The Goldfish Chronicles

I ordered a cheap Dell Hybrid a few weeks back. These are nice little Mac Mini competitors, by default they run Vista but I wanted a Linux server. Dell were offering a $200 off deal, which given the low price originally made it time to pick one up. The reports online about being able to run Linux had moved from “Ugh!” to “Did you? No, but did you? No - you? No - you?…. I did it!”. So one out of 10 seemed happy. Must be easy right?

It took a month to show up, despite my paying more on shipping. I’d guess they couldn’t get the parts for some reason - hopefully they’re not being discontinued, but i did notice that they’re not in the latest Dell catalog. Still, eventually, after a few “official do you still want it?” emails it was announced that it had been shipped (which was odd given my lack of answer to the latest “do you still want it, please answer or we cancel?” email.

Simple hardware setup - hardest task is adding the legs where you want them. Boot up into Vista, identify that things seem to work then in goes the Ubuntu 9.10 CD that the Mac had burnt while the setup was happening. It hopped into the live demo mode (I wasn’t paying a lot of attention and that’s the default). I got the wireless card working via the installation of a proprietary driver and things were golden. I double clicked on the install ubuntu icon and things seemed to get unhappy… unsure. I held down the power button (I love acting like a clueless user) and chose to install on restart. Gave it all the disk, no more Vista, and let it do its thing. Fixed some custard and poured it on digestive biscuits.

All was good - except no wireless. No proprietary driver. Seems that it was on the boot disk, but didn’t get installed. Grrr.

Mac laptop to the rescue. Set up a network bridge. Auto Eth0 on the Hybrid (now christened Runt) and after poking it as to why it wasn’t the network address I expected (to which it Mac/Runt combination told me they knew better than I and I acquiesced) it was online.

Open up the package manager. Search for broadcom. Install the package.

Nothing.

No worries - it’s a kernel driver and I’m a user with no qualms about doing manual work. I rebooted.

Ubuntu came up. Wireless there. Finish its setup and *bang* I’m online.

Very, very cool. Graphics seem fine. No sound, but that would be the lack of speakers. I can recommend Ubuntu on the Hybrid and put paid to the ‘does it, doesn’t it’ forum posts out there.

SEO: Hybrid. Ubuntu. Linux. Actually works actually.

Looking for the muse to return. In vain currently.

Excellent blog entry back in April from Stephen Colebourne on No Java SE 7 - The ASF perspective. I’ve been there for much of it and found it informative myself to see the history being discussed. As it is… Sun have shown one of the great dangers of IP to a project being locked up in one (for-profit) entity (as MySQL AB had done beforehand) by being bought by Oracle and suddenly all our foundations are crumbly and jellified. I read elsewhere that the Oracle/Sun deal is on hold for four months - hopefully good news for any threatened with layoffs.

Another excellent entry (also in April… my how slow I am at reading) from James Strachan on Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?. Groovy begetter picks Scala as successor to Java splash across the tabloid blogs near and far. Of course James is one of the greatest “shiny thing!” creators out there, so who knows what he’ll like next year Still. A kick in the arse to go read more on Scala.

Atlassian have their JIRA 4.0 release coming out someday and have nudged plugin authors to make sure their plugins work and maybe to think about tying their own release dates. I don’t currently have any pending work on my plugins, but do need to sit down and prod the 4.0 beta to make sure the plugins work. They probably won’t - I seem to relish in finding JIRA APIs that are going to be modified. I also need to work on Apache’s JIRA instance - I merged 3 JIRAs into the main one and there was a tiny bit of custom data mangling that I’ve still not worked out the database fu to fix. That’s blocking the Struts and ActiveMQ ones merging in and ending up on the “one true JIRA(tm)”. It really needs time to focus though… my dim sum life really doesn’t allow for that right now.

