Terse Systems

I now have a job where I can go home every day. A full time job. Where I don’t clock in and out, and I don’t fly anywhere.

Just being at home is a luxury. The small joy of collapsing into the beanbag and watching the Daily Show. Seeing the sun rise over City Hall.

More than that though. I can drive my own car. I can wear jeans all week. I can make plans knowing I can dig files and information out of the bottom of the cabinet at short notice. I can go out on Friday nights.

But it’s the small things that matter most. When I was first finding my feet, I would come home to bad milk, stale bread and cold coffee with mold growing in it. I got the hang of it. Soon the house was piled with small cardboard boxes; the disposable product of disposable meals.

I cooked my own dinner last night. I made bread. It was still warm this morning.

I stopped at Safeways and bought perishable food. Plums. Avocados. Real, honest to god grapefruit juice. Just the sheer act of wandering the food court was a luxury.

There’s eggs in the fridge, and dishes in the sink. There are crumbs on the countertop.

There are flowers in a vase on the kitchen table.

For some reason Google doesn’t pick up this problem easily enough, so I’m noting it here. Besides which, I know I won’t remember it in two weeks.

If your cygwin processes are dying with a strange error that looks like this:

fatal error - unable to remap C:\cygwin\lib\zsh\4.2.6\zsh\complete.dll to same address as parent(0x1030000)

Then fear not. You may have no idea what is going on, but there is a simple solution.

Using the cygwin setup utility, find and install the rebase package.

Then close down any cygwin packages that you may have.

Then type ‘ash’ from the start / run menu.

Type ‘rebaseall’ at the console.

This should fix everything. I have no idea why.

There’s a new ATG Filebrowser available at datafaber. This is a very useful debugging utility, because now you can edit your JSP pages through the same interface that you view JSP pages. This can be a big help when you’re working on a foreign dev machine, or when you’re just tired off bouncing between apps. So go get it.

I’m on the SHAPE forum for software engineering management, and brought up the question about which methodology is the most appropriate for which situation.

I brought up three situations, and then realized there weren’t any factors I could weight for a heuristic. So I made them up, starting from a list I already had on factors that go into estimating software projects.

In the process, I’ve also made the attempt to list every commonly used software methodology and/or process framework. I’m certain I’ve missed some (such as ICONIX) but at least this is a good start.

Different people made different recommendations. The reasons why they made them was at least as interesting as the decisions they made.

I’ve also found a couple of books, notably Balancing Agility and Discipline which deals explicitly with people who are on the fence when it comes to software methodologies. I’ll come back and update this post as I get a better picture.

I’m commuting down to LA for my current gig. That gives me about two hours free before the plane flight where I have pretty much nothing to do. So I work on my blog and read.

I’ve given up on blocking the comment spam in the current version of the blog. It’s going to make more sense to do it in the next release. So (following the test-first methodology) instead of actually writing code to create and delete comments in Hibernate, I’m researching dbunit and trying to figure out the best ways to strip and reinstate a database in different apps. I can’t decide whether this is wise or not.

I’ve been researching programming methodologies again (here’s last time – even if you don’t read it, read The Inevitable Pain of Software Development, which is by far the best paper I found). The hard bit is getting empirical data which says what methods were successful under which circumstances. However, I did find a review of agile programming methods that gave me some very useful data points. The interesting thing is that it’s all been done before.

I also found the programming podcasts on itconversations. These are mysteriously addictive – I can play them sitting in the airport or waiting for a bus and feel like I’m doing something useful. I have to admit I don’t like the not-so-subliminal ads that the speakers put in for their books, products, and seminars, but you can learn more context in an interview than you can in a book because the interviewer actually understands software development.

Now I want to read Agile Software Development. But how useful is that in practice? How useful is any of this in practice? I don’t know. And getting a good quality filter in place is almost as expensive as ignorance.

I’ve been playing around with the ATG Eclipse plugin. I like the Repository editor, but it can’t cope with more than two layers of XML file combination, so it’s not useful for modifying large scale catalogs. But it is great for proof of concept repositories and prototypes. And I like that I don’t have to run through a build script when using an ATG project in Eclipse.

The side effect of using the plugin is that I’ve been creating a whole bunch of disposable ATG modules. I’m fairly good at cranking these out now, but they’re a hassle in bulk. So I wrote an ant script that creates ATG modules from a template. This will setup the EAR, WAR, and libs for you automatically. Click here for the file.

There’s also some stuff in there about ATG versioned modules. I remember that there was a big annoying problem with CampaignOptimizer (otherwise known as A/B Testing). The details are in build.properties, but I don’t remember precisely.

