Random Thoughts
Google Code SVN errors about MKACTIVITY
I learned today from an issue I posted myself that some of the most unexplainable error messages simply want to say “Your username is wrong” :-) See google code issue 4101 for details. As I found lots of results regarding this kind of error when people tried to commit via HTTP instead of HTTPS, and because some of the solutions didn’t help them, maybe this was the problem in some of their cases.
I’m a Friend of Eclipse
I’ve just become a Friend of Eclipse, thus I’m allowed to put the following logo on my blog:
Nice, isn’t it? :) I can also get early Helios releases directly from a special mirror. Nice.
Inbox Zero, Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail
I’ve become a big fan of Inbox Zero recently, yet I was unable to really do it because I was an Outlook user. Yes, laugh at me if it makes you happy :) Outlook sucks bigtime if you want to keep your inbox clean, and what Inbox Zero doesn’t promote is OUTBOX Zero! – which is what I do as well. In Outlook, for each mail I had to search for all mails having the same topic in order to find the sent mails as well, then delete all of them. Now, I’m a Thunderbird user, and I can view mails as threads, how cool is that? A feature I’ve always missed in Outlook, although it’s not entirely impossible to do this with Outlook, it sucks really bad. So with Thunderbird, I can delete entire threads by just one click and *bing* the inbox looks better. This requires to make reduced use of a “sent” folder of course. Now here comes Google and its GMail philosophy: “do not delete, just remove the label. The ‘all messages’ folder will serve as an archive for your messages” (this is not a real quote, it’s only meant to represent the idea). What the heck? This is absolutely contrary to the Inbox Zero principle. Thus, I’ve decided to ignore Google’s recommendation and make Thunderbird move deleted mails to the trash folder, from where I can exterminate them. Kind of disobedient, but who cares :-)
Sports log
Thanks to my employer, I can go to McFit for free. I started my “real” training on Monday, and I’ve been there another two times since. The first training resulted in major pain for the rest of the week, the second and third time I came out really relaxed. It’s a great means of getting your head back on the ground, and it’s good for the overall health too ;) Nick, you’re a little behind, let’s keep going ;)
Meet the experts at codecentric
Yesterday, we had the first “meet the experts” at codecentric, featuring 4 talks, open space, lots of food, and several Guitar Hero battles.
First for the official part – we had 4 talks about the following topics:
- Performance Antipatterns – Mirko Novakovic, codecentric
- Live performance tuning – Kirk Pepperdine
- The secrets of concurrency – Dr. Heinz Kabutz
- Continuous performance management – Alois Reitbauer, dynatrace
While I had already heard Mirko’s talk a couple of times (not hard to imagine, he’s given the talk on conferences as well as in-house at codecentric), the other talks were new to me both from a technical point of view as well as from the personal point of view. I did know Alois before, though.
Meeting Kirk and Heinz was a really nice experience – Kirk demonstrated live how to do performance analysis using basic, free tools, which was great fun to watch. Heinz explaines his ten laws related to concurrency, including “The law of Cretan Driving” which Heinz explained by some very funny storys and pictures of road traffic in Greece, especially Crete where he lives and works. Listening to his talk, I was quite happy that I’ve never had to do anything concurrency-related myself in web development :-)
In the open space, I learned why Hibernate wins over Toplink, which was in fact rather a history lesson than a direct feature-based shootout – actually, I’m a bit sad that there is basically no “recorded history” of software, open source etc. I also learned that the majority of Eclipse committers works at IBM, which I didn’t really know before – but if you look at Eclipse commits or issues, you do find a lot of IBM people there ;-) I also went to another open space session held by Heinz Kabutz where he spoke about his lates puzzle and some other newsletter topics – visit JavaSpecialists.EU if you’re interested – it’s packed with interesting topics.
In between the open space sessions, we had some really great food, as well as during the day – the evening catering was even more fun because the entire setup was moved from our building to the outside where we spent a really great time eating, chatting away and drinking. As usual, the codecentric team partied hard, supported by participants, the invited experts and a couple of guys from dynatrace. It was quite nice to have some relaxed conversations, and the weather was just absolutely perfect!
