The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m finally getting near the end of my every now and then hacking at a static version of a JIRA.

The basic story is that I want to turn off the computer that is running in my attic doing nothing but hosting a JIRA. The slicehost I pay for isn’t a great place to try and squeeze in the memory hungry JIRA/JVM combination, and as the project has mostly moved to Google Code it seemed like a good idea to get the JIRA gone too. Google Code doesn’t have any simple methods for uploading the data (basically you get to do HTTP and have no control over dates etc), so I decided to dump JIRA as XML, and XSLT a nice look to it. Maybe one day I can migrate it to Google Code or elsewhere, but I doubt it matters.

Pulling the XML down is easy - in fact I don’t even implement that. I assume you have used the IssueNavigator in JIRA to get a dump of all your issues as RSS. That’s right - probably will make a big JIRA explode. Ah well. I also pull down attachments for you. Just not the audit history.

Then I use XSLT (stunning architecture eh?) to put together a simple static site that shows users, issues, projects and versions (couldn’t be bothered with components though I should add them some day). The nice part here is that as I have the xml, I can restyle and make it better if I ever want to. It will support the project and issue URLs out of the box, while version and user urls will require a mod_rewrite rule, however no one goes directly to those links anyway.

Here’s the site:

http://www.osjava.org/issues/

I need to redo it from the latest xml dump, and then maybe it will be done and that light hum from above can go quiet.

If you want the code to do this (you’ll have to modify it yourself as it’s got little hacks in for osjava specific bits) it’s public domain and available at:

https://svn.atlassian.com/svn/public/contrib/jira/jira-outlet/trunk/mig4jira/static

In the spirit of finding something I agree with and using it to justify my belief; here’s a BBC report entitled ‘Web worlds ‘useful’ for children‘. The subject came up at the doctor the other week about how much TV a child was watching. The general rule we try to live to is that our son doesn’t watch TV alone (occasionally broken when absolutely necessary - such as Apache board meeting while Carrie is at the doctor), but that he either watches TV with us or we are playing video games together. Again, with the last bit - the rule is to not have him playing video games on his own.

The doctor’s view was that the visual display was the bad thing and he should not be spending much time interacting with a visual display - that it was damaging for his ability to work at school.

There are a few thoughts you get here as a parent.

1) AARGGGHHHH I’m a BAD parent.
2) Hang on… what’s medical about being a good student and why is a doctor preaching this?
3) Wait a minute, your definition of normal wouldn’t include me.
4) I want my child to be normal.
5) I don’t want my child to be limited by my generation’s (or the preceding generation’s in reality) view of normal.

Computers are invading every day life. It’s like saying you won’t let a kid near a hammer until they are old enough - no toy hammers, no helping you while you use a hammer, no getting to hit the nail in under your guidance (which Nathan and I had huge fun doing the other weekend btw… my son helped me put up shelves… it rocked). Social activity is increasingly through computers. It seems very fair to ask:

“What is a more valuable skill - socialization in the playground or socialization on the Internet?”

The answer is obvious to me - they’re equal. My point being that I’d rather see schools embracing the technologies that the article talks about rather than trying to block them. I’d love to see work done on having kids in the school all having a shared virtual environment (what we’d call a MUD back in the day eh?). Hell I want the same for an office - even today in a tech job I find that people want to pick up a phone (worst possible medium) or have a face to face meeting (good, but needs to be kept for important issues) than have a long running email or message board thread. People haven’t learnt to express themselves, or to innoculate themselves against flames and trolls.

The majority of employees out there are quite frankly unprepared for where the modern work environment should be going; and the solution is to hide things from our kids so they’re not prepared either (except through their personal lives - turning the environment into gossip and not constructive).

So there I sat having been told that studies show that TV stunts a child’s ability to focus; and I’m thinking “what about their ability to multitask? What you’re really saying is that schools can’t support multitaskers, just highly focused one taskers”. Looking back, experience agrees. I did well at school until it got really hard and I needed to focus deeply - I was used to multitasking. However, I did obscenely well up to that point because I could multitask. I’ve since taught myself how to focus deeply, but it’s multitasking that continues to be the increasingly valuable skill.

