Adrian Smith

Adding additional repositories in ivy

2011-03-28T11:30:00.013+01:00

Although I've been using ivy for quite a while, it's been pretty light touch as we had someone on the team who did all the config. Moving to another project where we're using it in a more traditional way I have started to get a bit more involved.

One of the first things we needed to do was add configuration for some more repositories. On the face of it, ivy is very well documented, but sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees (or should that be ivy :-)). I'm going to describe my understanding of the process I followed in the hope that it'll help someone else, or even that someone might comment and tell me how I could have done it much more simply.

The first part is understanding how the ivysettings.xml file works. This page shows how the default ivysettings.xml file, contained in the ivy jar file, is set up. To create your own settings, you must override the complete file in the current directory adding in all the sections contained in the original.

Starting with the original:


<ivysettings>
 <settings defaultResolver="default"/>
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-public.xml"/>
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-shared.xml"/>
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-local.xml"/>
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-main-chain.xml"/>
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-default-chain.xml"/>
</ivysettings>

I ended up with this:


<ivysettings>
 <settings defaultResolver="default" />
 <resolvers>
  <chain name="public">
   <ibiblio name="ibiblio" m2compatible="true" />

   <url name="com.springsource.repository.bundles.milestone" m2compatible="true">
    <artifact pattern="http://maven.springframework.org/milestone/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
   </url>
   <url name="jboss" m2compatible="true">
    <artifact pattern="http://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public-jboss/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
   </url>
  </chain>
 </resolvers>

 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-shared.xml" />
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-local.xml" />
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-main-chain.xml" />
 <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-default-chain.xml" />
</ivysettings>

Most of the file is the same as the original except that we have overridden the public resolver chain. The original

<include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-public.xml"/>

section includes a file that looks like this:


<ivysettings>
 <resolvers>
  <ibiblio name="public" m2compatible="true"/>
 </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

This content has been replace with an identical inline section that starts with the original ibiblio resolver and then add 2 additional Maven repos for Spring milestones and jboss.

Good customer service

2010-10-10T19:55:00.002+01:00

My super Philips electric toothbrush recently decided to give up the ghost. It developed a most unwelcome fault of switching itself on in the middle of the night. It's a brilliant brush that I bought new from an eBay seller for a good price well over a year ago and as it went wrong while I was on holiday I decided to buy another one. Luckily they were on special offer in Boots!

When I returned from holiday I decided I had nothing much to lose by sending it back to Philips with a covering letter. I reckon around 18 months is not very good for a product that retails for over £100.

Well, low and behold, on Saturday, a new one arrived in the post.

Top marks to Philips. Probably costs them very little and now means I'll be buying their products in the future.

Child Benefit

2010-10-05T08:04:00.006+01:00

I have decided to write to my MP.

Charity

2010-03-16T20:41:00.002Z

Just got one of those plastic bags through the door to fill up with junk in aid of the Air Ambulance.

It's amazing in this country that we think it's normal to have major charities for 2 really important things, #1, various Air Ambulance groups and #2, the RNLI.

How is it that we're prepared to spend millions, or is it billions, of pounds funding the armed forces to go and blow people up all around the world, but we can't spare a few boats and helicopters plus crew to save the lives of people in our own country?

Adria Altea 542 DT Caravan review

2010-01-10T12:42:00.005Z

We bought this caravan last June (2009) and I thought it'd be good to do a small review to help other prospective purchasers.
We got ours from Broad Lane leisure in Daventry as VERY nearly new purchase, someone else had had it for a couple of months and only used it once, so it was hard to tell.

Our main criteria (in order) for selecting this caravan were:

Layout - a good compomise for us, as the bunk beds are very wide and the bathroom is still much more than a cupboard.
Weight - for the size, these vans are lightweight and we are limited by the car we tow with (Citreon C4 Picasso 138bhp).
Price - these vans are very competitivley priced.
Good reputation for build quality.

Of course, all caravans are a compromise and nearly all of the above come at a price of one sort or another, so I thought a list of the pros and cons might be useful, although I'll try and justify the reasons that certain things might be somewhat lacking.

Pros

Price, about £11K for a 6 berth van is pretty much un-beatable.
Layout is pretty much unique and as our 2 children grow older the wide bunks and also the wide single bed will hopefully be appreciated. A half-decent bathroom is also nice to have.
Lightweight - about 1300KG fully loaded is amazing for this size of caravan.