Last but not least, I’d like to mention the open space highlight of the day, announced by my workmate Nick – because “performance” was the topic of the day, he announced an open space session called “Performing on Guitar Hero” which turned into quite an entertaining event. We saw Kirk, Jeroen (Xebia) and a couple of other people overcome the initial frustration and then happily rock away, battling each other – there were quite a couple of cheers and hard laughs involved :-)
I’d like to thank codecentric for organizing this event, and I’d also like to thank both the experts and the participants for making this a very interesting and memorable day. I’m looking forward to the next two “meet the experts” events!
Sorry for lots of text – I think that appropriate images will be published on our company blog next week, as soon as everyone is back at the office. Thanks for your attention :-)
Eclipse Galileo vs. SVN
Still no “built-in” SVN support. Same song as ever? Almost. SVN Team Provider is now available via the Galileo update site, but:
Subversive SVN Connectors distributed from external location. Such scheme of distribution caused by licensing requirements.
Gnah!!! Source
Ok, so this time I picked “latest release” (there is no Galileo release available yet) and chose the SVNKit Connector with the highest version available. Seems to work. Still foobar though…
NetBeans 6.7 RC3 – it’s alive
Following Petr’s comment on the previous post, I filed a bug report for the NetBeans 6.7 RC3 installer on Windows XP today. By ignoring this:
NetBeans 6.7 RC3 installer warning
and by clicking “Ja” (Yes) I managed to make the installer do its job. However, this only worked after a system restart – somehow, there were obviously still stale processes floating around before the restart.
I’m now going to retest the Grails support. Hope it works. :)
In the meantime, I recommend reading this one and the other posts on Petr Hejl’s blog.
Grails IDE fail
I’m trying this and that with Grails at the moment, and I was willing to find out which IDE I should use on Windows. “The Definitive Guide to Grails” mentions Eclipse and Netbeans, giving Netbeans an advantage because the Eclipse Groovy plugin is still under heavy development. Okay. I don’t want to frustrate anyone or bore the reader with long stories, here’s the results after some hours of testing the proposed IDEs:
- Netbeans 6.5 works out of the box, but seems to be buggy, or maybe Grails 1.1.1 is buggy. I got lots of stupid errors stating problems like “xy is not a domain class”. My browser (Firefox 3) went crazy opening a new tab every couple of seconds when I ran the Grails application. On top, Netbeans did obviously not really kill the Java processes it created when I clicked “Run Application” – in the end, I had to manually remove 6 Java processes until I could do a “clean start” of my Grails app. No good. Netbeans seem to suck anyway, I had lots of problems with it in the past.
- Netbeans 6.7 RC3 won’t install on my computer, the installer does either nothing at all or it goes into Nirvana, leaving a stale Java process behind.
- Eclipse Ganymede lets me install the Groovy plugin (I tried the latest development build as well as the stable release), but that’s pretty much all that works. Check out this article if you want to know which manual steps have to be done in order to get it working at all – okay, I would have gone through this, but I was stopped quite early because of several internal plugin exceptions telling me that a couple of classes were missing and that this-and-that could not be executed. Gosh.
I’m tempted to say that RadRails (now Aptana etc.) for Ruby on Rails development was pretty much of a kick-ass application, also Eclipse-based, and I’m quite unhappy with the state of things when it comes to Grails IDE integration…
Looks like my choices are:
- Buy IntelliJ IDEA
- Buy a Mac and try Textmate
Both no option. So I think I’ll go on with a plain text editor.
If anyone has a working Grails IDE based on Eclipse or Netbeans, let me know!
VLC easter egg explained
The comment posted by my homie Nick on the previous post made me search the source code just for fun, which revealed the following or similar code in 4 places:
if( QDate::currentDate().dayOfYear() >= 354 ) label->setPixmap( QPixmap( ":/vlc128-christmas.png" ) ); else label->setPixmap( QPixmap( ":/vlc128.png" ) );
And this is the image used for it:
VLC christmas icon
Long live Open Source Software :-)
Certified SCRUM Master
As of today, I’m officially a Certified SCRUM Master. As I mentioned before, the training with Jeff Sutherland and Serge Beaumont was really great fun, so if you’re interested in SCRUM, book one of the trainings for a good bunch of new knowledge and for a nice experience :-)