Side note… I remember a report that kids were getting better at multitasking. Maybe I blogged about it. The weird thing was that the report thought that was a bad thing. I was stunned. Kids need to multitask more; they’re adapting. What’s not adapting are the schools and the common wisdom.

I read Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” for the first time over the last few days. I was a Marvel reading kid growing up, so didn’t get to see how the other half lived (yeah I know, the cool kids read indies… like you could find those in the corner of SW Herts/SE Bucks). I’ve brought a few Star Wars graphic novels over the last decade, maybe one a year, but this is the first real comic book in a long time. I’ll also be rereading “Kaven’s Last Hunt” - a Spiderman story I remember liking a lot. The Batman graphic novel was very good by the way - I liked it and recommended Carrie read it, but I doubt she will.

I took part in my last real Apache board meeting. I’ll be in the next meeting, but for the purpose of handing over the reins to the new board. I’ll also unsubscribe myself from a few more lists - the silence of being on so few lists (down to maybe 20 or so) is already deafening. I look over the shoulder at Carrie’s busy inbox and realize I can go a day without reading my email and it wouldn’t be much effort to catch up with the near empty folders.

Not a lot of Commons code though - Levi has been less happy in the evenings and I’ve been more tired. Carrie continues to bear the brunt of baby hours while I get Nathan to tire me out. I like the look of the Childsplay project - Python implemented games for kids. Coding GCompris didn’t interest me, too much C hackery to mess around with,
but Childsplay looks more fun to dig into. Need to get focused soon into writing some games.

Work is tiring - the old job keeps any spare moments that the new job allows nice and busy. Main thing I’m doing right now is grokking the build’n'deploy system - fortunately I like grokking build systems so this is one part pain in the arse and one part pleasure.

Lastly - I’ve spent some time running the numbers for house buying. There are two numbers that I find interesting. 1) What house can we afford with the same mortgage payments as our current rent, and 2) What house can we afford with the same interest in the first year as we’re wasting on rent. I began by factoring out property tax (pricey here), water/waste/sewage bill and rounding it up with $50 a month on ‘general repairs’. Based on that I worked out that unless we can find somewhere extremely cheap, it makes better financial sense to keep renting our current place.

Obviously that’s not a good long term plan - rent increases with inflation while mortgages stay fixed [I look at the fixed 15 and 30 year interest rates]. House value also goes up, presumably by more than inflation or at least what money in ’safe’ savings is likely to get - but right now house values aren’t going up and from a budgetary sense I find it very hard to justify buying. The mortgage tax bit doesn’t mean much as the amount we would pay in tax equals the standard amount for having 4 people in the house. Frustrating.

A week since my last update. Life continues to be busy.

The new job role has turned up the heat - I’m going from looking for things to juggle to juggling lots of things - especially with the old job role still intended to fill my time.  Each day at 4pm I tend to be exhausted - not due to lack of sleep (tonight’s late night not withstanding) as I get lots of sleep, but due to having nearly all my time outside of work and sleep being filled with Nathan.

I’ve managed to do a little coding. Commons Collections is getting closer to the next bugfix release - real close, and Codec too. I’ve started moving towards Lang 3.0 - including such wonderful things as removing deprecations! Maybe… depending what the opinions are etc.  It continues to be what I call dim sum coding - coding that works well with a high amount of context switching. Tonight’s late night comes from committing an extra hour or two to breaking the back of a painful serialization issue [mostly just in terms of figuring out why it didn’t like the test framework, and then once I had real tests why it wasn’t working in the first place].

Levi’s growing happily along. A fair bit of work as any new baby is, but still being remarkably chilled. Nathan’s also a delight and we’re starting to get a weekend routine, him and I. Must repeat this weekend despite relatives being here.

Just realized that I should have pointed out that James put out a Quartz 1.6.1 release candidate. I got involved with Quartz while at SourceLabs and have since kept a bit involved.