Cons

Small fridge - probably to keep the weight and cost down.
Slightly flimsy fittings in some areas, again probably to keep the weight down. In particular the bunk beds do seem to flex a bit an I wonder if their stated 85 kg weight limit might be a bit optimistic. Also the overhead cupboard stays are plastic and I wonder if they will last.
Heater is gas only, was sort of expecting electric as well, again probably budget related.
Nose weight has to be very carefully checked. We only have one small 3.9kg propane gas cylinder in the front locker and it's already on the limit.
Shower tray and basin plugs are very odd and I suspect peculiar to either Adira or continental caravan in general. They get jammed in very easily and you'd be advised to have a pair of pliars on hand to loosen them if necessary.
Velcro cushion fixings have nearly all come off but I'm manged to glue them all back down again.
Slightly dingy lighting at the rear end near the bunk beds, I noticed at recent show at Milton Keynes shopping centre, that the display model had an extra skylight there, not sure if this is now standard, or just an optional extra.

Spot the deliberate mistake

2009-09-17T10:00:00.002+01:00

Got caught out today doing some Jave code at work.

I thought I'd be a good boy and use Commons Lang utilities to implement toString(), hashCode() and equals(). Spot the mistake here:

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    return new HashCodeBuilder(13, 73).append(field1).append(field2).hashCode();
}

Any ideas? Here's the corrected version:

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    return new HashCodeBuilder(13, 73).append(field1).append(field2).toHashCode();
}

An easy mistake to make when using an IDE with auto-complete.

Luckily I was saved by my unit tests!

More Ubuntu progress

2009-04-20T09:50:00.002+01:00

With regard to my previous post, I have recently upgraded to 9.04. I was finally getting too fed up with sound and display issues on 8.04 so upgraded to 8.10 (Intrepid), but found no improvements with the NVidia integration and sound on Skype. I took the plunge and went for the 9.04 release candidate. I have to say it is a massive improvement for me with instant out of the box dual monitor support and the sound stuff all works without having to install pulseaudio.

I need Windows less and less now and I feel the writing really is on the wall for Microsoft. This seems to be confirmed by the increasing amount of laptops for sale with Linux rather than Windows.

Happy days.

Printing from Windows XP to a CUPS shared printer on Ubuntu

2009-03-08T15:44:00.003Z

On the face of it, this task would seem to be very simple and there are various pages with instructions on how to set this up. Basically you configure CUPS to allow the local USB printer to be shared and then set up a new network printer on windows that has the address http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername>. The problem is that, whilst this all seems to work OK, when you print, nothing seems to actually hit the printer. Nothing meaningful in the CUPS logs.

Lots of Googling brought me to this page.

The really critical part which makes things work is :

"Now, once you have that information, you can open a command prompt on
Windows, and type in the following command (all on one line, it is
wrapped here):

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /b "Printer on Ubuntu" /x /n
"blah" /if /f %windir%\inf\ntprint.inf /r
"http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername>" /m "MS Publisher Imagesetter"

That command will install the MS Publisher Imagesetter printer driver
(which is a printer driver that uses PostScript, which is what CUPS
takes as input), and setup the printer spool on Windows. You can then
open the Printers control panel and set the printer as the default
printer, and you will be able to print to it."

Igloo in Milton Keynes

2009-02-05T12:26:00.000Z

The most snow I've seen at home in my lifetime!

Prince Caspian

2009-02-04T14:24:00.002Z

My son Dylan got a Corn Snake for his 7th birthday. I made it's vivarium, but there is still quite a bit of kit to buy like a heat mat and thermostat.

Feeding time is once a week and is pretty amazing!

Day 14 - going home

2009-01-05T17:44:00.003Z

Pack up for the drive to Miami airport via Naples and the Delnor-Wiggins state park, basically a car park for the stunning beach where we stopped for lunch in the 85 degree sun. Luck enough to see a wild Dolphin cruising by.

Highway 41 takes us through the everglades where, unfortunately, we do not have enough time to stop and go on an air boat.

Day 13 - Chill out last full day

2009-01-05T16:38:00.007Z

Our last real holiday day was spent mainly on the very local beach, apart from a short drive around to get some present shopping and a meal in Clearwater Beach at Clear Sky Cafe, highly recommended, followed by a walk up Pier 60 to look at all the local jewellry stalls.

Day 12 - Clearwater Aquarium

2009-01-05T16:32:00.003Z

Today we head to the Clearwater Aquarium for a great day out including a boat trip around the Clearwater Harbour and talks about Winter, the Dolphin without a tail.

Day 11 - goodbye Disney, hello Gulf coast

2009-01-05T16:17:00.003Z

Today we pack up and leave Tuscana Apartments and take a 90 minute drive west via Tampa to Indian Rocks beach where we have a beach apartment booked for 3 nights at Sun 'n' Fun.

The apartment is pretty old by US standards dating from 1925, and to be honest, it shows and could do with some investment on internal fixtures and fittings. You can't however fault the location as Indian Rocks is a quite area between Clearwater Beach and St. Pete's beach on a very narrow strip of land barely wide enough for the road. The beach is just out the back and is fantastic white fine sand leading to the Gulf of Mexico sea, a haven for Dolphins, Pelicans etc.

