard shortcut (mac: cmd+t). To disable the button put this in your userChrome.css:

.tabs-newtab-button {display: none;}

The userChrome.css is located in your profile dir under the chrome subdir (mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/random_profile_name/chrome). If there is no file then copy and rename the userChrome-example.css.

2. Disable Tab tearing

I used to drag the actual tab onto the desktop to create a shortcut. Now I can drag the actual tab out and create a window…

Just install this weirdly named extension and activate it in the prefs: bug489729

To enable it, you have to install the ssh extension for PHP. The following instructions apply to Gentoo Linux:

1. Install PEAR
#emerge PEAR-PEAR

2. Install the ssh pecl extension
#pecl install ssh2-beta

3. Enable the ssh extension
#vi /etc/php/apache2-php5/php.ini
# extension=ssh2.so

Restart apache and voila:

Another iPhone app is done and this time the stuff we learned while thinkering with Timr helped to reduce developing time to three weeks (working in our spare time).

This is a cute lil’ game about a mouse eating lots of cheese accompanied by an epic story (don’t miss it and let me put my poems in you). The game eploys the iPhone/iPod Touch accelerometer to move the mouse. The goal is to stay alive as long as possible (which by the way is hard as hell if you play in “insane” mode).

Many thanks to Emmett Cooke for his sweet sound track.

Check it out: Need For Cheese

We went with the later:

Timr