Style is nothing, content is everything.

The internet is a series of tubes.

Going through my usual late friday evening series of Jon-Stewart-bashing-George-Bush clips, i came across this gem , where US senator Ted Stevens tries to explain how the internet works. He should know ofcourse, as he's the head of the E-Commerce Committee ... you know, the entity that is supposed to regulate the internet usage in the US !

Aurélie

Yesterday, one of my (French) colleagues came over to my desk for a chat.

Him : "Have you read any of the books from Aurélie?"
Me : "I haven’t actually , are they any good ? Never heard about the writer either."
Him : "What?? You have never heard of Aurélie? That’s impossible, everybody reads them, they are very popular !!"
Me : "Nope, never heard of it" - thinking it must be one of those French things.

Wanting to prove his point, he told me to go to their website and see for myself. So I launched Firefox and hit alt-L.

Me : a .. u .. r .. e .. l .. i.. e , hold on, is it with i-e or just y at the end ?
Him : Ah non, it’s spelled o..r..e..i..l..l..y
Me : <chuckle> … <grin>

phew !

A good friend of mine sent me this picture of his desk at work, located a good 50 km south of Munich.

We all know that the higher the office temperature, the lower the office productivity, so i wonder why some employers just refuse to shell out 400EUR for a decent airco - knowing that they are likely to lose more money overall because of the reduced productivity !

Anyway, Thomas: perhaps you can apply some of the tricks described here to keep your head cool while coding away !

Manipulating Continuum’s internal database

If you’re using Maven2 to build your projects, then chances are you’ve got Continuum doing your CI (Continuous Integration). At Cocoon for example we use it to manage the deployment of the daily snapshots to the Apache snapshot repository.

It’s still a bit rough on the edges though as far as usability is concerned, especially for larger projects. I once wanted to change the build goal for all our modules from the default “clean install” to “clean source:jar deploy” and was very disappointed to find out there was no global goal setting i could enforce all modules to use. One solution would’ve been to change the defaultGoal element in the root pom but that ofcourse impacts everyone else building Cocoon - not desirable at all.

As i didn’t feel to click my way through 180 modules (and do it again every time Continuum’s database is zapped) i decided there must be a more clever way of handling this. So I figured i would have a look at Continuum’s internal database, hoping to be able to do a quick “update BUILD_DEFINITION set goal=’clean source:jar deploy’. Continuum uses Derby as internal database, so Eclipse + WTP is all I needed to start exploring:

Make sure Continuum is not running
Open the Eclipse Database Explorer View
Add a new Derby 10.1 connection
Point the database location to $CONTINUUM_HOME/apps/continuum/database
Point the class location to $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins/org.apache.derby.core_10.1.2/derby.jar if you don’t have the driver handy somewhere.

Your screen should now look something like this:

Now connect to the database. You’ll see a few familiar names in the table list :

The first table is called BUILDDEFINITION (so i wasn’t too far off !) :

We’re interested in updating the goals argument, so all you now have to do is create a SQL Scrapbook page and run it :

As far as i know, this is the easiest way of doing bulk updates to build definitions in Continuum. There is one caveat though: you need to have physical access to the database directory.

In one of my next posts i’ll discuss a way of achieving the same result without needing physical access to the database.

MNG-1797

a.k.a the maven bug of hell, basically boils down to this:


<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-hibernate3</artifactId>
  <version>2.0-m1</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
      <artifactId>hibernate</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
  <artifactId>hibernate</artifactId>
  <version>3.1</version>
</dependency>

If you have this in your pom then hibernate 3.1 will not be passed on transitively anymore because you’ve excluded it on another dependency. This can lead to all sorts of seemingly random behaviour, so beware when you start excluding dependencies from other poms !

As a workaround, you should exclude the unnecessary dependencies in the child pom rather than on the dependency directly.

Omnidazzle

If you’re the person that likes to stun your audience with a bit of eye-candy during presentations: OmniDazzle .

Want your own personal bank card?

A couple of days ago, my bank announced the availability of a new service: they put together a website allowing you to create and personalize your own bank card. Woo-hoo, I thought and headed over to their site. So I put together below design, thinking my wife would be thrilled to have the Czech flag embedded on her card.

To my surprise however (I didn’t read the small print ofcourse - always read the small prints when dealing with banks!) I got an email the next day that my design was rejected. They pointed me to a pdf (dutch only) explaining what is not allowed on the card.

Here’s a rough translation :

copyrighted material like logos, slogans, brands, drawings, trademarks, domain names, company names.

(Fair enough i guess, but what if you’re the copyright holder ?)
advertising or promotional material

(understandable)
images of well-known persons like actors, musicians, sportsmen, comic-heroes or any images referencing these.

(darn)
addresses, phonenumbers, URL’s, account numbers and PIN numbers

(duh)
naked (or half naked) adults or children, or sexually explicit material

(guess the lawyers wanted to make sure on the wording for this one, being in Belgium and all that … )
images portraying hate, violence, discrimination, obscenity, blasphemy, political ideas, religion, criminal activities, asocial behaviour or groups of people acting in an asocial manner, guns, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, insults, payment methods of any kind, symbols like flags or the Red Cross.

I honestly believe they could’ve made it easier for themselves had they simply reversed the rules and defined what is allowed rather than what’s not !

So to summarize: this doesn’t look nearly as interesting as I thought it would :-(

I will still scavenge openclipart though and see if i can come up with something decent …

Any other suggestions ?