After a quick play on the beach, we head off to explore nearby Clearwater Beach and make a plan for tomorrow before a meal out at nearby JD's, a very nice local restaurant.

Day 10 - Epcot twice and New Years Eve fireworks

2009-01-01T02:19:00.002Z

Yet another early start to get to Epcot for the 8am opening and a rush to get Fast-passes for Soarin'. We get a 9:15-10:15 time-slot which is pretty quick as it soon gets to be 5pm plus with a 3 hour wait for the main queue.
n and
Once we get on, after also going to "Living with the land" and "Circle of Life", it's pretty clear why the queues get so big so quickly. The ride has us flying over various sights of California including Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.

Once done, we leave for lunch at Ponderosa steak house, probably all that is wrong with American food! Then back to our pool for the afternoon in really lovely sunshine.

Early evening sees us heading back to Epcot as we luckily discover that the usual 9:30pm fireworks are re-sheduled to 7:30pm as it's New Years Eve, making them early enough for Robyn and Dylan. The whole place is packed out, but it's worth it as they're the best fireworks I've ever seen, and they do them every evening of the year!

Day 9 - another visit to Blizzard Beach

2008-12-31T00:47:00.004Z

Not too much to report today as we just had a slow start to get to Blizzard Beach by its 10am opening time before spending the whole day there until it closed at 5pm.

Good things about Florida (in no particular order)

The weather
Blue Diamond Wasabi and Soy roasted almonds
Cheap petrol (29 pence/litre)
Disney
Minimum speed limit on Interstates
Did I mention the weather?
Right turn on red
Overtaking on the inside

Bad things

Annoying sales tax
4 way junctions

Day 8 - back to Animal Kingdom and an evening at Hollywood studios

2008-12-30T03:19:00.002Z

Another early start sees us back to Animal Kingdom to get on the African Safari where we board a truck to see just about all of the major African animals in a very clever landscape. Then followed the Lion King show, a pretty cool 30 minute show and lunch in the Rainforest Cafe.

Following an afternoon back at the Apartment pool, we decide to head back into the Hollywood studios park for the evening Fantasmia show, and unfortunately have our first experience of bad Disney organization. Lots of un-organized queuing and a 15 minute late start.

click image to see pictures

Day 7 - back to Epcot

2008-12-29T00:07:00.006Z

Time to get back to The Epcot Centre to try and finish off the bits we couldn't get to the first time around. The real highlight for me was Mission: Space, a simulated space flight to Mars. The simulator/ride was the best yet with loads of G forces, probably a bit too much for Dylan! I also really enjoyed the "Universe of Energy", presented/narrated by Ellen DeGeneres and also the huge aquarium tanks with sharks, rays, dolphins and turtles. A ride we missed again was "Soarin'", a hang gliding simulation that had a 160 minute queue and first fastpass ticket of about 9pm when we got to it.

We managed to finish up about our normal time allowing time to have a swim in the pool before tea.

Thinking about the 70-80 degrees temperature in winter, I wonder if I could swap the UKs climate, but of course give up our long summer evenings, I think it probably always gets dark by about 8pm at the latest here.

Day 6 - Kennedy Space Centre

2008-12-28T02:20:00.003Z

An early start to get on the road for the 60 minute drive to the east coast and Kennedy Space Centre. We are almost first in the queue and get a good start on the bus tour that visits Gantry 39, The Saturn V facility and the International Space Station centre. The Saturn V part is the best with good stuff about the Apollo missions and the impressive Saturn V rocket itself.

We see a fair bit of wildlife on the bus, including 'Gators, Bald Eagles an Armadillo and some vultures.

Overall the trip is interesting but, in my opinion, slightly disappointing considering the high entrance fee.

Day 5 - Disney Magic Kingdom

2008-12-27T00:07:00.003Z

Not too much of an early start today, and we were rewarded with probably the most crowded day so far. The entrance to the park starts with the usual $12 parking and "tram" ride, but then an extra step is either the mono-rail or ferry across the lake. We took the mono-rail and were rewarded with the sight of a 'gator swimming below us.

The Magic Kingdom is the most "Disney" of the Disney parks with Mickey, Minnie and Donald in great abundance. The park is also aimed at younger children although there are some rides for older ones such as Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain. We managed to get on Space Mountain, but left it too late to get sensibly timed Fast-passes for anything else of substance, so spent more time that usual wandering around and exploring the sights and scenes. We did manage to see some shows and also went on a Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We also held out the "parade" at 15:30 which was quite an experience, although personally one is probably enough.

We still managed to get back to the apartment for a twilight swim in the pool while it was still about 75 degrees!

Day 4 - Blizzard Beach

2008-12-26T00:04:00.004Z

Christmas Day! Very strange. At least the kids managed to hold out until 05:30!

After a fairly slow start it's off to Blizzard Beach which is surprisingly quiet. This is a great resort for the kids to have fun and the parents to try and chill out. In spite of that, still pretty tiring and we managed to stay until closing time at 17:30.

