magpiebrain

I’ll be at “Open Tech 2005”:http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2005/ on Saturday, as it looks interesting and its damn cheap (five of your UK pounds). “Topics include(Open Tech 2005 - Schedule)”:http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2005/schedule/ blogs, copyright concerns, webservices, and the offical launch of “backstage.bbc.co.uk’s developer network”:http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ - aimed at providing ways to open up BBC’s content so Joe public can program a webservice for it or something. Most importantly it starts at the highly civil hour of 11:30am.

If you’re coming along I’ll be the skinny geeky guy with an under-developed social life and too many gadgets. I should be easy to spot.

Way before I started looking at a “cruise control plugin(My CruiseControl plugin for trac)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/07/03/cruiseandtrac for trac, Tammo van Lessen had been developing “one of his own(Tammo’s Cruise Control Plugin for Trac)”:https://oss.werkbold.de/trac-cc/. Tammo’s solution uses XSLT to parse the cruise control logs - and it looks very similar to the cruise reporting application as a result. The big added benifit of course is that it integrates with trac (so no need for a servlet engine to display your logs). The current plan is that myself and Tammo will try and merge our efforts at some point, but until then I recommend you have a look at Tammo’s excellent work if you’re currently using trac and CruiseControl.

They fixed it. Seems it was down to a “hardware outage”:http://www.bloglines.com/about/news#87. Withdraw the kitten!

“Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/ has decided to eat all my feeds - I hope it’s a temporary outage or I’ll send “the kitten”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/04/20/annoy round.

It’s OK everybody, there is no point comparing Django and Rails, Obie has it sorted:

There’s one problem dude… No matter how good Django is, it isn’t written in Ruby.

You see, that’s what so great about Obie - he can deliver a balanced, reasoned comparison without letting language politics get in the way.

Package dependencies in Pasta

Today on my current project I had to spend some time creating a client JAR file for use by downstream systems. I needed to keep the JAR as small as possible, with (more importantly) no external JAR dependencies.

There are tools out there for dependency analysis, such as IBM’s “Structural Analysis for Java”:http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/sa4j (aka Smallworlds), Compuware’s “Pasta”:http://javacentral.compuware.com/pasta/ or the open source “JDepend”:http://www.clarkware.com/software/JDepend.html. As nice as these tools are, they are for analysis and the gathering of metrics. As I’ve “mentioned before(magpiebrain - Enforcing test coverage in the build)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/01/06/codecoverage, unless ‘good metrics’ are in some way enforced by the build process, it becomes very easy for even automatically gathered metrics to be ignored.
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“It’s all gone quiet over there”
“You’re going home in a rather disappointed ambulance”
etc.

This has been a public service announcement from the “Smug Londoner Party”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/front_page/4655555.stm.

Don’t they know this is the UK? If you’re over here letting off fireworks, you bloody well better be burning the effigy of a Catholic, and it better be November.

Bastards!

Click for larger image

I’ve long been a fan of the python-based ticket tracking/wiki/subversion browser, “trac”:http://www.edgewall.com/trac/. It manages to integrate subversion changesets with tickets quite simply - go to a changset page and you’ll see the edits; go to a ticket and you can see all changesets that apply to the ticket. On top of that you can use wiki syntax in your subversion commit messages (or anywhere for that matter) - to my mind trac is perfectly capable of doing away with the need for separate systems (certainly on my next project I’ll be recommending trac over a Jira/Wiki/ViewCVS or FishEye combination).
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