It’s worth noting that versioned modules could have some advantages over regular modules for large scale enterprise builds. Notably, versioned modules can contain scripts that can automate deployment. Jason Goth goes over this in his presentation at the ATG Open. Relevant bits are as follows:

Versioned Modules
- Each versioned module contains an install script(s).
- The AACom module is a “shell”
– Creates a dependency on the actual version of the site
– The MANIFEST.MF contains just the following:
ATG-Required: AACom-1_36

Versioned modules allow completely automated deployments.
- The deployment script:
– Copies the module files
– Stops a portion of the servers
– Runs the install script(s)
– Starts Dynamo
– Repeat process for remaining servers
- Written in Perl

The deployment script allows us to:
– Upgrade without manual intervention
– Avoid inconsistencies during the restart
– Handle failed file transfers
- Don’t start those servers
– Rollback in case of failure

This is taken from the powerpoint slides. I have no idea exactly what he meant by much of this – since ATG versioned modules are completely undocumented, much of what I already know is trial and error. Still, it’s a good starting point.

Okay, time to go through the toolkit again. It’s been a while since I did this. This time it’s Firefox Extensions.

HTML Validator. If you are an HTML designer, a page developer, or indeed anyone who makes web pages for a living, you need this extension. I can’t tell you the number of headaches it has saved me by pointing out exactly where something doesn’t match up.

Aardvark. This application is superficially similar to the DOM inspector, but it has a far nicer interface. You turn it on, and all the page elements are tagged for you on the page. This sounds a little abstract, so here’s a demonstration:

Firebug. This is a number of different things, and it’s already had very good press. It does a number of things, but the best thing from my perspective is that it validates CSS, debugs Javascript (in a way far superior to Venkman) and can track XMLHTTPRequests. If you’re working on AJAX applications, Firebug pulls many different things together to form a unified whole.

Scrapbook. This extension changes the way I surf the web. You drag and drop a bookmark or a page into it, and it stores the page for you. You can then read the page offline, without being connected to the web. And because it’s local, you never have to worry about losing the URL. I’ll drag pages in and use them for reference at meetings, for long articles, for web page receipts…

That’s it for now – there are other firefox extensions I like, but they’re personal preferences rather than new features.

So it turns out IF you have a Windows machine which uses a wireless connection for the Internet, AND you wire it up to an ethernet network for an internal subnet, AND the ethernet is faster than the wireless connection, THEN Windows thinks “hey, this new network is faster than the old one, let’s send everything there!” And tries to send Internet packets to the ethernet.

So you can’t rely on the automatic metric. More details here.

I had a couple of hours in the airport a couple of weeks ago, and decided to use them to write some Yahoo widgets.

The first one is an expansion on the existing TenPlusTwo widget: I’ve added a whole bunch of options, such as configurable popups, sounds and programs. I tried getting in touch with the original author so I could submit the code back as an enhancement, but he has no email address! So this will have to do.

The user preferences look like this:

The second one is a heavy reworking of the Yahoo Notepad, into a pure GTD inbasket. This thing just takes in text that you type in, then runs a script against it.

It looks like this:

The precise nature of the script is configurable in the preferences, so you can run a Perl, Python or Ruby script against it.
In this case, my script executes the following command

"c:/usr/perl/bin/perl.exe d:\home\wsargent\work\eccoapi\scripts\command.pl 'this is a test'"

In this case, the inbasket dumps into Ecco Pro, the only application that reduces me to zealotry. But you can write your own scripts to write out to a text file, a web application, or wherever.

You can download both widgets here: Inbasket and TenPlusTwo.

Total time spent: two hours, plus the time spent to write this. Widgets rock.

I wrote my blog from the ground up. It seemed like an interesting technical exercise at the time. Now I have actual content and people who comment, I’m in a much better position to appreciate the benefits and drawbacks.

Plus: I know exactly what’s going on. It does exactly what I want.
Minus: If something doesn’t work, I can’t draw on a user community to fix it for me.
Plus: I can use the blog as a proving ground for new technology.
Minus: Spammers also learn new technology.

I thought I was very clever for writing my own blog, because spammers were oriented against WordPress and Blogger and wouldn’t bother with as small a target as one custom written blog. I failed to take into account that spammer technology would advance to the point where they would figure out how to act like users and hit a comment button without regard to the back end technology.

I tried cleaning out the spam manually. This is like trying to stop the tide with a bucket. The problem is to come up with a comment submission scheme that spammers cannot hack, and that I need to think about.

In the meantime, I’ve disabled comments altogether. And in lieu of deleting the comments by hand, I’ve used this problem as an opportunity to think about how to do ad-hoc deletes from the repository.

Hence the BeanshellAdminService. This little beauty runs in the AdminServer, and allows me to run beanshell scripts on the server. It’s so convenient that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it years ago. For development, it lets you do just about anything.

I’ve uploaded it to the usual place. This is useful for your normal services as well. You can override the admin servlet to set your own parameters for the interpreter, so if there’s a function that you want to pull in or some parameters that you want to set, you can set them with an anonymous subclass. Best to do that from another module though, so you don’t inadvertently deploy scriptable code to production…