Pretty good weather in the 80's but a short rain shower in the afternoon.

All exhausted, back to the apartment for tea. Kids probably the tiredest yet.

Day 3 - Disney Animal Kingdom

2008-12-25T00:29:00.003Z

An early start today as we suddenly realised that the Animal Kingdom opens at 8am. We didn't quite make it for 8, but early enough to get on a few rides before the crowds really got going.

The Animal Kingdon is the highlight so far even though once again we didn't manage to go around the whole thing deciding to instead have some chill out time back at the pool. We'll head back anther day to do Africa, Discovery Island and Camp Minnie-Mickey.

Highlights were Kali River Rapids where you get a soaking and Expedition Everest, a large and scary roller-coaster that Robyn and I managed 2 trips on thanks to Fast-pass and Dylan's reluctance.

We saw large (Flying F0x) bats, tigers and loads of birds.

Attractions visited:

Dinosaur (ride)
Primeval whirl
Finding Nemo (musical)
Flights on wonder (bird display)
Kali River Rapids
Everest Expedition
Maharajah Jungle Trek

Day 2 - Hollywood Studio

2008-12-24T01:58:00.004Z

We plan a day with an early show start and a return to the apartment for lunch before returning for the evening fireworks etc.

Arriving at the Hollywood studio park after our easiest drive yet, we are before the 9am opening time, but there are still thousands ahead of us. Once inside we decide to head to the Toy Story ride and get funneled into the fast-pass queue, where we eventually get tickets for some 2 hours ahead. Moving on to the very quiet "back-lot" tour, we hit very lucky and all our plans change as we get given Dream Fast Pass special tickets that provide fast-passes to all the major rides in the park. We now decide to make a full day of it to get the best advantage of these special tickets.

Finally get back to the apartment about 5pm and the kids try out the pool while get some more shopping at the local supermarket.

Attractions visited

Backlot tour
Cascade Canyon
Lights, motors, action
Star Tours
Indiana Jones show
Rock 'n' Roll roller-coaster
Prince Caspian
Little Mermaid

Day 1 - Epcot

2008-12-22T21:42:00.005Z

We do the checking in stuff and take a look at the lovely pool area and, after a quick shop at the very nearby supermarket and breakfast at Dennys (diner), we decide to go to Epcot which is one of the nearer Disney attractions. Once again, although driving is really easy, we seem not to have learnt much about navigating and make a meal of the short journey.

When we finally arrive, it's a slight dissappointment to have to pay $12 to park when we've paid hundreds of pounds for our 14 day passes, but you can't fault the organisation and the sheer scale of everything is simply amazing. We get transferred from the car park to the main park on a road train and quickly get into Epcot. Immediately, the quality and cleanliness is apparent, especially considering the age of the park.

The first area is the modern part with loads of technology exhibits mixed in with the traditional rides. It's Disney's most busy time and the queues are epic, but at least there is the Fast-pass ticket system, where you can get a ticket for 'later-on'. We actually don't bother with this yet and just continue to explore in the sunny, but slightly chilly, weather. (We expected this first day to be un-seasonally cold, and know it's picking up tomorrow).

We manage to get about halfway around the 'world' area before we run out of time and head back to the apartment for tea.

Everyone's pretty tired already and the kids are straight off to sleep.

List of attractions visited

Body parts
Velcro show
Mexican boat ride
Viking boat ride
Segway
Chineese acrobats
China film show
Norway filem show
Stormstruck
Where's the fire?

Florida for Christmas and New Year - getting there

2008-12-22T09:00:00.003Z

To do the madness that is air travel we needed to get up at 04:45! We loaded up the car with our luggage and dog to make the first trip to our friends Sarah and
Doug in Hatfield where we dropped off the dog for it's 2 week holiday and picked up Doug who drove us to Heathrow terminal 3. Of course, despite my stress and panicing, we arrive in plenty of time at about 06:35. The American Airlines flight is un-eventful apart from the slightly grumpy old maids who pass as air stewardesses and we land in Miami about 10 hours later at 15:00 local time.

Of course, that's the easy bit! Immigration is actually not too bad as I'd managed to fill in the reams of paperwork on the plane, but the baggage reclaim is bordering on third-world, with all the cases just dumped in a heap behind one of the conveyor belts, inviting a scrum! Luckily we make a reasonable escape and then head outside to the steaming hot underground car hire shuttle bus pick up area and hence to the car-hire depot to pick up our Pontiac C6.

Now the fun really starts as we've been travelling already for 17 hours and it's about 17:00 as we head north for the drive up to Orlando. We have a map that I'd taken trouble to print off at home and we managed to find the I95 heading north with no trouble, although in retrospect this might have been the wrong choice as maybe the Florida Turnpike runs the whole route, the map I had was not too clear about this. We stop off for a Mucky Macs tea and then manage to somehow miss a turn to get us heading NW to Orlando, so we have to detour slightly. We get there in end, but still manage to make a complete hash of finding our apartement just a few miles away from Disney, I think fatigue, bad maps and large distances are taking their toll.

