I went to to Japan in March last year, and it turned out to be the most unforgettable trip so far in my life. Why? As a start, I arrived in Narita less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. I then had to take the train to Kyoto via Tokyo only hours after they restored public transport at reduced capacity, and experienced a lower magnitude earthquake while in Kyoto.

The greatest concern of them all was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. I was in constant contact with family and friends via email and Twitter, trying my best to convince them that the situation wasn’t as apocalyptic as how the media portrayed it. The incidents at Sendai and Fukushima were beyond devastating by any scale, but at the same time, other parts of Japan lived on with their daily life and did their best to help via donations and lots of other means. To witness the great Japanese spirit and sense of community in person was a humbling experience.

I ended up visiting Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Kanazawa, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Okayama, Himeji, Tokyo, and Ise. My favourites were Okayama for its chillaxing vibe, and Kanazawa for its snow-covered town. Here are some pictures from the last three days of the trip, I lost the rest of them because my laptop was stolen during transit in Kuala Lumpur (here’s the person who now has my stolen MacBook).

Best food? Ramen at Kyoto Station, extra eggs, a must.

I also loved this Yamazaki Pan chocolate bread I bought every day at Lawson.

Definitely going back there!

Warrnambool was a nice place with super friendly locals (apart from some idiotic hoons), it’s about 3 hours away from Melbourne by train. The town is slightly larger and more crowded than Albury.

Had several great meals at Bojangles on Liebig St, had a nice light exercise with yet-another-I-don’t-know-how-I-end-up-with-this-on-every-supposedly-relaxing-holiday trail walks, and checked out a glimpse of historical maritime life at Flagstaff Hill.

View Breakwater & Hopkins Mouth Trails in a larger map

OSDC 2011 was very well organised, much thanks to the organisers: Evan Leybourn, Gavin Jackson, and the volunteers squad. It was an interesting grass roots conference with lots of passionate open source geeks, definitely learned a lot.

Slides from my talk:

Update (24/11/2011): and the video of the talk:

Canberra was still as quiet as ever…

So last night I did a quick read, and then recorded this video.
This used Mac Speech Recognition, so in theory I talked to my Mac, which then opened Jenkins pages on Firefox. Here are the commands:

1. ‘Open Jenkins’: opens Jenkins home page (dashboard)
2. ‘Build Bob’: builds a project called Bob
3. ‘Configure system’: opens Jenkins configuration page

I had to repeat each command 2-3 times because I speak Indonesian-accented English.

Note: I scrolled the page up and down using the trackpad, it could be voice-controlled too actually.

It’s easy to add a command:

1. Create a new file in /Users/<username>/Library/Speech/Speakable Items/Application Speakable Items/firefox directory containing:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
   <plist version="1.0">
   <dict>
   <key>URL</key>
   <string>http://jenkins-host:8080</string>
   </dict>
   </plist>
   

   This format is Mac OS X Property List.

2. Save this file as <command>, e.g. Open Jenkins (yes, with the space).
3. Open System Preferences -> Speech, and switch Speakable Items on.
4. Configure the Listening Method. I set it to Listen continuously with keyword, and keyword is Required before each command. My keyword is VIKI, you know, Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence, from the movie.

I haven’t investigated how much programming can be done on the command file, but this opens up the possibility of mapping Jenkins HTTP API to commands, and we will be able to fully interact with Jenkins using voice.

Then the only thing left to do is… develop an American accent.

Another lesson learnt: never go to Hong Kong or Macau during China’s National Day holiday period. It was extremely crowded, long queue at each tourist attraction, and the worst was when people started pushing and shoving in the crowd, or attempted to cut the queue, that annoyed me to hell.

The best food? Found a small noodle place at Sheung Wan. Latte Girl approved the delicious food, while I was just happy to not get my stomach upset that time, so that was two thumbs up. That noodle place caught our attention because they put up a picture of Chua Lam visiting the restaurant, Chua Lam is a food critic who made several appearances on Iron Chef, one of my favourite TV shows.

It was also the first time we experienced typhoon warnings, nothing too severe, but it still wasn’t fun when you had to queue for an hour in a strong wind. On the other hand, Hong Kong was actually a great place to walk around and explore when it wasn’t windy, specially at night.

