SCode On Headless Hosting And Resin Plus OS X

Tim wrote about his adventure setting up SCode Plugin on a headless hosting: blojsom, anti-splog, and captcha; while Miles wrote about using the plugin on Resin and OS X: Resin, OS X, wrappers and image-generating servlets, SCode plugin clarification, More SCode servlet, SCode servlet.

Those issues are basically related to image generation in general and not just with SCode Plugin. However, the fact that various people are using the plugin on various different environments is a definite good thing for the plugin documentation.

When "JIRA" Replaced The Word "Issue"

Quotes from me and some former colleagues after a few years using JIRA:

How the hell did I start the day with 28 JIRAs, resolved 10, and finished with 35 on my list?

Get me a summary of the open JIRAs!

How many JIRAs do you have?

Ok, it’s confirmed, please raise a JIRA.

Without noticing, we started refering issues as JIRAs. Just like saying “I’ll google it” when I want to say “I’ll use a search engine to find some info about it”. JIRA might be going through the same phase of greatness.

I’m not trying to jump on any praising bandwagon, but I still remember thinking “Finally someone has done it right. A proper issue tracker!” a few weeks after I started using JIRA for the first time. That was right after some months using Bugzilla and FogBugz.

Der Wunsch

About a week ago, Claus Morell contacted me about his plan to implement a German version of Wish. Lo and behold, it’s now live at www.derwunsch.de. It also has an RSS feed. Good stuff, Claus!

Language support has been an interesting issue with Wish. When the web site started receiving some submissions in Italian, Portuguesse, and some other languages I couldn’t recognize, I thought about having multiple language sections a la Wikipedia. I didn’t go ahead with that because I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to implement and maintain it.

I came up with a ‘temporary workaround’ for approving those languages foreign to me. For Portuguesse / Spanish submissions, I hassled Devin, my Brazilian friend who obviously is fluent in those languages. For Italian, I hassled another friend who has been learning Italian for some time. Not wanting to waste their time after several translations, I decided to replace them with Babel Fish.

Wrong move. Babel Fish is no replacement for my translator friends, its translations to English sometimes ended up as weird sentences. So I gave up translating those submissions to English one by one, and asked the submitters to use Babel Fish and translate their wishes to English before submitting them. I reckoned if they arrive at the web site, then their English must be better than my knowledge of their language plus Babel Fish’s translation. It worked… or it chased away all those non-English speakers.

If anyone else is interested to run the site in another language but do not wish to implement anything, check out Wish project page, we have Java and Rails flavors. Or better yet, extend the current implementation to support multi language sections.

SCode Plugin v0.3

SCode Plugin v0.3 has been released. If the jar and src files are not yet available from blojsom plugins download page, then email me and I’ll send them to you.

In order to upgrade, simply replace scodeplugin-[prev_version].jar with scodeplugin-0.3.jar .

Blojsom Plugins Documentation: Moved To Blojsom Wiki

David offered me to use Blojsom wiki, so I’ve (yet again) moved my Blojsom plugins documentation there. Check out the available plugins page.

Blojsom uses Confluence for its wiki. If you have used JIRA, you’ll know the sort of excellence that you would’ve expected from an Atlassian product.

The only gripe I had was with its embedded rich text editor which uses TinyMCE. I’m using Firefox 1.5 and this rich text editor kept on replacing “src” with “xsrc” on my code snippets. It’s a problem because users like to copy paste sample codes. At the end I just set Wiki Markup as my default edit view.

After a quick sleuthing around, I found out that some pages in Confluence documentation page suffer the same problem (1, 2), WordPress.org user also had a similar problem. However, I couldn’t find any related bug in Confluence issue tracker and TinyMCE bug tracker. Briefly looked at tiny_mce.js, I think the problem could be at TinyMCE.prototype.fixGeckoBaseHREFBug function.

Happy New Year 2006

Last night I went to Southbank to watch the fireworks, we found a spot on the bridge between Spencer St and Clarendon St. The fireworks show wasn’t as good as previous years, they also moved from Flinders Station to Federation Square this year so we ended up even further away.

Colourful fireworks over the Southgate bridge.

The highlight of 2005 for me was resigning from work at the end of April, packed my bags (all 3 of them), and flew to Singapore with the plan to work and live there for the next 2-3 years. Reality changed direction and I had to return to Melbourne after a month. I was disappointed, but it was a great experience nonetheless. It was humbling and eye opening to live in another country for a month. To this day, I still want to travel to some Asian countries later on in the future.

And here’s to 2006, cheers!

Tagyu4J: Tagyu Java API

Tagyu4J v0.1 has been released. Tagyu provides tag suggestions for a given text or URL, and Tagyu4J is a Java API used for interacting with Tagyu REST web services interface

I initially misunderstood its authentication mechanism by assuming that it prompts authentication challenges. It turned out that Tagyu checks the authentication header on every request. Wikipedia has the details of HTTP Basic Authentication Scheme.