Anyway, consider yourself informed

Reading my wife’s blog, I realized I hadn’t followed up on the original post here for Levi with more details on the post. Carrie has most of them in her birth story entry.

The main thing that will stay in the memory for me is actually watching Levi come out - largely due to being a part of the process [I got to hold a leg - Carrie’s not Levi’s] rather than relegated to hand holding as I was for Nathan. It’s a pretty amazing thing to watch - the head is this flat pancake at first, then seems to inflate. Purple face, no sound, the obvious worry from the expectant mother as to whether things are good - to which of course the expectant father says things are fine (like I have any clue… he’s a purple pancake honey, couldn’t be better eh?) and then a wriggle of the shoulders and out shoots a baby. Literally.

More worry for the expectant mother as he’s not yet made much of a sound beyond a “*gurglegargle* Hey this is breathing” type of thing. Compounding her realization that the doctor, while deftly unwinding the cord in a sleight of hand moment to make a Vegas magician proud, had commented on the cord being looped twice. Then finally some crying and the expectant father’s job of dishing out liberal doses of optimism and calm is done. Now to focus on the baby, record some video footage of those first moments, cut the cord (wooop! didn’t get to do that last time either… damn chewy things they are) and be impressed that the doctor seems to have bleeding etc well in hand. Last time it sounded a little bit like we’d be off to surgery any moment, this time it was focus and efficiency.

Then it all calms down, accept the congratulations of the meconium team, and take newly cleaned baby over to his mother for some relaxing and shock that he seems to get the boob thing. Finish off with phone calls to the newly minted grandparents (from the room! You mean I don’t have to head out to the car park to phone this time?) and of course the lad who has just become a brother and the birth was over and it was time to get Levi through his first few days, many poops, guzzling of milk and some surprisingly long naps.

He spent his first 8 hours feeding and crapping like he was born to do it (err….) and then slept for 5 hours. Lad was full.

Slashdot are having a thread about e-books. For me the biggest problem with e-books is the same problem as with mp3s (e-music??): the product loses its resale value.

Up until now, most of the music and books we consumers have bought maintain some level of resale value. It’s minor, but it makes these items an asset. Unlike say a computer (unless it’s computer books), they are unlikely to become valueless, and in some rare cases they may increase in value as they become - well rare. I imagine I’m a rare person in North America with a complete original set of Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Of course - not the most well known author so I doubt it amounts to much

We all (well lots of people) worry about our books and CDs somewhat - our home contents insurance is expected to foot the bill of replacing them. Most likely it won’t buy much back, but there’s some insured value. We also pass the books down as heirlooms - my dad has a cool Anglo Saxon Reader from 100+ years ago passed down from his grandparents. I expect my parents library to fold into mine some day (minus whatever my sister and I agree she wants), and for my books to be passed on down. They’re physical - they have value.

What about e-books? Or digital music? If something happens to me, do the various companies have methods by which the inheritor acquires the digital ownership? Is iTunes better than the ‘5 computers and you’re out’ it started with? Of course music has got around that problem largely by reinventing the wheel every 10 years. Vinyl, false path into eight track, cassettes, CDs…. then they got a bit stuck. Will my CDs be of inheritable value or resellable value in 30 years time? So far the CD is hanging on as a medium, though whether any of my CDs will play in 30 years is another question [and I’m sure the vinyl will still be working then in custom made record players]. DVD jumps to mind, Blue Ray… All the bollocks about changing the medium yet again so the consumer can be bled for yet more money for products they already own.

The curse of digital, from the legal point of view, appears to be that it has a resale value of zero because resale is equivalent to copying. Much like the huge loss you make as soon as you walk off the lot with a new car, the book you just bought is now worthless to anyone else but you. Suddenly the insurance (backups… real insurance - are my digital music/books covered by my home contents insurance?) starts to feel more expensive because it’s being spent on a product with zero value. That awareness of zero value makes me far more likely to dispose of the book - or want to resell it - than before, and yet now I no longer have space constraints on how many books I can own. What an ugly cycle.