Speaking of… dim sum increments and glacial development are a process I’ve been mastering (imo) for the last few years. Add glacial administration and glacial project management to that as well. I seem to specialize in working on things that have no defined end goal, but instead they move a little bit further each increment. Often the increment is a daily event, but only 30minutes. Context switching makes that 30minutes a tricky one to maximise. Still - it’s how various Commons libraries have been released. Need to write up Glacial Development one of these days. My older name, which I probably prefer, is Tortoise Development. Amusing that I’d forgotten about that, come up with Glacial and then remembered. The tortoise doesn’t know where the milestone is, just puts one foot in front of the other and moves forward. Obviously it’s not as simple as that - for example you could end up on a life long death march if you weren’t defining forward as closer to some realizable goal. Still… probably is a life long death march

Two major code things I want to be working on right now but lack the impetus are Commons Lang 3.0 and migrating Jakarta Taglibs to Tomcat Taglibs (along with the creation of the Extended Taglib and release of a JSTL 1.2 implementation). The Taglibs migration will end my involvement with Jakarta after 8 years (probably 9 by the time I’m done). That’ll be quite the day. Really need to use that to drive me on.

We reinstated our Netflix subscription now that a bunch of movies have built up. So nights currently are spent watching the play on demand and the delivered dvd’s. Fill the time etc. Plus I’ve robbed the open source time kitty of an hour each night to clean the house. At 2:30am in the morning, said kitty is way overdrawn and in need of rescuing.

Apache Licensing/Trademark lists are also being ignored. There are others who can jump in, not a low bus count there thankfully

Waiting on the muse. Reading library books on the bus. Buying Willard Price out of print books to complete the collection that my children probably won’t care about anyway. Looking at explodingdog.com pictures. Wanting to write AA Milne type poems for the kids (not managed to achieve the blend of innocence and maturity that AA Milne manages yet) and create a maze creation bit of software for the eldest. Engaging in retail therapy at REI. Waiting on the… well, let’s be honest. It ain’t a muse. No creative spark in this here realm. Just waiting on the energy to pick up the mop and do some more open source janitorial work. Someday.

I’m sure most people read blogs through RSS nowadays, I know I generally do, but the ‘homepage’ is still something that one likes to play with and craft. Eirik Bjørsnøs has kindly given me permission to copy a bit of his code from the excellent svnsearch.org and now I have a compressed calendar widget to show 7 years worth of blogging, rather than the exceedingly long list of months that the system provided. I need to get the mouseovers back, but I’m liking it.

I’m playing at setting up a Commons dashboard within the Apache JIRA. This means needing some improvements to my plugins so that they can pretend the site is Commons specific. It’ll be nice to get custom l&fs for JIRA dashboards one day too.

The first released change is the ability to make the Search restrict itself to a set number of projects (and lets you say “Search Commons” next to it rather than “Search JIRA”):

JIRA Outlet Search Plugin

Roller JIRA was also moved into the main ASF JIRA. Not a bad vacation - three JIRAs turned off Also saw the last stages of the Commons CLI 1.2 release being done.

Nathan and I are in England on vacation. As we flew over Greenland, the vote to release Commons CLI 1.2 passed and I’ve now pushed out the artifacts.

Time to kick CLI2 off to the Sandbox and get rid of the almighty confusion that that component has lived in for so long. Should have happened 4 years ago in hindsight.

Finding English sausages in the US at long last. Went to a different grocery store the other night to scout it out, and they had them sitting there (Top Food and Drug in Shoreline). Two nights of bangers, mash and beans later and I’m as pleased as punch.

Which is more than can be said for the screaming child who’s meant to be asleep.

Wife is with her family - taking the youngest along for the ride. Eldest and I are at home on my vacation.

Busy first day - finished putting up shelves, assembled a wheelbarrow and dug the border plus 1% of a new garden. The 1% is a bit depressing - 300 sqft to do and once we’d done all the shopping (shovels, seeds, wheelbarrow etc), assembled the wheelbarrow, and dug a trench for the new border; we had enough time to do a 3 sqft patch that led to eldest being very sad about not being able to keep the worms as pets. Still - it’s a start. Unless I work at night the challenge will be to see how much we can do at the weekend. Aim is to seed the first third at the end of February, so a few weekends to go.

A bug was reported back before the snow and the holidays pointing out that custom fields didn’t work in the csv-view plugin I released back in November. I freed up to look at that tonight and have released a 0.2 with that fix in it.

* http://developer.atlassian.com/jira/browse/JOUT-45

* http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/CSV+View

Spent much time drinking here: Halfway house - from the poor review it sounds like it’s not changed much.

(I think it meant halfway from London to somewhere… not that it was a place for kids with disorders. Then again….)