Some Hong Kong pictures…

And Macau… with its interesting Portuguese architecture.

Like most Java applications, Jenkins built-in CLI also suffers from slow start up time (flame suit: ON) due to core Java libraries loading (Kohsuke later told me on #jenkins that there’s also a handshaking process involved). This led me to try Jenkins Remote Access API with curl, which performed significantly faster than Jenkins CLI.

So that’s great, but I have another issue with the fact that Jenkins CLI’s commands start with “java -jar jenkins-cli.jar …”, that’s a finger twister right there, and lengthy curl + URL obviously doesn’t help.

Enter Nestor, a Jenkins CLI written in Node.js that aims to be a faster and simpler alternative to the existing solutions. The catch? Node.js and npm support on Windows is not there yet, so if you managed to run Nestor on Windows please let me know about it. Nestor has been tested and used daily on OS X and Linux.

Simple setup

Install Nestor using npm install -g nestor

Configure the Jenkins instance you want to use using export JENKINS_URL=http://user:pass@host:port/path

Simple usage

Nestor commands are simple, it’s always nestor <action> <param>

To trigger a build

> nestor build studio-bob
Job was started successfully

To view a job status

> nestor job studio-bob
Status: OK
No xml report files found for checkstyle
Build stability: 3 out of the last 5 builds failed.

To list the executors

> nestor executor
* master
idle
39%	studio-bob

To view the queue

> nestor queue
Queue is empty

To view all jobs status on the dashboard

> nestor dashboard
WARN	blojsom-bloojm
OK	jenkins-buildmonitor
FAIL	studio-ae86
OK	studio-bob

Check out Nestor’s GitHub README page for more commands available.

Hopefully that’s simple enough.

Note: The name Nestor was inspired by Captain Haddock’s butler at Marlinspike Hall, not the Argonaut one.

I’m just a total sucker when it comes to Muji products, looking forward to their first shop in Melbourne, Australia, someday.

Note: The ring is important so that whichever page I last worked on can be the first page the next time I use it.

jazz, art, design: +1

The above pictures were taken at the garage of my parents’ house back in Jakarta, Indonesia, sometime in the 90s.

The first one was titled “From Java To Node.js”, at Shine Technologies‘ developers meeting on August 5th, 2011.

The second one was titled “JavaScript Everywhere From Nose To Tail”, at Melbourne JavaScript usergroup on August 10th, 2011, with Carl Husselbee from Sensis.

Happy with the positive feedback from the audience of both talks, thanks folks, much appreciated!

Update (08/09/2011):

And here’s the video from the second talk…

JavaScript Everywhere – From Nose To Tail from Benjamin Pearson on Vimeo.

Jenkins has a discovery feature as part of its remote access API where it listens on UDP port 33848, and whenever it receives a message, Jenkins will respond with an XML containing the instance’s URL, version number, and slave port information.

So how do you send a UDP message using NodeJS?
Here’s a sample function adapted from Nestor’s lib/service.js:

function sendUdp(message, host, port, cb) {
    var socket = require('dgram').createSocket('udp4'),
        buffer = new Buffer(message);
    socket.on("error", function (err) {
        cb(err);
    });
    socket.on("message", function (data) {
        cb(null, data);
    });
    socket.send(buffer, 0, buffer.length, port, host, function (err, message) {
        if (err) {
            cb(err);
        }
    });
}

For Jenkins discovery purpose, send any message to any hostname on port 33848:

sendUdp('Long live Jenkins!', 'localhost', 33848, function () { ... });

and if there’s any Jenkins instance running on localhost, it will respond with an XML like this:

<hudson>
  <version>1.414</version>
  <url>http://localhost:8080</url>
  <slave-port>12345</slave-port>
</hudson>

Simple!

konan cliffano$ nestor discover
Jenkins 1.414 running at http://localhost:8080/

View Hobsons Bay Coastal Central Trail in a larger map

Some pictures I took along the way…

And the route…

View Koonung Creek Trail in a larger map

How to display RunKeeper activity map on Google Maps without using RunKeeper embed code

1. Export GPX of RunKeeper activity map data (Share -> Advanced Options -> Export GPX).
2. Convert it to KML using GPS Visualizer (Upload your GPS -> Create KML file).
3. Import KML to Google Maps (My Places -> Create New Map -> Import).
4. Use Google Maps embed code on your website (click the button with link icon on the top right).