We finally arrive at about 21:00, some 21 hours after leaving home and manage to get access to our 3rd floor apartment which is pretty super. Huge and well equipped with 2 double en-suite bedrooms, nice lounge and kitchen with three TVs and free internet access, hence this post.

It's still 75 degrees outside, but we manage to crash out, exhausted!

ddate

2008-12-11T13:34:00.002Z

Due to my amazingly bad typing skills I discovered a new unix command today:


$ ddate
Today is Setting Orange, the 53rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3174

Google leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

Learn something new, although maybe not useful, every day.

The most important Agile tool

2008-11-17T15:41:00.002Z

Having just completed a review of our latest release, a lot of the team complained about the lack of some of the tools and processes that we've become used to in recent times. These shortfalls were mainly due to the fact that we're integrating with a new team but it led me to think about which single tool I'd hate to be without.

The answer is Continuous Integration, we use CruiseControl by the way.

We get a lot of spin-offs for doing this, especially as we're a distributed team, the main one being an implicit communication tool, everyone is using it, so we can all see who's doing what. Other benefits are that we also using several build metrics, so I believe the quality level is kept high, which gives a much warmer feeling, especially when the pressure is on.

Which Agile tool or process would you hate to be without?

Ubuntu and me - the story so far

2008-11-10T16:07:00.003Z

I've been using Ubuntu in quite a big way for the last 2-4 months and I thought I'd just write down a few points, good and bad.

Good

Speed - massive improvement over Windows for day to day use, especially wireless networking and boot up times. The only bad part is using Firefox to upload photos to flickr which seems to cripple firefox. I have now overcome this by using F-spot photo manager instead.
Viruses - not come across any yet!
VirtualBox - can be used when you really must have Windows
Really cool for a lot of development, especially having the command line so handy.

Bad

Suspend and Hibernate seem impossible to get working on either of my HP laptops and believe me, I've tried.
Can't seem to get the microphone working either.
I do miss Outlook
No Livemeeting which can be a pain in a mostly Microsoft company. But Yuuguu is cool for simple sharing.
Screen properties are a bit flakey.
I'd like to share a printer with other Windows machines on my LAN, but I've still to crack getting CUPS to do this for me.

Good Interweb customer service

2008-09-30T21:12:00.002+01:00

After quite a long break over the Summer, I recently started to use my Phoenix flight sim again. Checking their site I noticed I was quite a few releases behind, so decided to download the updates and upgrade my installation.

Although the installs all went OK, the results were very disappointing, with dodgy shadows and very clunky slow graphics. As the latest release was Beta, I decided to send off an email to the support address, not really expecting much from what is surely a pretty niche product. To my pleasant surprise, I got an almost instant response, and after a fairly lengthly, but rapid, exchange of emails, my issues were resolved with an upgrade to my Nvidia drivers and also Directx.

Thanks guys!

Cedric's coding challenge

2008-07-04T09:19:00.012+01:00

So, the latest little problem buzzing around is Cedric's coding challenge. I took Raghav's solution as a base, and just simplified it somewhat I think:


package com.bt.test;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

public class CedricCodingChallenge {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    CedricCodingChallenge codingChallenge = new CedricCodingChallenge();
    
    int max = 10000;

    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    List<String> list = codingChallenge.populateList(1, max);
    long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(list.toArray()));
    System.out.println(String.format("Size of list: %d", list.size()));
    System.out.println(String.format("Biggest jump: %d", 
      codingChallenge.getBiggestJump(list, max)));
    System.out.println(String.format("Total time: %d", endTime - startTime));
  }

  private List<String> populateList(int start, int end) {
    List<String> whiteList = new ArrayList<String>();
    for (int i = start; i < end; i++)
      whiteList.add(String.format("%d", i));

    for (int i = 0; i <= 9; i++)
      whiteList = removeDuplicatesFromWhiteList(whiteList, i);

    return whiteList;
  }

  private List<String> removeDuplicatesFromWhiteList(List<String> whiteList, int i) {
    List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>(whiteList.size());
    for (String item: whiteList) {
      String c = String.format("%d", i);
      int f = item.indexOf(c);
      if (f < 0) {
        result.add(item);
        continue;
      }
      int l = item.lastIndexOf(c);
      if (f == l) {
        result.add(item);
        continue;
      }
    }
    return result;
  }

  private int getBiggestJump(List<String> list, int max) {
    int result = 0;
    int last = 0;
    for (String item: list){
      int i = Integer.parseInt(item);
      int jump = i - last;
      if (jump > result)
        result = jump;
      last = i;
    }
    if ((max - last) > result)
      result = max - last;
    return result;
  }
}

My solution took 722ms.

