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.

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.

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/

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?

On average, there are about 2500-2700 active daily users on weekdays. That became the basis of my release mantra: “Let’s not piss 2500 people off.”

The top locales are en-US, de, en-GB, fr, ja, pl. We’ve got en, fr, and ja locales covered https://github.com/jenkinsci/firefox-extension-buildmonitor/tree/master/src/main/resources/firefox/chrome/locale. Any German or Polish translator around? please feel free to submit a pull request.

While the top operating systems are Windows, Linux, Darwin, Solaris, FreeBSD.

And as you know, this add-on is now named Jenkins BuildMonitor, though in practice it should still work with both Jenkins and Hudson just fine. As for the project management, I’m staying with the original Hudson – now Jenkins – community, source code on GitHub, mailing list on Google Groups, etc.

I know there are already some solutions out there that somewhat tackle this problem, but none of them is simple enough to my liking. So that’s why I wrote FeedTouch. (Note: even if there’s a simpler solution that I didn’t know of, I’d still write it anyway :p)

To use FeedTouch, all you have to do is add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL.
The screen shot below shows a normal website on the left http://ma.tt, and the FeedTouch-ed version on the right http://ft.t00.me/ma.tt .

FeedTouch automatically discovers an atom or RSS feed on a website (most news sites and blogs have such feeds). But instead of showing the content included in the feed (many feeds only provide excerpts), FeedTouch shows you the full content in a readable format.

I understand that this is not a solution for everyone. FeedTouch is particularly useful for me because I mostly read news sites with fresh daily content and I mostly do the reading during my daily train commute, which means I only care about reading stuffs, I never run out of reading material, and I’m not worried about keeping track which articles I have or have not read. And after some time, I ended up with a folder containing a collection of the FeedTouch-ed websites that I read most often, I added those sites to my iPhone home screen.

I know some of you might ask “What’s wrong with Google Reader?” Two things. First is that Google Reader only displays the content included in the feed. I like to read NBA.com and I only get few sentences worth of excerpt on their feed, which means I ended up having to visit the actual web page with the hard to read texts anyway. And second, adding new feeds to Google Reader on iPhone’s Safari is not simple enough because it involves finding out the feed URL (good luck with that) and copy-pasting it to Google Reader, plus, using a web form on a mobile phone is such a pain.

I would rather simply add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL and let FeedTouch discover the feed URL automatically for me. If I like the website content, then I simply add it to the iPhone home screen. Easy!

FeedTouch uses jQueryMobile, and mashes up Google Feed with ViewText.

Update (26/07/2011): replaced ft.prn.la with ft.t00.me .

Back then I was really into soccer and basketball, and for a reason I can no longer remember, I often incorporated elements of a soccer ball or a basketball in my drawings.

Here’s two of them:

T’Challa from Marvel Comics, obviously holding a basketball with adjusted ribs forming the shape of claws.

Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. Notice the basketball ribs at the background of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo?

There’s one mystery, I’m not sure what the significance of the numbers, 91 and 4, on those characters was. I’m guessing 91 was Dennis Rodman‘s jersey number when he was playing for the Chicago Bulls and 4 was Takenori Akagi‘s at Shohoku High School, but yea, your guess is as good as mine.

So we had to improvise and placed the sign above the door frame for now.

Time to start planning to overthrow the current body corporate.

Please note that what I’m writing here is more applicable to web sites with low traffic and storage requirement.

I’ve been a happy Slicehost user for the past 2.5 years. I used Slicehost for hosting this blog and some other web sites. I used their 256 slice plan at $20 per month, i.e $240 per year which includes 36.5 days bonus. I know there are cheaper hosting plans out there, but none provides the combination of excellent reliability, full root access, easy to use domain management, excellent support and documentation, and competitive price.

That was until two weeks ago when Amazon announced their EC2 Micro instance plan of 613Mb for only $54 a year plus $0.007 per hour of usage for a reserved instance. I immediately gave it a few test runs and found plenty of nice things about it. I really like their on-demand instance, I could start and stop the instance any time I want and they only charged me for the total time it was running. I also like having the ability to choose which region the instance is hosted: US West, US East, Asia Pacific, or Europe. And their documentation is very complete if not too much to read through.

The only downside is that EC2 doesn’t have any domain management service, but luckily Go Daddy, where I bought my domain names from, has Total DNS Control. It’s not as convenient to use as Slicehost’s domain management but still usable enough, and best of all, it’s free.

Some numbers from the plans (valid at the time of writing):

(*) not included in the yearly cost.

This blog and some other web sites I’m maintaining only use 2GB/month bandwidth usage and less than 1GB storage. So let’s count that at $0.15 * 2 * 12 = $3.6/year for bandwidth, and $0.10 * 1 * 12 = $1.2/year for storage, which brings the yearly cost to $115.32 + $3.6 + $1.2 = $120.12. Rounding that to $120 and I’m saving $120 per year.

In summary, I no longer have any reason to keep using Slicehost. I think the Slicehost crew is amazing, but cost-wise, I simply can’t ignore Amazon’s offering.

This blog is now hosted on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance.

NodeJS is one piece of technology that I’m very excited about. For web application development, I think Node, along with its web stack, is a nice middle ground between Ruby/Rails magical ‘simplicity’ and Java/JEE layers of complexity. For network-related stuffs, (I’m quoting Sami Samhuri here) NodeJS is a swiss army knife. Oh, and have I mentioned that NodeJS is fast? like seriously da*n fast? (thanks to V8).

