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.

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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.

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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.

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I found a very interesting project called code_swarm, which is (as quoted from its web site) ‘an experiment in organic software visualization’. code_swarm analyses the commit activities within the project’s source repository, and generates a visual representation of those activities. Each resource commit is represented as a particle floating around the commiter’s username.

So I thought it would be interesting to see how Hudson has evolved as a project, check out the embedded video below… . The particles are color coded. Red-shaded particles for Java, Jar, JSP, Jelly. Yellow-shaded particles for XML, properties files. Green-shaded particles for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. Blue-shaded particles for various scripting languages.

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The most frequently asked question from Emptiness Theme users was about customising the styles (font, color, width, etc) and the header image of the theme, and I usually answered by giving them some pointers to which file to modify and where. The problem was that most WordPress users  would make the modifications directly against the theme files.

The downside of such approach is that the custom code would end up buried within the theme, which users won’t remember few months down the line. And this will then discourage them from upgrading the theme in order to avoid overwriting the customisations accidentally.

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So I got the chance to use Watir again on a short project at work. The last time I used it was about 1.5 years ago, and I was glad to find out that Watir is still a nice library to use. Watir simply works without much hassle.

The only issue I had was with image saving. From Image class documentation (Watir 1.6), it wasn’t obvious that save can only be called when image element is directly contained within a browser element.

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To celebrate 3 years of Wish’ existence on teh web, I’ve been meaning to write up some behind-the-scene stories about Wish and some lessons learned so far from running a mini content sharing web site.

The Beginning

Wish was started back in 2005. The idea was simple, I’ve always believed that having a wish is an important part of life, so why not share it? I thought it would be interesting to know what other people are wishing for.

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I spent several train rides this week putting together Reflection Plugin for WordPress. This plugin applies reflection effect to images on a blog. The reflection effect is done on the client side using the excellent Raphael JavaScript library. You can use normal image on your posts as usual, and you’ll get the reflection effect by simply adding ‘reflection’ to the class value.

Here are some examples of the effect…

Wide movie poster:

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BuildMonitor v0.9.1 was released yesterday. This is the first version with French l10n bundled, thanks to Eric Lefevre who submitted the translations.

I added a new ‘Build’ menu to trigger the build of a particular job. This menu item only comes up on a job feed.

Another little improvement is a new option on the preference window to hide the feed name on Firefox status bar. This is useful when you need to monitor many feeds.

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I got this error message on Firefox Error Console after adding fr-FR locale to BuildMonitor, which caused it to fail initialising the status bar feeds.

1="[Exception..." 2="Component" 3="returned" 4="failure" 5="code:" 6="0x80004005" 7="(NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" 8="[nsIStringBundle." 9="<div" id=":sd" 10="class="ArwC7c" 11="ckChnd">GetStringFromName" language="Error:"]"  nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)"  location: "JS frame :: XStringBundle :: getString :: line 17"  data: no] Source File: XStringBundle Line: 17</div>

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