Wimbledon

2008-06-28T21:28:00.002+01:00

After 45 years on the planet, most of them living near enough to Wimbledon, I finally went to the tennis on Thursday after work. Certainly an experience I'm glad I made the effort for.

But what an effort it was! 90 minutes queuing for about 2 hours tennis on the outside courts.

Isn't Wimbledon just another "Ballet" or "Opera"? Seems like the Centre and No.1 courts are for the "haves" and the "have-nots" make do with the outside courts. The whole place if full of pompousness, loads of uniformed official telling you what you can and can't do and they even give you a "guide to queuing" to make it seems like it's all part of the experience.

Joan A

2008-06-28T21:26:00.001+01:00

Just watching a bit of Glastonbury on the TV, I never realised that Joan Armatrading was such a cool guitar player. Also related, and in the news, it turns out that all those rumours about her and Valarie Singleton are just a pack of lies!

Company car time!

2008-04-24T20:12:00.002+01:00

Yes, I know that company cars do not make sense financially but......

I've hankered after one for over 20 years and, now that I've finally become eligible and, having loads of grief with my just out of warranty caravan tug and, with one of the family holidays coming up soon...

It seems like now might be the time to make the switch. Of course it wont arrive in time for the holiday, so hopefully I can get the problems sorted in time.

Python homework

2008-04-17T09:41:00.004+01:00

As part of a 'Python study group' at work, we were given the following challenge:

Exercise 1:

Write a program that processes a list of numbers from 1 to 100. For each number, if the number is a multiple of 3, print “FIZZ”; if the number is a multiple of 5, print “BANG”; otherwise, print the number.

You are *NOT* allowed to use any *IF/ELSE* statements in your code. You can use the list-accessing ternary operator hack, but whilst I’ll accept your homework if you do, you’ll miss out on the prize (alcoholic), which goes to the most concise code (not including whitespace).

Have fun!

Here's my final solution:


for i in range(1, 101):
  f = (i % 3 == 0) and "FIZZ" or ""
  b = (i % 5 == 0) and f + "BANG" or f + ""
  n = (len(b) > 0) and b or i
  print n

flickr -> photobox transfer

2008-03-12T20:09:00.004Z

SWMBO asked me if I could help transfer some of our flickr photos to photobox so that she can create and print an album. A quick Google seemed to find a few links for doing it the other way around, so it seemed like time to get knitting some perl!

Flickr has an API and photobox lets you use ftp to upload, so I thought I'd use the perl API to download the 4 sets that my wife had arranged on flickr. Anyway, here's the code with keys etc obscured. Sorry it's pretty rough and my perl is not too hot, but at least it works.


use Flickr::API;
use Data::Dumper;

my $api = new Flickr::API({'key'    => 'your_flickr_api_key',
                           'secret' => 'your flickr_secret'});


my $frob = $api->execute_method('flickr.auth.getFrob', {
                'api_key' => 'your_flickr_api_key',
 });
my $f = $frob->{tree}->{children}[1]->{children}[0]->{content};

my $url = $api->request_auth_url("read", $f);
my $cmd = "C:/Progra~1/Mozill~1/firefox.exe \"$url\"";
system($cmd);
sleep(3);

my $token = $api->execute_method('flickr.auth.getToken', {
             'api_key' => 'your_flickr_api_key',
    'frob' => $f,
    });
 
my $t = $token->{tree}->{children}[1]->{children}[1]->{children}[0]->{content};
 
my $response = $api->execute_method('flickr.photosets.getPhotos', {
    'photoset_id' => '72157601397952579',
    'auth_token' => $t,
        });
  
my $ids = $response->{tree}->{children}[1]->{children};

for my $id (@$ids) {
   if ($id->{attributes}) {
      my $photo_id = $id->{attributes}->{id};
      print "$photo_id\n";
      my $sizes = $api->execute_method('flickr.photos.getSizes', {
                    'api_key' => 'your_flickr_api_key',
    'photo_id' => $photo_id,
    'auth_token' => $t,
  });
    
      my $s = $sizes->{tree}->{children}[1]->{children};
      for my $size (@$s) {
         if ($size->{attributes}) {
            if ($size->{attributes}->{label} eq "Original") {
               my $url = $size->{attributes}->{source};
               print "$url\n";
               my $c = "wget $url";
               system($c);
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

Central heating problems - from bad to worse

2008-03-09T15:43:00.004Z

I've been working on a bathroom re-fit for the last few weekends. Last weekend, I removed a radiator and replaced it with a heated towel rail. This involved draining the system down. Sad to report that it's never been the same since.

The boiler started making a right old racket, thumping, banging and occasionally venting into the expansion tank. A phone call to a trusty plumber friend, and I'm pretty convinced that there is now some air in the system. Looking back I think this might have been caused by trying not too lose all the water in the system by turning off as many radiators as I could at both ends before draining down.