Hangzhou

Hangzhou felt more traditional compared to Shanghai and Beijing, and people were somewhat nicer there. The main sightseeing area in Hangzhou was the West Lake, a gigantic lake which was just recently listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I circled that lake on foot, it wasn’t the smartest idea.

The best part of Hangzhou was the delicious home-cooked style meal I had at a small restaurant on Santaishan Rd, herbal chicken soup and stir fried veggies brought back lots of childhood memories, but this time with a bottle of light beer.

One of the most unforgettable experiences I had during the whole trip was the last day in Hangzhou. We were supposed to figure out a way from Hangzhou to Shanghai by train, and I literally meant _figure out_ since we didn’t book any ticket and we didn’t even know whether there was going to be a train to Shanghai that day. It was very crowded at Hangzhou train station, we had to queue for a long time to buy the tickets and several times had to turn a blind eye at some people cutting the queue.

With tickets in hand, the next challenge was squeezing ourselves through hundreds of people trying to get through the main building’s small entrance. And surprise, surprise, once inside, next up was another round of pushing and shoving just to get on the train. But there’s more, it turned out that our tickets didn’t cover for a seat on the train, so we had to sit on our luggage, next to the toilet, for 2 friggin’ hours! Like I said, it was an unforgettable experience.

Shanghai

Shanghai was very modern, it’s a totally different face of China compared to Hangzhou. I was amazed by the lights at The Bund at night, I declared that part of Shanghai the bling of Asia. My favourite spot in Shanghai was Xintiandi, specially the area with Shikumen architecture, a fusion between the Western and Chinese styles. Had a really nice brunch there.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but we also ended up visiting Shanghai Expo 2010 and checked out what the China Pavilion was all about. The Expo was covered on TV day and night, everyone was talking about it. But to be honest, I still don’t get what the big deal was, I was impressed with the pavilion’s sustainable design more than anything else there.

The best food I had in Shanghai was everything that was served at Xin Wang restaurant, seriously, I still remember how delicious the food was!

On the last day in Shanghai, we took a train to get to Shanghai airport. That train line branched out into two lines, and according to the timetable, our train was supposed to take the top line with the airport nearby its last stop. But as bad luck played out, the top line was closed that day and our train was directed to the bottom line, fsck! We got off at the last stop, not knowing where we were, we had to get a taxi and that involved crossing a busy Shanghai highway while carrying two bags each, let’s just say that it was not something I would like to do more than once in my life.

Beijing

The first thing that I noticed when I arrived in Beijing was the grey sky, it was never blue, just shades of grey for days, pretty gloomy. Beijing was very crowded, the streets were never empty, there were just people everywhere, walking, talking, non-stop.

To give you an idea of how crowded it was, have you ever been to a McDonald’s where you have to queue for half an hour outside of the building and they have to limit the number of people inside the building and how many of them are allowed to place an order at one time? Well, the McDonald’s at the Olympic Park was where I had that exact experience. And after getting our meal, there was no free table, we ended up sitting on the curb and ate the burgers and taro pies there.

The most unforgettable part of Beijing was walking on the Great Wall of China, I couldn’t help wondering how on earth could mankind build such a massive piece of structure, it was just beyond belief. The fact that I did the Crank That on the wall was, of course, not that important.

At the end of the trip, we took a bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin to catch the flight home. I still remember the ticker showing 320kmph, which was the speed of the train, faster than the shinkansens in Japan! That right there pretty much summed up the unbelievable economic progress China made in the past decade, the infrastructure followed suit, technology, life. Sure it’s not perfect, there are still numerous issues that the western world would like China to improve. But there’s one thing for sure, the China today is better than ever for the rest of the world.

