However this is not one post which should bring JIRA near to you. But if you know that you need it, now is best time to get it, because Atlassian started their “Get Startet” Price, which now allows you to by full functional JIRA for 10$ for ever even with one year support. All you need is a little bit of free CPU time, root access, 10$ and if you buy it outside of USA, you will need a credit card.

I installed it  for my private purposes and it works fine! I just followed Atlassian documentation (Read it carefully). Maybe, the easiest way is to install the “all in one” solution which comes with Apache Tomcat. I choosed that one. But don’t forget to switch to serious database before you start really using it. Take MySQL for example like I did.

I will not provide here step by step how to do it, because Simon has already described some of the important configurations moments as he heard about new pricing and as already mentioned the Atlassian installation guide is good and really answered all my questions.

Nevertheless feel free to ask questions here, about installation and configuration to.

Also i would like to discuss other Atlassian developer tools which also available for 10$. Is here outside someone experienced in bamboo?

The whole set for interested in photography.

Shuron's Letters

Hello everybody! I’d like to present you my new theme for that Blog! The old theme was not good readable in my opinion. Please tell me if you encounter any bugs.

Have a nice day!

There is just one drawback of this method. Uploaded images become automatically description, which say that that picture where uploaded by Folder Monitr (with a link) and a tag “FolderMonitr”. So I don’t like stuff like this. Unfortunately mass edit (or delete i my case) of tags and description is not so comfortable in flickr as it could be.

However I will use FolderMonitr further maybe the description and tag problem cannot outbalance the use of that tool.

P.S. If anybody knows the working way haw too upload pictures to flickr direct out of Lightroom in the version 2.0 is welcome to give me a hint thanks!

New Year

I wish all of you happy new year! May all your wishes come true in 2009!

I wish to learn a perfect time management to made all of the thing that I have to do, and spend enough time with my family. Also I wish to achieve new level in project management and maybe new career level! Why not? I feel ready!

Good luck!

Why the movement

Primary it had to be done because of some problems with hosting service provider. But that is a long story, which I won’t tell you here. However ORG domain is much nicer? What do you think?

wPopularity Plug-In

Please excuse me for not maintaining it. I just have time to keep this site alive, not really for a writing Plug-ins i free time. But I promise i try to find some hours in the winter holidays, to answer all your questions and maybe even to release new version. Thank you for you patience.

Don’t know them?

The first one is the actual President of Russian Federation – Dmitry Medvedev, the second one, is the latest Russian Tsar -Nicholas II. Nicholas II was executed by Bolsheviks in 1918.

However I found this similarity very funny but also somehow strange. Maybe beacuse of history. Nicholas II stands for last moments of non communistic Russia . History has made Nicholas II and his whole family (which was executed too)  very symbolic. It’s difficult to explain. However very strange for me.

P.S. As you see, I’m back again, have much to do, so has to wait few days or even weeks

I found this picture here

Nevertheless I have some ideas on improvement of W-Popularity Plug-in. I think we should give up compatibility of DB-Tables with Popularity Contest Plug in. As i think that should eliminate all possible inter-operation problems with the Plug-in of Alex King, including those activation problems, some of you have report in the comments to my ???????? ????? ????????.

I started already work on version 0.9.4 but i will release it after I’m back again.

This is a personal blog. Isn`t? – Yes. Can I write my personal opinion in my personal blog? Let me think… Of course! Should my personal opinion be somehow conform to the mainstream opinion? – I think you should know the answer

However, during Google continues to mark my site with malware warnings (), because the Google test of cleaned sites takes Sooooooo Looong. , I want to tell you one story, concerning a theme which scares me already for a long time. Don’t laugh, but I wanna speak about school education in Germany.

Maybe you heard already about Pisa Study Results of German “Schuler”? If not, I tell you, their results are really not impressive. How it comes…? Read in the following…

Historical

After the WW2 in West and East Germany began denazification. Germans have done good work and succeeded in that by throwing out everything of the Third Reich. Also the education methods in the Third Reich where considered as unappropriate, I’m not an expert but can imagine that they can appear as too strikt, too idealized for modern times. And therefore totaly unappropriate for modern children. The same happened also after the “unification of Germany” in truly unification is the wrong word, West Germany incorporated East Germany. And of cause education concepts of the “East-Block” (also of the enemy) where thrown out of the window, not even to look on them.

Personal Impression

If I look around and speak with my friends, who have children in school age, I gain the opinion that, the primary school is a place where children are doing everything, except of learning.

So I’m also a big friend of playing. But excuse me, if my son goes to school, I expect that he learns something there! In best case, my children should can read and write and simple math after the first year in school not after the third or even fifth one!

It’s nothing impossible for every child! But children have to be motivated to learn, to be smart, to be educated. I don’t wanna say they should be compeled to learn, mostly it won`t have much success without motivation, but teachers and parents have to be strikt with that in every case.

