Gift From wannabesociety.com

About a month ago I received an email from Andja Maric who was a global ambassador for wannabesociety.com . Andja came across Wish while googling for wishes, she explained that wannabesociety shared a similar idea of sharing your wish with the world (t-shirts in their case, binaries in my case).

Andja then mentioned that she liked the concept of Wish and kindly offered to send a gift as a token of appreciation. So the gift finally arrived in my mailbox yesterday…

The packet. First time ever receiving a delivery from Slovenia.

The content. They sent 3 sets of these (a notebook, stickers, a mini brochure, and some kind of a wrist band). I picked ‘creative’, SS picked ‘believer’, so the last one ‘better’ will be sent to JC. SS and JC have been helping with site testing and concent moderation, and they prefer to remain anonymous.

Thanks very much, Andja, and wannabesociety.com. I appreciate the kind gesture, and I dig wannabesociety’s concept of no design.

BuildMonitor v1.0

It’s been a long time since the last one (v0.9.2 – November 2008), but I’ve finally managed to release Hudson Build Monitor v1.0 .  This add-on is still in the sandbox, I’ve been waiting for approval from the Mozilla editors for the last 9 months, so unfortunately you still have to login to download it.

A new feature in this release is build executor monitoring. This feature will work only on Hudson instance feeds (non-job feeds), and you have to enable it via Prefereces window -> Feeds tab -> Enable executor monitoring check box.

The executor status will be displayed next to the build status. It’s blue when one of the executors is running a build, red when one of the executors is stuck, and grey when all executors are idle or offline.

Another new feature is the support for HTTP Basic Authentication, this has been requested by a number of users with password-protected Hudson feeds. You can set the username and password in Preferences windows -> Network tab -> Username and Password fields.

Thanks to Jason Meridth who helped with testing this feature and wrote up his experience.

Other minor changes in this release:

• ‘Add Link To Hudson Build Monitor’ menu only appears when you’re right clicking Hudson feed links (for all, for failures, for just latest builds), and no longer for all links.
• Preference window is now tab-ified as seen from the above screenshot.
• Hudson icon tooltip on Firefox status bar now displays a message that recommends user to add Hudson feed link via right click menu instead of manually adding the URL to Preferences window Feeds section. This feature was already implemented in v0.9 (released in November 2008) and documented on the wiki page, however, there are quite a number of users who are still not aware of it and keep adding the feed URL manually following the old tooltip message.

As usual, translations have been updated thanks to Eric Lefevre-Ardant and Seiji Sogabe. Unfortunately I had to temporarily disable the French translation in v1.0 due to something wrong with the file/text(s) which breaks the add-on. I’ll do a patch release when it’s all sorted out, in the mean time, users with French locale on Firefox will get the default English texts.

Countdown D-33

… to fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Lovin' The Groovy

I’m a huge fan of The Java Posse, a podcast about Java related news and technologies. The show co-hosts, Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Dick Wall, and Joe Nuxoll, really have a great chemistry between them, probably the best compared to other tech podcasts I’ve ever listened to.

There’s a joke in episode #227 on how Dick ‘hates’ Groovy (of course he doesn’t) which led him to repeat the phrase “I love The Groovy, Man” several times during that episode. So, to help Dick Wall convince the world that he, in fact, loves Groovy… I fired up Photoshop and quickly whipped up this show poster idea.

Sent to the posse a month ago, they liked it (thanks a lot guys :) ) and gave me the permission to post it on my blog.

Now, there are still Tor, Joe, and Carl…

Update (16/03/2009): the above picture was mentioned on Java Posse #232 – Newscast for February 25th 2009, listen to Dick reiterating his love for The Groovy at 15:25.

Build Executor Monitoring

Here’s a sneak peek of Hudson Build Monitor’s new feature, the ability to monitor build executors from Firefox statusbar panel. This feature was requested by Espens back in July last year. Espens was one of the earliest users who raised lots of ideas and feature requests. Thanks Espens!

In retrospective, I should’ve implemented this feature much earlier as I found out recently how useful it is to be able to keep track of the currently running builds and the status of the executors. Having a stuck executor is like losing a leg, sometimes you end up with a lot of builds waiting in the queue just because a master/slave doesn’t have any idle executor.

I’ve been monitoring Apache Hudson instance, and that jspf-trunk build has been stuck for the past 3 days. If the master instance is set up following the 1 executor per 1 CPU suggestion, that’s like wasting 1 CPU resource not doing anything (if the box is dedicated for Hudson).

Build executor monitoring will be included in v1.0 release about 2 weeks from now.

Another  good news is that Hudson Build Monitor Firefox Add-on was featured in the tools tips section of JavaTools Community Newsletter on December 29th, 2008. It’s a few months old, but someone just told me about it :p. Thank you!

Home Studio v0.1

Some pictures of the initial version of my ‘home studio’. :)

I have always wanted a home studio where I can work on my own projects and create stuffs: codes, digital graphics, hand drawings, circuit boards. I guess I’ll start with the codes and digital graphics bits for now. This ’studio’ is basically a third of my apartment’s bedroom (still renting). An old study desk, an old $25 chair. I’ll get proper furnitures, think ergonomic chair, when I have my own house, god knows when that will happen with the current global economic downturn.

My laptop is an Asus F3SV running Ubuntu 8.10 . I used it as my main workstation for coding, IMing, web browsing, video editing. And just like any other geek, I have a naming convention for all gadgets within my home network, the laptop is hinata.

Cables, cables, and cables. Someday everything has got to be wireless.

Three old boxes which I assembled between 1999 – 2005. The one on the left is sasori, a Windows XP box that I use primarily for Windows-specific testing (Internet Explorer, FF on Windows), a little bit of gaming, and Photoshop. The one on the right (furthest in the picture) is gennou, running Ubuntu 7.10, this is where I host a local Hudson instance for my project builds and also to run weekly backups. The one in the middle is nameless at the moment, its power supply unit overheated and exploded in 2002, I haven’t had the time to rebuild it. On the top is anko, a wireless printer which also serves as a scanner and photocopy machine.