The story revolves around an elite group within Lockheed Martin called Skunk Works, who worked on top secret projects and engineered some of the most famous aircraft in the history of aviation. The book was authored by Ben Rich, Skunk Works second director, and central to the story was Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, the founder of Skunk Works who was a genius on both technical and management fronts.

There were many gems scattered throughout the pages, but my personal favourites were these words of wisdom during conversations between Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich.

The first one was when Ben told Kelly about his plan to attend a 13-week advance program at Harvard Business School, which was only available to 150 carefully selected executives. Kelly wrote Ben a glowing recommendation, but still insisted that it would be a complete waste of Ben’s time.

I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot. You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you’re decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems – kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place. Now, go home and pour yourself a drink.

After Ben completed the program and returned to Skunk Works, Kelly asked him for his appraisal of the Harvard Business School. Ben wrote the equation: 2/3 of HBS = BS .

The second one was when Ben revealed that he had been approached by Northrop, a rival company, and was offered a significant salary raise along with the opportunity to build a Skunk Works-style group within Northrop. Here’s part of Kelly’s response…

Hell, in the main plant they give raises on the basis of the more people being supervised; I give raises to the guy who supervises least. That means he’s doing more and taking more responsibility. But most executives don’t think like that at all. Northrop’s senior guys are no different from all of the rest in this busines: they’re all empire builders, because that’s how they’ve been trained and conditioned. Those guys are all experts at covering their asses by taking votes on what to do next. They will never sit still for a secret operation that cuts them out entirely. Control is the name of the game, and if a Skunk Works really operates right, control is exactly what they won’t get.

And the most inspiring of them all was Kelly’s can-do attitude which he used to improve the people around him. Here’s what he said after Ben told him that there was no practical application to liquid hydrogen because it was so dangerous to store and handle, based on Mark’s Mechanical Engineering Handbook, the engineer’s bible…

Goddam it, Rich, I don’t care what in hell that book says what you happen to think. Liquid hydrogen is the same as steam. What is steam? Condensed water. Hydrogen plus oxygen produces water. That’s all that liquid hydrogen really is. Now, get out there and do the job for me.

A must read, even if you’re not an engineer, even if you’re not running a company, specially if you like pushing the limit of what’s possible in whatever field you’re doing.

Do check it out if you are a CouchDB and NodeJS user.

this blog attracts about 7000 monthly visits,

and has a Google PageRank of 5.

Not too bad for a little blog, eh?

At work, we had to use Tomcat due to SOE reason, so I spent a bit of time trying to get CouchDB-Lucene running on Tomcat and get it deployed as a .war file. Here’s how we did it, please note that this is the tedious way of doing it, all because I had to integrate CouchDB-Lucene into an existing web app. There’s an easier way to build a .war file mentioned at the end of this post.

1. Unpack couchdb-lucene-<version>.zip .
2. Create a standard web app directory structure with WEB-INF dir.
3. Configure LuceneServlet in your-app/WEB-INF/web.xml .

   <web-app>
   ...
   <servlet>
   <servlet-name>lucene</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>com.github.rnewson.couchdb.lucene.LuceneServlet</servlet-class>
   </servlet>
   ...
   <servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>lucene</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>
   ...
   </web-app>

4. Copy all jars from couchdb-lucene-<version>/lib/ to your-app/WEB-INF/lib/ . The jetty-*.jar files can be excluded.
5. Copy couchdb-lucene-<version>/conf/couchdb-lucene.ini and couchdb-lucene-<version>/conf/log4j.xml to your-app/WEB-INF/classes/ .
6. Deploy your-app on Tomcat.
7. Configure the CouchDB external process hook script with the host name and port number where Tomcat is listening on.

There was one catch though, LuceneServlet did not have any no-argument constructor for the web.xml configuration, so that’s one of the changes I had to make. The other change was some file reorganisation so that you can use mvn war:war to generate a target/couchdb-lucene-<version>.war file. Too easy!

I’ll submit a pull request to master later, but in the mean time you can clone my fork to get the patched LuceneServlet and to easily generate the .war file.

Update (27/05/2011): It’s now part of couchdb-lucene master as of 0081272a30dc679effc1cf1298e365b953f568a5, should be included in v0.7.0 .