codeBrane Blog

While it’s quiet around 8am I like to catch up on my blogs to see what’s been happening out there but I also thought I’d give blogging about what I’ve read a go. See if any patterns emerge. Chief among them will be whether the pattern of writing about what I read will persist!

So real coffee cup full, Reeder open, what attracted my attention enough to open in the browser?

This year seems to be the year of Big Data, as reported by OSS Watch in The dominance of open source tools in big data, so much so that you can even attend the Big Data University to learn just how big Data is going to be this year and even try and tackle some Big Data yourself using Apache Hadoop. All in all, moderately interesting.

Next up, Ben Orenstein has taken the Wikipedia article on coupling and applied it to Ruby with some good examples. I’ve always felt the best way to learn a topic is to munge it into something practical and this fits the bill perfectly.

There were lots of other nature, philosophy, mountaineering and programming ones too but the above ended up open in the browser. Plus I still have a couple open I’m working my way through from the day before. The thought patterns of success and the guide to the rails asset pipeline. Not mention a slew of Kaltura tabs open and one on unit testing C# applications in Visual Studio.

Time for a blog post methinks and good timing too as I’ve recently updated the Matrix provisioning system to support Invalid Message Channels in its routing engine. An invalid message is any message that can’t be processed for whatever reason including if the target system is down. This turns out to be quite convenient as the messages can be rerouted to the target topics when the system is back up.

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As part of the porting matrix from Java to C# I’m installing .NET on a vmware Windows 7 image and seem to have inadvertently stumbled into a version bump mess. .NET is currently at 4.0 with 4.5 to be released soon but this is apparently an ‘in-place’ upgrade rather than a ‘side by side’ replacement. Sounds not too bad until you find out that apparently 4.0 apps may crash on 4.5 due to internal gubbins that won’t be apparent until runtime. Thanks M$! But I am rather enjoying the intellectual stimulation of a new platform and language.

References:

.NET Versioning and Multi-Targeting – .NET 4.5 is an in-place upgrade to .NET 4.0

.NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4.5 Versioning Faces Problems Ahead

And so it rumbles on, this joke OS. 10.7 is what I give it out of a hundred. This time it’s the network not coming back after sleeping. According to this thread you can variously turn off/on wifi to get your wired connection back, invoke network in system preferences, or, get this, start a backup. I mean, what’s the point of releasing crap like 10.7? There has obviously been very little testing.

This time it’s XCode. Refuses to install from the app store. None of that fancy leaping from the store into your dock with a progress bar to inform you it’s downloading. Nothing. It just sits there saying “Installing” then installs nothing. Thinking it had opened a wormhole in space and time to download its multi-gig bulk in super quick time I tried XCode in my dock. It blew up complaining it wanted 10.6 back. Sigh. Uninstall the now dud XCode:

sudo sh
/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

delete XCode from the dock, login to the Apple Developer site and download the DMG from there. But wait. Where are the commandline tools? Sigh. They’re making it as difficult as possible to develop on this platform now. You need to go into XCode -> Preferences -> Downloads and install them from there. Or you can download them separately from the SDK site.

This is so tedious, having to go through settings putting them back to the ‘default’ before OS X Lion stamped it’s iOS footprint all over them. This time it’s Safari opening with the last page viewed no matter what its settings are. You have to go into a completely unrelated area to sort this. This smacks of iOS interference as that’s what you do on iOS, use the Settings App to change some global settings. Well OS X is NOT iOS.

System Preferences -> General

uncheck this:

Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps

With Selenium requiring a browser to run the tests, if you don’t have one installed you’ll get the error:

sessionId should not be null; has this session been started yet?

You’ll also get this error if you have a valid browser configured in the test code but not installed on the system. However the problem with running Selenium tests on a headless Bamboo server is, there’s no display. So here’s how to sort that on Suse Linux.

Install Xvfb from yast2 and the xorg-x11-server package

Startup Xvfb in the background:

Xvfb :99 -ac &

and set the display to use the one you chose. I normally do this in / etc/profile.

export DISPLAY=:99

Then exit and go back into the shell or do:

source / etc/profile

start and stop Bamboo and the Selenium tests will run.

Seriously, are they taking the mickey? I upgraded to OS X Lion and thought the browser had crashed. No way could I scroll down. Then I realised they’d decided my laptop was a phone and I had to scroll as if on the iPhone. Excuse me? Are they having a laugh? Apparently they call it ‘natural’ scrolling. I call it crap and here’s how to go back to a really natural scrolling movement:

System Preferences -> Trackpad

Uncheck this garbage:

“When using gestures to scroll or navigate, move content in the direction of finger movement”

You wouldn’t have liked to have seen which finger I was moving when they did that.

With more and more information coming my way, I decided to rationalise how I manage all that chatter and keep track of what needs doing and when. Now, being a software developer, I need to concentrate on designing systems and writing code, as well as keeping up to date with several fields and managing the development infrastructure such as Jira for issue tracking, Bamboo for continuous integration and Fisheye/Crucible for code reviews. So before I even go near the endless stream of bytes flowing from the net, most of my time is already taken up with things related to what I do. So I don’t really have time to work out how best to use various productivity applications, other than download, install and crudely filter the flow, usually to some local application where I keep notes. Read more »

It’s not as bad as it sounds! A putlog hole is an affordance in medieval construction that allows the structure to be built up. It has no real function other than to aid the construction of the building and is often filled in afterwards. The concept can be used in software construction too, especially if one indulges in TDD. Read more »