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Kees just wrote something about project management, change management and the involvement of the information security officer in projects.

He argues that the information security officer should be involved in almost any project and he’s probably right about that.

More generally speaking, the information security officer is ‘just another stakeholder’ for any project. And for a project to be successful, it should pay attention to the needs of its stakeholders.

But… while there are many stakeholders, there is usually only one sponsor of the project. Does he consider ‘information security’ important to ‘his’ project? Who would have to convince him that he should reserve some resources to achieve an acceptable level of information security?

Seems like a perfect role for the information security officer. Even better if that officer is backed by a proper information security policy (I guess it isn’t a coincidence that Kees has an opinion about that too ;-)).

Doesn’t it all come down to the fact that we tend to overlook the Ilities in projects?

Tags: Management by martin
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I just read Andrej Koelewijn’s post on the IT-eye blog, Version control for the solo programmer, about installing Mercurial, a Distributed Version Control System. The most important reason for this exercise was to create a local, single user repository.

DVCS’s are ubercool and you can do some nice tricks with them. Nonetheless, not everybody needs these tricks (yet?) and integration with popular IDE’s isn’t nearly as good as with CVS or Subversion.

Most people who develop software regularly have a copy of TortoiseSVN installed and it’s perfectly possible to create a local, single user repository with just TortoiseSVN.

Here’s how:

1. Create an empty directory.
2. Right click it, choose TortoiseSVN - Create repository here.
3. Choose “Native filesystem (FSFS)”. You could use Berkeley DB as well, but FSFS is the default nowadays.
4. TortoiseSVN should report that it successfully created the repository.
5. Create another empty directory.
6. Right click it, choose TortoiseSVN - Checkout.
7. Pick the repository you just created, click OK and there you go!

You now have a version controlled directory that you can use as… any other version controlled directory with TortoiseSVN. It really doesn’t matter whether the repository lives on a remote webserver or on your local hard drive.

Technorati: version control, subversion, tortoisesvn

Tags: Tools by martin
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At home, I have a small network with a Samba server. On my Windows XP notebook, I have a few drive mappings to this server. I guess lots of people have some kind of file server at home nowadays.

Did you ever need a file that lived on a Samba-share on your home network while you were out (work, school, customer site, whatever)? I do. Regularly. Maybe it’s just my fault and I should think more thoroughly which files to take with me on my USB stick. Anyway, I found out a way how to use my drive mappings transparantly at home and anywhere else by simply using PuTTY and an SSH connection to the server.

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Tags: Tools by martin
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