My first time at OSCON (having just got back home) and my general feelings are ones of belonging to a very significant movement; and being very insignificant. Going to ApacheCon has some of the same feelings, but it’s an order of magnitude larger at OSCON.
At the beginning of a Robert J. Sawyer short story, I read the following Leroy “Satchel” Paige quote:
"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?"
It’s stuck with me through the day.
Bloglines doesn’t hold history, so I don’t know whose blog I just got to this link via, but the list of financial contributors for the ItsOurNet website make for good reading:
E-commerce vs AT&T. I know whose service I’ve been happier with over the last 6 years (hint: the one that doesn’t phone me up all the time asking how the service is).
Speaking of…someone tell Vonage that they are a computer industry company and not a phone company and to stop using AT&T style tactics (ie: phoning me at dinner time).
A while back Kosta (Konstantin Ignatyev) pushed me towards selling computer books on Amazon.com. Having just moved I was complaining about the large number of books I’d collated and was planning to walk around taking the books to second hand book shops trying to make a little bit of money for them. Kosta gave me a good hearty kick in the direction of Amazon and I’ve not looked back.
A bunch of the books were worthless second hand, so I went ahead and sold them for 50 cents a piece or something at Half Price Books. A bunch of other ones had good value though, so I’ve been selling them on Amazon for good cash - I’ve made $600 dollars or so. Pretty happy.
I’ve been having a bit of fun at work recently with Ant. We build lots of open source projects using the original Ant build systems that have been tweaked via overriding, setting properties early and various other mundane tricks. It’s a bit of a slog as often it’s not just a case of having to set some properties or override a task, but to fully understand yet another different build system. One particular bit that has been a pain is wanting to enforce that all JUnit tasks generate XML reports.
My first thoughts were to hack a new build of JUnit - but looking at the source I realised that all the exciting work happens in the Ant task. So next up was to hack a new build of the JUnitTask in Ant. Fortunatley my laziness intervened and I read on. You see, Ant has these things called BuildListeners. They tell you when a build starts, when one ends, when a particular task starts etc etc. Useful for logging. Or being an evil dictator build guy…
Given that I know that a JUnit task has begun and through its Event object I have access to the Ant version of the DOM - I can insert my own modifications. Mandatory changes that the build system has no choice but to accept. The basic for Aspect Ant if you would (yes I know you could just use Aspects on the Java, but that’s a lot more painful I suspect.
Here’s the relevant part of the BuildListener implementation:
public void taskStarted(BuildEvent event) {
if(event.getTask().getTaskName().equals("junit")) {
UnknownElement ue = (UnknownElement) event.getTask();
RuntimeConfigurable rc = ue.getWrapper();
rc.setAttribute("haltonfailure", "false");
rc.setAttribute("haltonerror", "false");
UnknownElement ue2 = new UnknownElement("formatter");
ue.addChild(ue2);
FormatterElement fe = new FormatterElement();
RuntimeConfigurable rc2 = new RuntimeConfigurable(fe, "formatter");
rc2.setAttribute("type", "xml");
rc.addChild(rc2);
}
}
Here’s what the manual has to say on build listeners, and here’s the Javadoc for org.apache.tools.ant.BuildListener.
I should have said this a few days ago - Congratulations to Martin van den Bemt on taking over as Jakarta Chair (or V.P., Apache Jakarta for the official records and the IRS). Martin’s been around at Jakarta for ages and will do a great job.
Apologies to Rich if this is just reiterating his thoughts (badly) - if you’ve only got the time to read one blog entry, go read his instead.
Rich Bowen has a good blog entry commenting on yet another blog/journalism piece. I then read Daniel Pearl’s blog entry over at the BBC on the surprise people show that the BBC might be reading their blog. Sitting down and watching TV that night, the two blogs and that night’s TV sparked some thoughts.
Journalism has nothing to fear from blog entries (huge shock statement there eh?). No blog entry is going to replace impartial news coverage from professionals. I still read the BBC News right after I check my email in the morning. Watching TV though (in the US, but tabloid journalism in the UK is much the same as US TV News) - I’m struck that blogging replaces 90% of the crap they have on offer.
One of the things that lesser news seems to do is chase the human interest story. We’re not told about the latest news from the Israeli/Lebanese border - instead we’re taken to a village on that border to see how it has affected people’s daily lives. As the net slowly tightens on the world, someone in that village is likely to be blogging - with far more human interest than a 30 second TV snippet. Others will comment on it, adding more human interest; and the sheer amount of bloggers and areas of interest blows away the handful of minutes available on the television stations.
I wonder whether the advent of professional journalism on the net gave a slap to TV news ratings. Did they increase the human interest side of things then? Not a terrible idea - but I think that the advent of blogging has hit them from the other side and that TV journalism is the lost battle. Professional journalism will stay (though will we see bloggers interviewing each other someday? are we already - I’m hardly up to date on the blogging trends) - but the human interest crap is in its heydey.
I’ve been saying “I need to start a blog on Jakarta Commons things” for ages, so this weekend I finally got around to doing so. It’s at http://www.featheredblogs.org/blogs/page/commoners and hopefully I can lure some of other Commons coders into doing some authoring.
I’ve got three categories so far. The first is pretty simple, “Releases”, in which I pretty much just cut and paste the announcement from the project. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone though as I’ve got a bookmark list in the navbar displaying the projects who are currently working on release candidates.
The second category is “In the Sandbox”, the idea here is to interview people bringing new things into the sandbox. Things tend to hide away in the sandbox, so I’ve a few canned questions for when the project’s website is up and available.
The third category is “Tips”. It’s as simple as it sounds. Happy, useful little tips on Jakarta Commons. I used to write such things for CNet/Techrepublic, so it’ll be fun to write them again (and not have a painful deadline).
One last thing to mention is the Triage link. It’s not cron’d yet, but the purpose is to pull together the issues in the Commons project that don’t have a fix version yet and display them in a single report. By remembering the last report, a changes email can be sent to commons-dev too.
If you’re ever in Perranporth, Cornwall - and I recommend going there for a holiday, then head over to the Hard Drive Cafe if you find yourself needing to get online.
Jumped from 53 to 63 votes overnight. Could have been scammed I suppose, but interesting to see that pop up as a ‘notable’ issue in the morning automated bug report at work.
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/SPR-1484