So this Saturday, I started to investigate.

The boiler is situated in a sort of utility room that links the house with the garage, and in the garage loft above there is a sort of pressure relief valve that I had trouble with last year when it started leaking. I wondered if this was adjusted down too tightly and was not allowing any air to escape, so up I went for a fiddle. DISASTER. The rubber o-ring is perished and, before I know it, the system is pissing out and dripping down into the wall mounted boiler below. A quick panic has me draining down the system again, and rushing off to B&Q to get a new o-ring. Once refitted, all seemed OK, until a couple of hours later I notice that the boiler is not firing at all, the whole system is off and the fuse has blown. To cut a further chapter short, the water from the leak has dripped down into the top of the pump that is sited under the boiler and cause the pump electronics to blow...... pump now f**ked. Another trip to Wickes this time for a new pump. Manged to fit that, but now one of the pump valves has a tiny leak from the screw that turns to isolate the pump. A common problem apparently.

Next weekend I'll be draining the system again to fit new pump valves.

The only good point about this is that the system does seems a lot quieter now.

I'm sure it's on borrowed time as the boiler is over 20 years old. Although I've replaced a boiler in the past, I wont be doing it again, so maybe this summer we ought to get it looked at?

Ubuntu upgrade to 7.10 problems!

2008-03-09T15:35:00.002Z

I don't use my dual boot Ubuntu that often except that it's wireless network seems far more performant and reliable than that on XP running on the same machine using the same USB wireless adaptor. Irony follows....

I boot into Ubuntu, and like nearly always, it prompts me to do some software upgrades, this time asking me to upgrade the whole OS. Like a fool I accept. About an hour later, it's all done, but no network! Woe is me.

Resort to trusty google, and this pops up! Lug the desktop down to the router to get a network connection, and it all worked fine.

Not good marks for Ubuntu though.

Michael Clayton

2008-03-03T09:39:00.000Z

Last night I watched "Micheal Clayton", one of 2007s most well received and awarded movies. A couple of things about this made me think.

Firstly, I downloaded the film using BitTorrent, naughty me! However, is there a difference between doing this and watching the film once, and just borrowing the
DVD from a friend, and doing the same. Are both illegal?

Secondly, more directly related to the film, what was all the fuss about? OK, it was a reasonable film, but how does Tilda Swinton get awarded an Oscar
for best supporting actress? It seemed to me she was only on the screen for about 5 minutes in total.

Fix It Again Tomorrow

2008-02-07T13:38:00.001Z

Well, after several months of prevaricating, I've finally taken the plunge and ordered a brand new car, well second car anyway, mainly used as a local run-about. It's the first brand new car I ever had, but only a really small and cheap Fiat Panda.

In spite of generally good reviews and great economy and low running costs, I'm slightly nervous of getting a Fiat given their past poor reputation. Only time will tell.

The only colour it comes in at no extra cost is a rather pale yellow. If it was a nice bright yellow, I'd be pleased, but anyway my wife insisted she wants a black one. The extra £360 makes a slight nonsense of getting a rock bottom price, but who am I to argue.

Only 6-8 weeks to wait!

Do brains wear out from over-use?

2008-01-30T13:20:00.000Z

I've noticed recently that I'm always thinking about something. Is this just me? Do other people ever find themselves "just going blank"?

This lead me on to wondering about my brain wearing out. My father suffered from Alzheimers and I wonder if he used to be like me, never seeming to switch off, and his brain wore out.

Something to look forward to anyway, NOT.

Browser caching hell

2008-01-11T16:38:00.000Z

Started to look at Freeswitch which I may be using over the next few months.

Initially decided to try and build it using cygwin (nasty habit that I must get rid off!), but after installing various packages, gave up after some wierd error about 64 bit integers.

So, switched to Visual Studio to build, which I thought would be dead easy. In a way, it was, once I learned a few very basic things about VS, like looking in the 'output' window to see the build progress, then I hit a problem......

Part of the build uses a vbs script to download and uncompress some dependent packages. I have stripped out the relevant code here, which is sort of interesting in itself, as I think it's really meant as an Ajaxy sort of tool:

Set xml = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
Set oStream = CreateObject("Adodb.Stream")

xml.Open "GET",
 "http://svn.freeswitch.org/downloads/libs/pthreads-w32-2-7-0-release.tar.gz",
 False
xml.Send

Const adTypeBinary = 1
Const adSaveCreateOverWrite = 2
Const adSaveCreateNotExist = 1

oStream.type = adTypeBinary
oStream.open
oStream.write xml.responseBody
oStream.savetofile "pthreads-w32-2-7-0-release.tar.gz", adSaveCreateOverWrite
oStream.close

The code then used 7za.exe to unpack the gz and then unpack the tar file. This seemed to be where the problem started, as the .gz file seemed to be corrupt and I ended up with a file called [Content], instead of a directory structure.