That is the plus side - I can have a bajillion books and not be constrained by the wallspace I have available. And not find my choice of house constrained by - “which room will the library be?”. The plus sides are really all about space. I can be reading one book on the bus, and switch to another without having to mess with my bag, or wish I was back home.

That raises other questions. Will an e-book fit in my coat? If so then that bag can be a laptop accessory (once I start buying lunch for the month from Fresh They upped the limit to beyond my weekly lunch shop; must be reading my blog the dastardly crew). Does an e-book have authentication so when it’s nicked it’s only an insured reader which is grabbed and not my actual books (plus notes).

How do I share the book I bought with my wife. Digital doesn’t seem to understand families the way physical did. Do I have to wait for my son to have an income before he can read his own copies of my books? What happens to second hand bookshops (or first hand). Let’s be blunt here - browsing for books in a bookstore is much more productive than a website (even if you end up buying at the website etc etc). Once books are digital, byebye bookstore hello hard to browse world. Bye bye browsing in a second hand book store for gems (and lots of overpriced junk… someone needs to tell that shop in Broadstairs that charing half price for an 80s computer book is a good way to guarantee space doesn’t get filled).

Oddly - that’s the biggest one for me. Family and books. The digital fork in the family book relationship. Ignoring that once that e-book collection is large enough my son will have to pay inheritence tax at full price because there is no second hand market; and that I’m sure someone out there thinks it’s evil that my wife and I read the same copy of the latest Terry Pratchett book, and that my parents watched a movie while at my house one day.

Copyright and Open Source work well together. Patents and Open Source appear to often be diametrically opposed. Trademarks…. these are fun.

The trend in Open Source with trademarks, including the Apache one, appears to be to emulate how companies handle their trademarks. That is - to keep them, you have to protect them. Protect is automatically interpreted as “hold close to your chest”. I’ve seen suggestion on the foundations@ mailing list that this is too much, and I heartily agree. What we need are trademark licenses.

“This is a license to use the Xxxx trademark for non-profit activities, provided they do not imply that the Foo Xxxx Foundation [or committers to the Xxxx project] endorse the activity in any way. For for-profit activities, please contact foo@example.com. ”

Obviously the actual text will need some thinking. I don’t give a crap if someone sets up a user group for Apache, that benefits everyone, but I do care if someone gains value from my trademark at detriment to myself. So if someone uses apache.net (no idea what is there) to set up the Apache Net Foundation, supplying open source software as a non-profit etc; well I’m going to care.

So how to be open about our trademarks, without being ripped off?

Update on life….

New job role… busy. I came back a week early and had 1 day of slack before the new role filled all my time

Levi - doing superbly.  Putting on the pounds one ounce at a time, sleeping moderately well and a big fan of music. Pretty much anything with a melody will make him happy, though he does not like the concept that one track ends and another starts.  He also screams blue murder when those little yellow stains are working their way into his nappy.

Open Source - I’ve managed to find a few moments to work on the odd patch; and am getting closer on being able to turn off the OSJava JIRA and have a static version that sends people over to code.google. I also created some infrastructure over at Atlassian’s developer site so I can start working towards my JIRA plugins being supported by Atlassian. Given how simple they are, seems an easy win for Mike and his aussies. Two more Apache board meetings to go as a board member, and then I get to try and find time to regularly attend as a member.

Other… This year is about my family; much more so than Open Source. I want to do more with my sons in my evenings rather than hacking on code and letting them play with themselves. Once Levi understands night and day, I’ll get some evening time back, but in the meantime I need to get Nathan to football lessons, to the park for kite flying, t-ball and bicycle riding, to start learning his letters and to improve his Mario Kart Wii skills. Lego Mindstorms too - after being addicted to playing with the designed Lego spaceships, Nathan made his first original the other day by using two discarded tie-fighter wings to create a flying wing.

Lots to do - never enough time.