The Goldfish Chronicles

Lots of things to organize at Jakarta this quarter.

Firstly, we’re starting to look at moving to SVN. Before we launch in with the first sacrifices/volunteers (ECS and ORO) we need to make sure we have a consistent strategy, though realism suggests everyone will quickly go their own way.

Next up, I’ve been occasionally hassling Cenqua for a licence for Clover for Jakarta as many sub-projects were beginning to organize their own. As I’m over-ambitious and lazy, I asked for an ASF-wide licence, which means, for my sins, I’ve got to take it through the proper channels (as I discover them). To make it all so worthwhile, there’s a new code coverage project out there now (an open-source one at last) called Emma. It doesn’t have the quality of Clover yet, but that’s mostly the all-important window-dressing.

Third on the list, a better report to the board this quarter. The major problem, so to say, in Jakarta is the size. This means there is a long distance from cvs commit to pmc and then board. The solution (thanks Geir) this time is that any release in Jakarta will need to be accompanied with news for the report. It gives me a smaller list of people to hassle, which means I can target the hassling rather than just spewing out to the general list.

Last on the list, the Jakarta download page sucks. It needs improving but will involve some organizing to make sure releases don’t happen while the improvement is being put in place etc.

I’m increasingly impressed by the titles on offer at Apress. Partly the increase is due to their aquisition of some of the Wrox catalog (which I’ve never liked), but there are also a lot of new books. Especially in the areas I care about; Open Source and Java.

Here are some that grab my fancy:

1. Hardening Apache
2. Foundations of Python Network Programming
3. The Definitive Guide to Plone
4. Pro Jakarta Velocity
5. From Bash to Z-Shell
6. Pro Jakarta Tomcat 5
7. Pro Hibernate
8. Pro Spring
9. Expert Oracle JDBC
10. Data Warehousing with MySQL

I need to find some time to update pergamum to contain all the new/forthcoming releases in open-source Java.

If you’re a Lang 2.0 user, here’s what’s changed in 2.1. I’m already looking forward to 3.0 as although there’s not much deprecation, I love the clean feel of a codebase without deprecations.

Today was spent hacking more on DurationFormatUtils. It’s a class designed to print out the hours, minutes and seconds between two times, or that a millisecond amount represents. It’s easy until you hit Months, and then it gets sick and painful. The aim for Lang is just to have something usable, and the current implementation seems to be pretty much there.

I discovered a week or two back that FastDateFormat has some bizarre bugs, so be aware if you’re currently using it. It occurs on each of the following lines, deciding the days are 366 for the first one. This is of the month.

        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        FastDateFormat format = FastDateFormat.getInstance("yyyy/MM/DD");

        cal.set(2004,11,31);
        assertEquals(”2004/12/31″, format.format(cal));
        cal.set(999,11,31);
        assertEquals(”0999/12/31″, format.format(cal));
        cal.set(1,2,2);
        assertEquals(”0001/03/02″, format.format(cal)); 

Other than this, there are only a couple of minor bugs open for 2.1, and a lot of fixes made which need a second pair of eyes. In the absence of JIRA, I’ve been using the Wiki for the release plan. Not as nice as JIRA, but it works.

So I guess I should try to get decisions on the remaining handful of bugs (4 at the current count, 2 more turned up in the last couple of days) and then cut an RC1. Usually a Lang RC is just a practice at getting the release right, but I suspect that this will be far more of an actual beta release. Possibly it should be honest and call it Lang-2.1-beta1 or some-such.

OSNews.com linked to David Welton’s piece entitled Programming Language Popularity.

David points out that it’s just for fun, though I have a couple of thoughts. First is that he uses the word programming. In perl, it may be called scripting more often, while in say Java it may be called coding. In reality, this seems to not be true. Programming always beats coding and scripting on the google hits.

Another point is that David seems to google for separate words and not for a single phrase, ‘java programming’. Switching to a single phrase we get some slightly differing results:

1. cobol 23,300
2. ruby 9,150
3. tcl 5,670
4. shell 149,000
5. python 149,000
6. sql 98,900
7. perl 443,000
8. unix 128,000
9. java 1,190,000
10. php 492,000
11. windows 181,000
12. .net 375,000
13. visual basic 315,000
14. c 865,000

In addition:

• c++ 937,000
• c# 99,600
• lua 1,710
• html 278,000
• oriented 1,230,000
• basic 568,000
• apple 7,070
• vb 172,000

Cobol jumps up a touch. Perl, PHP and .Net enter the same ballpark figures and Java leaps up front (unless you combine C and C++ answers). VB is surprisingly low, ‘vb programming’ being added in doesn’t bring it up to the three other main players either. None of it important, just interesting.

It’s been a long time without any OSJava work, though Wednesdays are supposed to be OSJava night.

I’m still having machine problems, the recently replaced box decided to last 2 hours and suddenly start Seg Faulting. Joy. Must have been the car journey to the colo; so I’ve another machine swap to handle.

There’s a ton of OSJava things to work on. I need to setup the rsync’s to ibiblio again at some point, probably a day before the next release. Simple-JNDI needs a ton of work, gj-find has folded into Commons IO and hopefully will go out in IO 1.1. gj-csv might be replaced by something in Commons IO or Commons Codec. Couple of different CSV libraries likely to come together. Looks like trail-taglib might have a tiny release too.

It’d be nice to dump most of simple-jndi and consider turning it into a merge of Commons Naming (Directory Naming now?) and Commons Configuration. Need to research Configuration to see whether it can sit on top of a similar structure to simple-jndi; otherwise I might have some coding to do Same system to a user, but a lack of all the hacky code.

Another tidbit from the Eclispe tips and tricks document:

F3 is a keyboard shortcut for ctrl-click on a Java classname/variable. This takes you to the class definition of that variable, very useful and using the mouse was beginning to piss me off.

Apart from cooking this weekend, I also took a bit of time to use my new found Roller JIRA access to close the bug concerning &’s in category names, and one I found in which categories were duplicated in the drop down list of Edit Weblog the same number of times as folders they are in.

It’s always nice to be able to tick some items off and get closure.

Ctrl-1 is a pretty useful thing to do. They call it the Quick Fix action. Try it in different situations, quite nice. If I had a performant enough powerbook, I might even use Eclipse.

For more, look at the Eclipse tips + tricks. I’ve got it printed up for bathroom reading.

I assume it’s typical that when you have a little one on the verge of hatching, you suddenly start wanting to dump all this programming nonsense and start working on games for the child.

Goldfish attention span at work

No Java work last night, we shopped at babies-r-us for all the things we think we still need (except a cot/crib) and got home late.

I did a bit more Roller tonight.

The Wiki-JS editor needed a fix as I’d put what I thought was a good idea in at the end and broken some features. Typical optimistic hacking. Secondly, fixed a bug that was irritating my wife where categories could not contain & characters, else they had problems rendering.

As I remarked in a conversation today;
“Coding = fun… Scratching an itch = fun++… Making wife happy = priceless”.

I just had to manually escape the amphersand there. I guess my editor should be doing that for me. A todo!

Another one is that the newline handling needs a fix. Currently, for every N consecutive newlines, I replace them with N-1 br tags. This is wrong. It should be, for every N consecutive newlines, where N > 1; replace with N br tags.