I must have spent about a whole day investigating this. It was all the more strange because it seemed to work OK on my 'personal' laptop. As I seem to be rambling on, to cut a long story a bit shorter, it turned out to be a caching problem. IE had somehow created a corrupted cached version of the downloaded file and I was always getting the cached copy, instead of a fresh download.

Anyway, luckily it was in a 'downtime' period at work, so no harm done. Back to real work next week.

Ruby on Rails completed

2008-01-11T16:31:00.000Z

As a follow up to my last post, I finished my experiments with Ruby on Rails. Simple stuff really, a couple of very simple tables with a many-to-many relationship managed using some nifty Ajax drag'n'drop.

Most of the time was spent fathoming out the Ajax stuff to get it to do exactly what I wanted. I had a sort of 'light on' moment when I realised that changing objects around in my [session] could directly update the DB, without doing an explicit 'save'. Pretty cool all round.

Webby stuff still doesn't 'fry my ham', to use a Downeyism and of course I had absolutely no style but that's what all those web designers are for right?

Ruby on Rails on cygwin

2007-12-28T08:46:00.000Z

Just spending a few days of Christmas 'downtime' getting to know Ruby on Rails. Tried out InstantRails with no problems but decided that I'd like to use cygwin, partly so that I understand how the various bits of rails fit together without the InstantRails magic, and partly because the Unix like environment seems a bit more 'native' to Ruby on Rails.

Cue, loads of problems.......

1. need to ensure that gem is up to date - "gem update --system" seems to help here, but then you need to uninstall/install rails and rake.

2. problem with /dev/urandom can be at least bypassed by making self.supports_urandom? return false in secret_key_generator.rb.

3. Following Agile Development with Ruby on Rails, but using Rails 2.0.2 means that 'scaffolding' has been deprecated. This can be fixed with "ruby script/plugin install scaffolding"

After all that, decided to revert to Rails 1.2.6, as this should make following the book easier.

Do Postman regularly nick your letters?

2007-12-05T16:17:00.000Z

I've had several cases recently of my post going missing, always parcels, sending and receiving. Are they thieving gits, or are the sorting offices just so shambolic that stuff just lies around in the corner until someone tidies up. I suspect a bit of both. Certainly, it seems to be a recent phenomenon.

John Pudney

2007-12-02T19:40:00.000Z

Over the last couple of years I've been collecting (via Ebay) a series of childrens books that I read when I was a kid. They are called the "Fred and I adventures" by John Pudney. All very old fashioned now, but still have a sense of escapism, even for an old git like me. The books are called
"Monday Adventure" thru "Sunday Adventure" and "Spring Adventure" thru "Winter Adventure". I have now got 9 out of the 11 and last week "Autumn Adventure came up on eBay, so I setup a snipe for £25 using auctionstealer thinking that was rather extravagent! The bidding quickly settled at £13.50 early the week, so I thought I'd be in with a chance.

Unfortunately, my snipe didn't even get a look in, and the last minute scrum saw the book go for £72!

Gutted!

Blood

2007-09-05T20:07:00.000+01:00

So, I went to "give blood" today. Probably about my 30th time, but it suddenly dawned on me the incredible amount of staff and equipment involved at any one time for a relatively small amount of people going through the system. When I asked how much each bag of blood actually cost, it was not really too much of a surprise to hear "£130". In a serious operation, that soon mounts up!

Where is all the bio fuel?

2007-09-02T20:04:00.000+01:00

So, why does the tax payer pay farmers to do nothing, i.e. set-aside etc.? If we pay them to do nothing, they might as well grow bio-fuel. Talking to my wife's sister and her husband who work in agriculture, they agree, and have been saying similar for around 5 years. Beaurocracy is just swamping and restricting farmers more each year. Why do we do this? Other EEC countries such as France, pay lip service to all this stuff and stick up for them-selves, good for them!

Led Zeppelin to play London?

2007-09-01T20:38:00.000+01:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/31/nzeppelin131.xml

I wonder if I could get tickets? Assuming I can justify the high prices!

Spring JMX

2007-08-15T11:28:00.001+01:00

Just had my first experience of using the Spring JMX exporter. I can only say "WICKED!".

A few simple lines of XML in the application context and a Java system property, and all of a sudden you can use something like jconsole to view and update your Spring beans.

Charlotte Gray

2007-08-15T11:16:00.000+01:00

Just finished reading Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks, pretty good stuff. Of course I've seen and read various things related to WW2 such as Schindlers List, but the plot line about the two young boys who ended up in the gas chambers really affected me, maybe because now I have my own children.

Why is the human race capable of these sorts of attrocities? How do we forgive? It makes day to day worries seem so insignificant when there is similar stuff going on in African countries such as Congo and Ruanda and maybe Iraq.