However, it’s very difficult to be a teacher in our times, teachers have NO rights and might over their pupil, further they really believe ( because it is taught them at the university) that children can learn better without the stress of competition and without any effort and any pressure to perform at least in the beginning of the school. Bullshit! Children love to succeed, love competition. To compete, to win, to learn and to enjoy-this  is their natural urge, I can see it every day, when I look at my little son.

But let me tell you one story of many, which finally lead me to write this article, one story I heard today.

The Story and the Questions

One friend of my wife has a child, who is  the age of 5. The girl goes to the normal German preschool everyday, where they are doing something, as I think playing Once a week the same child also goes to a Russian preschool called “Azbuka”. Now the question: In which language does that child read? The Answer is indeed Russian!

The next question is: What the hell are they doing at the German preschool? With the same success if not better this child could play 5 days a week at a playground…

In my opinion these children are under-cultivated by the German education system in their best years! And many parents have no time to educate children at home because they are working hardly.
P.S. I remember my first “Gymnasium” class teacher, who did laughed at me, when I talked to him that German School Education is far not the best in the world. It  was few years before the first smashing Pisa Study got publicity.

Ok , I know I begin with the introducing of the My wife’s Blog. It’s about books, travel and geography, because my darling do study at the Faculty of Geography. You might find it also interesting even when you will not find there many articles about IT However her English is much better than my

Back to this blog. As you know Wordpress 2.5 is out. And somehow there are no security updates at that time. How it comes? Did the Wordpress guys didn’t their work really good this time?   Seems to be. So I consider to upgrade in the next time.

Calender and Car

Furthermore I realized that I need again my small personal calendar, Google online calender is not enough. After using it more than 1,5 years I realize that its comfortable to plan long term events with google online calendar, but maybe not so comfortable to plan activities for the next day or even for today.

I also noticed that it is also good to relax more often. So it is not good to drive 50 minutes to work by car. Driving car efforts brain activity. I prefer to drive fast, so driving deserves the biggest part of my attention, the other part is listen to the radio or slips And that not good. It is better to travel by subway, where you brain can be used for other things like thinking about mission of a day to be more effective, thinking about things you normally don’t’ have time too, cause you work to much or just sleep

So think twice and be effective, good luck!

DIGG Effect

Eric Enge has wrote very good article about succes on digg. Some of details he presents my be not true at the moment, because DIGG evolves and changes internal algorithms. However some facts are really interesting.

As he says, stories that where able to reach the digg home page receive an average of 129 links, and more than 10,000 visitors in an hour. Some stories have brought even more than 1,000 links and 100,000 visitors. This shows how important DIGG is and why there are so many legend and so much attention from SEOs. So it has happened many times that stories which have made the home page, have brought the server of the story site can’t handle the traffic load. This is well known phenomena is known as the “Digg Effect”.

Of cause the quality of this kind of visitors is “bad”. Don’t expect that they will by your products and click Ads. Do not expect big growth in comments, DIGG users often comment regarding a site on digg itself instead of on the dugg website. Digg users comes to see only that what they would inspect in the story description on DIGG itself.

I don’t wanna be a Digger

So after reading several articles about how to success on DIGG i realized that it would take very very very much time. So as every body know time is money, but moreover time is life! In my opinion the truly success on DIGG starting from null will deserve much to much time in comparison to the revenue.
Personally I don’t have much time and will not spend it to fullish site like DIGG, voting for silly topics of US tanagers So at the moment and I think also in the future will not spend much time on DIGG or other communities.

I mean isn’t it better to spend time to create wonderful content? It would give you personal much more satisfaction than any DIGG effect. But however good content have in any case good chance to achieve one DIGG effect after another!
So by by DIGG, may others vote for my content, I will not spend my life for Digging

P.S. It doesn’t mean i will not continue submitting my articles to it

Currently I’m the number 49 of top users of the Russian DIGG sister called news2.ru, therefore I think to have some experience and some kind of instinctive feeling for mechanisms we have on that page. News2.ru is a typical example of social news-driven page and is quite similar to DIGG. Therefore my experience can be useful also for DIGG users and other similar Web2.0 sites.

Success factors of digging

As I think there a only two main factors your success (success of your submissions) depends on. That are the quality of your stories and friendship. Yes only them two and some sub issues its quite simple. Such an statement my appear as vague for you, therefore I’ll try to be more concrete.

High quality stories

High quality stories are known as:

• unique
• unusual
• very actual
• interesting for everybody

That are primary properties on successful story. Now you may think that the appreciation of these attributes is highly subjective, that is partly true. However everyone can achieve good objectivity by analysing the actuality of post. E.g. U.S. President election is quite actual at the moment, Cold War maybe not. However with some experience thee appraisal of these properties will get better and better. I can say I began to feel what kind of stories can reach the TOP.

To be actual and have many stories to choose, it is recommended to subscribe to RSS feeds of news portal of your wish or several of them. If your social-community portal presents websites statistic , you are well advised to study it and chose some with the best success rate.