As a side note, Indonesia is currently undergoing a strong growth in mobile Internet penetration, and with 200+ million people in the market, the progress is very exciting to watch. Teman Macet is one of the best podcast shows, technical or not, in Indonesian language. I personally find it immensely useful at providing information about Indonesian start ups and technology practitioners.

This plugin allows you to use NodeJS script on a build step, as an alternative to the existing shell script (out of the box) and Ruby script (via a plugin).

Call me too optimistic, but I’m waiting for the day when all standard shell script commands have their NodeJS equivalence.

This photo was taken at Clayton station platform 2, I was on my way home after work.

I wrote this plugin as an experiment on using Hudson for non-continuous integration purposes, in this case, a very minimalistic ‘games delivery platform’. Games as plugins, each with a pluggable Hudson UI that automatically adds a game menu / navigation. To push this further, the dashboard can then be modified to look more like Steam or iTunes, but of course I didn’t do this part.

Hudson is quite flexible, eh?

It’s still not clear to me of what’s the best practice for upgrading a CouchDB installation. From the mailing list, some people suggested backing up the config and database files, uninstalling the old version, then installing the new version. But, really, what’s involved in uninstalling a CouchDB installation? manually deleting the files from the old installation? I had the same confusion when I tried to do the upgrade on OS X, once from a compile from source, and another from a CouchDBX installation.

So instead of ‘the best practice’, I’ll just share what worked for me. I simply installed the new version using the same way as when I installed the old version, i.e. compile from source, and the files from 1.0.1 installation overwrote the files from 0.11.0 . Here’s what I did:

1. I searched for CouchDB config and database files, and found them in /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini and /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb/mydatabase.couch . I then backed up those files.
2. The fact that I found those files under /usr/local indicated that I must’ve used –prefix=/usr/local when I installed 0.11.0 .
3. I downloaded the source code of CouchDB 1.0.1, then ran the usual:

   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
   make
   sudo make install

4. Voila, CouchDB 1.0.1 was installed, the config and database files were still intact, everything worked fine.

Standard stuff:

git add file.ext
git status
git commit -am "Message"
git push origin master

To create a patch:

git clone git://github.com/user/project.git
cd project
git checkout -b fix_something
(fix that something)
git commit -a -m "Fix something"
git log
git format-patch master --stdout > fix_something.patch

To tag:

git tag -a v1.2.3 -m "Tag v1.2.3"
git push --tags git@github.com:user/project.git

To merge from another branch:

git remote add --track master project git://github.com/otheruser/otherproject.git
git remote
git fetch project
git merge project/master
(resolve any conflict)
git commit -a -m "Merge from otheruser/otherproject"
git push git@github.com:youruser/yourproject.git

To bisect:

git bisect start
git bisect good a1217cdc2e05dfd5672b
git bisect bad HEAD
git bisect run command.sh

To solve both problems, I had to compile Nginx from source with --with-http_gzip_static_module option. By default, Nginx would be installed at /usr/local. I would rather keep the locations consistent with those used in the precompiled packages from the repositories, so I ended up having to use the following configure options:

./configure \
--prefix=/usr \
--conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \
--lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock \
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log \
--with-http_dav_module \
--http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/body \
--with-http_ssl_module \
--http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/proxy \
--with-http_stub_status_module \
--http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/fastcgi \
--with-debug \
--with-http_flv_module \
--with-http_gzip_static_module
make
sudo make install

nginx path prefix: "/usr"
nginx binary file: "/usr/sbin/nginx"
nginx configuration prefix: "/etc/nginx"
nginx configuration file: "/etc/nginx/nginx.conf"
nginx pid file: "/var/run/nginx.pid"
nginx error log file: "/var/log/nginx/error.log"
nginx http access log file: "/var/log/nginx/access.log"
nginx http client request body temporary files: "/var/lib/nginx/body"
nginx http proxy temporary files: "/var/lib/nginx/proxy"
nginx http fastcgi temporary files: "/var/lib/nginx/fastcgi"

And voila.

foo> nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/0.7.67

The gzip settings in my nginx.conf:

    gzip  on;
    gzip_http_version 1.1;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_comp_level 6;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
    gzip_buffers 16 8k;

I’ve just relaunched Badminton Academy of Victoria web site. v2.0 sports a new look and floats on Posterous platform.

The site previously used WordPress(.org) and was hosted at Go Daddy. I decided to migrate it to Posterous to allow the users to spend more time using the site, and less time maintaining the site software and infrastructure.

Just like everyone else, I initially considered WordPress.com, but Posterous has most if not all of the features needed for $0, this includes custom domain name, custom theme, FeedBurner integration, Twitter and Facebook integration, easy Google Maps embedding, easy image gallery, short URL, and post by email. Posterous wins, hands down.

And a bit of a plug for BAV:

Badminton Academy of Victoria is specialising in junior coaching. We have outstanding records in winning under 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19 junior tournaments in Victoria and Australia.

One of their coaches, Lenny Permana, is an old friend of mine from back in the university days. She was a former world number 11 female badminton player, and (so far) the only friend with a Wikipedia entry. BAV itself has produced several Olympic and Commonwealth Games athletes.

Trivia: Do you know that badminton is the fastest racket sport? The fastest smash was clocked at 332km/h. As a comparison, Andy Roddick’s world record serve was 249.4km/h.