Recently I was contacted by an editor from Packt Publishing asking me to update the book. To be honest, for me it’s not a good time for an additional work (I have many other things to do), but this book is like my kid and it really needs my attention. So, I agreed (having negotiated a reasonable schedule, of course). In other words, let me announce the second edition of the Mastering Redmine book, which is going to be published at the start of 2016.
Ruscism or russian fascism
Russia positions itself as an eternal anti-fascist force in Europe. First, with “insignificant help” of the Allies and other soviet republics it defeated the fascist Germany in 1945. Then, it fought against fascist Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008. And now it struggles against fascist Ukraine and… fascist USA! Whatever country Russians fight with it eventually appears to be a fascist one, weird isn’t it? Or, maybe, this is just an insult they use to call their enemies?.. This looks to be more true. Ukrainian and Georgian people, by the way, also call Russians fascists (“ruscists”, to be more exact). So, who is right?.. Both sides? No one?.. Let’s try to investigate this.
Orangutan: Jibo – a bot’s embodiment?
The idea of bots is such popular due to the natural style of interaction. As it’s nice to be able to speak to a machine in a human-like manner (i.e., not through buttons and so on). And it’s also quite exciting to get the answer in a similar way (i.e., through speaking). For this reason we have Jabber bots, IRC bots, console bots (e.g., Emacs’ doctor), voice bots (e.g., Siri), and many more. Nevertheless, the concept of such bots is apparently incomplete as they can’t fully imitate the behavior of humans! In particular, the text messages just can’t express emotions (in a convenient way). To be able to do this bots would need bodies – e.g. eyes for users to look into, faces to express feelings, etc.
The world and friendship according to Russia
Russian Federation seeks for a polycentric world, where not only USA has the exclusive right to advance its interests… Russia just wants to have a minimal influence on intergovernmental integration processes of its neighbor countries, if these processes can impact its economy and/or safety… Russians ask to respect their concerns regarding NATO expansion closer to the Russian borders… These can be heard from Russian officials in context of the Ukrainian crisis. One can conclude, that all these actually make sense. Therefore, at least some European politicians have doubts regarding correctness of the current restrictions on Russia and think about choosing prosperity over coercion. Other world leaders and countries attempt to keep distance from the conflict assuming, that it’s not their business at all and it does not affect them in any manner. But, is all these true?.. Remember, Vladimir Putin claimed, those were not Russian troops in Crimea, who blocked the Ukrainian military units?.. As you can see, Russians often explain their behavior with what can be believed (i.e., just lie), but that does not have to be the truth. The real things are usually different…
Personal report for 2014
What happened in Ukraine?
There are lots of interpretations of what have happened in Ukraine since November 21, 2013 (the day the Euromaidan started). While I can’t be sure, what is known to third parties (i.e., people outside Ukraine and Russia), popular ukrainian and, especially, russian interpretations differ from what I believe it was. That’s why decided to write this article. No, I don’t claim, that what I believe is the absolute truth (yet I believe it’s quite close to it), but still my interpretation can be interesting for some readers…
Whatever they claim, actually we’ve had two crises in Ukraine – the first one was the Euromaidan and the second one is the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war. Russians did a lot to stop and discredit the Euromaidan and launched the second crisis because they failed. Therefore, Russia is, in fact, a participant of both crises. Why do russians do this and how do they explain their motives, I shortly describe in indented paragraphs starting with “Russians believe”. It’s fine to skip such paragraphs though, if you want…
Redmine › ISSUE-id: Sequent issue numbers with the project key
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Currently, I use Atlassian JIRA on my job at Kayako – I use Redmine for my personal projects. And still I like Redmine more! But, what I like in JIRA is sequent numbers plus the project key in issue IDs. There are many benefits to such issue numbers, some of them are: a) you easily see how many issues the project has, b) it’s much easier to remember issue IDs (even if numbers are four-digit – not sure why, maybe because you follow numbers increasing), c) you always know, which project the issue is for. These are no way critical benefits for me, but one day I got interested – how the similar can be implemented for Redmine. So, I started to experiment… And eventually here goes the result of the experiment – the ISSUE-id plugin for Redmine!
Another server migration announcement
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For more than 3 years I was a happy customer of BurstNET web hosting provider… But, recently I discovered, that, actually, I was a lucky customer of this company. Yes, I had some issues with their service, but not ones, that I interpreted as critical! However, some of their customers appeared to be very unhappy (I saw a post on some forum claiming, that the author cannot get his/her data for more than a half of year)…
So, why did I get interested about the quality of their service?.. On the previous week I got an email, notifying me, that I have a month to… get away from them! I did not believe, that this could be the truth (this could be fake), so I googled for the problem… And, expectedly, figured out, that I was not the only one. Yet still I did not believe, so I decided to ask the support team for a confirmation and to wait, if more people get such emails (normally people share such news)…
Redmine › Subscription: Getting email notifications about major project events
There are many complaints, that Redmine is sending too many notifications and is missing functionality to configure them properly… So why then writing this plugin? I believe the problem is in what it sends. You can choose either to receive everything including issue changes, notes, Wiki changes, new messages in boards and so on or just issues. That’s either too much or too little.
Saying I’m just a user of a project. How do I know, when a new version is released?.. Yes, I can subscribe to RSS., but which RSS? News?.. Okay, I can do this. Since Redmine 2.5.x I can even watch news! Assuming, that there will be a news posted about the new release. But, what if not?.. Can I subscribe to files?.. No! Also, there can be no files in the project – users can get code from, e.g., Git. Maybe I can subscribe to versions?.. No! I can subscribe to activities RSS, but it has the same issue as email notifications – too much data! So I can’t know, when new version comes?!.
Redmine › WikiNG: Three ways to add custom HTML content to Wiki in Redmine
It’s absolutely common for a Redmine user to ask: How do I add custom HTML code to the Wiki content? Here by Wiki content users usually mean not just a Wiki page, as in Redmine a Wiki syntax enabled content is used everywhere (well, almost) – in project description, in issue description, in news, in comments, and so on. Anyway, normally, for Redmine such inquisitive persons get quick and definite answer: There is no way!..
As this is a common question, certainly, I used to ask it too. But, as I’m a Redmine plugin developer, I was able to “give” a different answer… Depending on the features, I developed, I used to implement some capabilities for embeding custom HTML code into different places of Redmine interface. There were no plan or design – I just implemented, what I thought at that moment can be reasonable and needful. Only after implementing those things I realized, that in several my plugins I implemented almost the same feature – the possibility to embed custom HTML code into the Wiki content. Luckily it was implemented in different ways…
To be more precise this was done in two my plugins – in Hooks Manager and in WikiNG. As some of these features are not foremost and, therefore, can be unnoticed and as the feature is commonly asked, I decided to describe its implementations in this article.
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