So what to do? How to begin? The answer is clear too, you just have to star and play a bit around. If you are non completely new in the field of social news community, then you just can’t leave this step out. However as already mentioned the success factor of your news will grow with experience.

It is difficult to provide some examples of good or bad news, because it’s highly depends on the time context and also other things like presentation! Presentation is one of the sub factors I wanna say some words about:

• Always use pictures! Choose them with care.
• Use headlines that magnify attention (Compare: “Microsoft considers to by some Yahoo shares” vs. “Microsoft takes over Yahoo!”)
• But use headlines that are precisely express what is in the content behind them. Otherwise your messages can be considered as spam or inaccurate.
• Be aware of duplicates
• The content at it self should be good presented and layout carefully. Don’t write to much, but try to make your link sexy. Don’t lie.
• Use the right category!

Doing so you will create solid and high potential submissions, and you has learned this, the second factor comes to a play which helps enormously to use the potential of your submissions.

Friendship

If in the beginning of your “career” maybe non of your messages reach the top, at a master level the rate of your positive submissions can rise up to 50-99 percent (depending on social service and other factors). But this success is only possible with a active circle of friends!

How to get friends on social communities? You should be able to answer this question at your-self, because it is not much different as in the real life. Friendship grounds on mutuality and deserve much time. Decide for yourself whether you are ready for it. However gaining new friends is in any case new experience and enrichment for everyone.

Nevertheless the Geni people have send me small present for my cooperation, this cool GENI T-short.

P.S. Did you asked yourself what does means “Second cousin once removed” browsing your tree on geni.com? Estman helps to answer that question.

However at Day Two I had to work the whole afternoon, so my mother came and looked after Leon. At third day I was home and this was great day! Fourth day was good to we had much time. But let the pictures speak…

Usual day activity is playing outdoor

We Leon usual awakes at 6:00 pm, and I usually try to get him sleep again through my dormancy. Sometimes he sleep additional 20-30minutes. So we finally get up at 6:30 pm. First in the morning we do the routine stuff like changing of pampers (I mean i change his pampers ) and cloth, brush our tooth and so on.

After that Leon gets his Milk. Then we play something or do some house work together.

At Sunday we where long time outside, Leon tries to learn how to use chute. First he get some lesson form one experienced chute user.

But theory is dead without practice, so the wise mentor tries to get thing working in practice.

This led to success and Leon liked it, even if it may not look like this

Monday we met some older and matured children in the courtyard, they were quite important and busy, but Leon has quickly gained their confidence and could participate on their grave business dealings.

Who plays so much outside gets big hunger.

That the story so far… To be continued…

The title is tells it already, there is only few on IT in this article, so decide, now whether read it or not My wive had to leave Germany and is now in Prague for ten days. So my 14 month old son stays only with me (and his grandmothers). I decided to write small posts about our adventures, because time spending with own children is something special and one tries to hold such moments. Furthermore i do it for my wife to, so she she will exited to see such funny report when she comes back and maybe she will be intrigued by that blog self.

Day one – departure

Polja flow away in the morning, has left me with a bit cheerless Leon.

In addition Polja left me some reminders and instructions in strategic places, which covers the topic “hows survive with the baby”, especially, what is small man’s food, and what does he wear and stuff like that.

Translation:

What to wear (when go to out)Point 1 to 10 …

What to wear at night

Point 1 to 4 …

So this is also a list but also an simple linear algorithm of execution. Nevertheless in the real life we forgot the point 6, but this hat not held us from having fun.

As we were eating, the whole soup was sloped on Leon, an as was running for the wiping cloth he just sloped the bottle of watter. That was funny.

At the end of day Leon was going to sleep without a word, at is could be written in a book, so i was able to met one friend of me and write this story down. We will try to give you also tomorrow a small review of our adventures (See continuance of story ). At first we have the awakening (6 or 7pm) and that without mother, will see what would be his reaction.

Using senseless pictures is senseless. And using photo is inappropriate too, because you get older but the photo stays young. Update your photo every time is also strange, results in something like mutation avatar. What do you think about that? I think that not good too. Further People tend to prejudge other people on their appearance. So photo is therefore not a good avatar. Consider, you take one photo where you laugh, can be found cool on some fun-social website, but may be strange on some serious site. So i think the avatar should be something like own Brand. But it have to be universal and in some kind neutral, which will you allow to use it in every context.

That is what i suppose to do. Create new universal avatar. Any one have an idea what should i look like?

Also people that stands behind seemed to be serious to:

“Geni was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.”

and that is very important in my opinion in case of such kind services.

One of the new features i wanna tell you about, is the sharing option, that allows you sharing of parts of your tree. That is also what I’m doing here next, while i begin with a small piece of my tree – closes relatives:

Cause our whole Tree has already more than 337 people and will growth further.It is also useful to subscribe geni’s blog.