The Goldfish Chronicles

Kicking myself to blog about what’s happening and not feel a need to say anything profound (which is good as I rarely do).

Today saw the announcement for the Commons IO 1.3 release. This was a cool release for me - I had an osjava project named gj-find which was basically an attempt to create a library that would be as useful as I find the find command is on a unix command line. I think I succeeded (by my level of need) as it was a library I grabbed from time to time to do said functionality. I brought it to the Commons Sandbox where Niall Pemberton gutted it and along with Stephen Colebourne took the valuable parts of it into IO where it led to a bunch of new filters and a new DirectoryWalker class. I’ve no idea how much of my original code survived, but that’s less important than surviving peer review and having value. The find code still exists in the sandbox and has been changed to use IO 1.3, however there’s not much left and I suspect I’ll propose it for dormancy.

I also built the first release candidate for Commons Lang 2.3. I like Lang. It’s a very good tool to have in the toolbox, especially if you’re writing applications. Less so if you’re writing libraries as you often end up fighting the desire to import a Lang class to do something boring and simple as you don’t want the dependency. Once 2.3 is out I’m very hopeful that people will be interested in a Java 1.5+ dependent version of Lang that can branch out and look at lots of new things. I’d like to see if there are helper functions that could exist for Regexps and for Java logging to start with. Speaking of - it’d be interesting to see if there’s useful stuff that Commons IO could add for NIO coding.

I moved Jakarta Standard Taglib 1.1.3 a bit closer to happening. I’ve been keeping a history of what’s been going on on the taglib wiki. It’s been a while since I’ve done Taglib work, but it’s kind of fun to dip into it again. Once this is done I really need to gut the Taglibs project and retire the majority of dead taglibs. Maybe push the Unstandard Taglib again by pulling the bits of each taglib that have value into it. I’ve emailed a status update to the taglibs-dev list today, hoping that some people offer a reply or two.

Of course some company work went on - and I also spent some time with JIRA today - doing a test update to 3.7.2 and playing with plugins. I’ve become the company JIRA admin simply because I enjoy working with it. I had some personal custom dashboards for a long time (why oh why can we not share these?!?) and finally dumped them to work on a default dashboard for everyone. I’m using the JIRA Calendar Plugin to show people’s todo list and people seem to like that a lot. I’m playing with the Labels plugin (tagging) and the Chart plugin (pretty graphs). Soon I hope to start writing some plugins of my own.

No day would be complete without a walk through random mailing lists and JIRA projects. A few issues nudged along or closed on the INFRA JIRA project, an svn migration, an email to Roller suggesting they talk about graduating from the Incubator, and a couple of board emails.

All in all, not a terrible day. Feels good to sit down and put it on paper so to speak - my random wandering from project to project often means I end the day thinking not much has really happened.

Back in 2001 I migrated from a P90 left under the desk at my former employer’s in the UK, to a 4U server hosted by Iglou.com. I later replaced the 4U with two off the shelf super-micro P3 1Ghz 1Us, a cheap ebay’d celeron 400mhz (dns server) 1U and a built from pieces and ebay P3 700mhz 1U. I upgraded one of the P3 1Ghz 1Us to a P4 2.xGhz super-micro later on.

I originally used SuSE on the machines, but having to visit them physically to do CD updates was a crap idea so I switched to stable-debian just before my son was born on two of the machines, openbsd on the DNS box (it was going to do firewall too) and freebsd on the P3 (osjava.org machine). Nothing but good to say about debian, openbsd and freebsd. No serious problems.

After moving to Seattle last year, it was obvious that my ability to admin the machines while they were in KY was going to be tricky. So I slowly moved services off of the 4 machines and onto other services (gmail.com, code.google.com and a GoDaddy virtual server) - and in the case of CheeseWorld, a very inactive MUD, it was turned off.

Last night I turned off the machines themselves and a friend picked them up from Iglou this morning. The end of a grand experiment and education - having servers online (great bandwidth, great price) is an addicting thing.

Updated: … but the time needed to manage them is not something I can spare now and the cost in Seattle is not ‘Great price’.

I mentioned a while back that I wanted to make a report that gets sent to JIRA for Commons. It’s been done for a while, though it’s not being sent to the list yet. Here’s an example: http://people.apache.org/~bayard/jira-report-for-commons.txt.

It uses the trunk of Swizzle JIRA Report and custom vm file. The idea, as I mentioned before, is that it should give us a feel for projects that need to be considering releases, and issues that need attention. The logic is:

for each Commons JIRA project
  for each version
    show completed-issues-count and issues-count (how close to a release we are)
    for each issue with >= 2 votes
      show issue
  for Unversioned issues
    show issue

I like it, but I suspect it is still too noisy to have value.

And the last post of the night… We went to the 19 week ultrasound a week or so ago and the technician announced that it’ll be a girl (with the usual proviso’s that they could be wrong).

We’re both very excited (not sure if Nathan groks it yet) - 20 weeks to go. Need to get to work on the website overhaul.

I’ve been experimenting with cookies for the family. Here’s the current favourite recipe:

1. Mix 1.5 cups of white sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, 2 sticks of room temperature butter and a healthy pour of molasses up with a fork.
2. Add two eggs and mix them in.
3. Sift 1.5 cups of plain flour, 0.5 cup of cocoa, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon of salt.
4. Turn oven on to 375 F. Timing wise this seems to work well for me to have it pre-heated when I’ve got them ready to put in.
5. Add a cup of oats. Mix it all together.
6. Form flattened balls on baking trays with either greaseproof paper or tinfoil on them. I put 2 trays in with 6 balls each.
7. Cook for 10-15 minutes.
8. Do a second batch as you should have only used half the bowl’s contents.
9. Eat while warm before the family notice you were baking.

Most of the recipe is from the side of the sugar, but I’ve been changing it a fair bit.

I need to hit submit more often and not let the drafts build up. Here’s the ‘Recent Drafts’ list on the RHS of my edit window:

• Flow
• Plucky duck survives gunshot… I’m…
• How Apache Jakarta should be …
• What is Apache?
• Irritated by …
• Managing a Commons project …
• MINA
• Roller 2.3
• Marketing and OSS
• Building Tomcat
• Open vs Private conversations …
• 10 rules for dating my open source …
• Open Source support economy …
• Jakarta reorg discussion …
• Middle Management
• Long Now Foundation
• Being a pain in the arse…. …
• Comparing the Codehaus manifesto to…
• OS Upgrades?
• MPAA continue to defend their monop…
• Secrets to development?

Probably all lots of crap.

The earliest book I can remember reading is a whole set of learn-to-read books at school about a boy and a cat (who I think was called Tobias). The set was split into a series of different coloured groups and you worked your way up through the numbers and the colours, with the reading level going up as you went. They were a great way to learn to read.

I can’t remember the name of the books and the Internet is not helping me - which given that all I have is ‘boy and his black cat Tobias’ is no surprise, especially if I’m wrong about Tobias as a name. Anyone know these books?