I was reading this blog post the other day, and it tied in to some of the recent discussion on this blog as related to NIN's open approach to making music available.  The notion put forward (and linked to) is that copy protection is pointless.  The blogger goes on to point out that "the fact that the most easily found etexts are those of the bestselling books should suffice to prove that only a very small percentage of ebook pirates were ever potential customers."

 So… this open source thing is working for much more than just enterprise software… we see it working for books, games and music.

Avoid the Find.find method if at all possible if you are working on an app that may need to be deployed with JRuby (instead of a native version of Ruby).

See this issue (specifically the comment that starts with 'This description is not actually true.') for details.

Here's a reason to ignore people who give flippant advice (in this case me).  Following is an interaction I had with my co-worker Rod who sits right next to me this morning .

• [Out of silence, a very annoying ringing sound ensues. ]
• Random developer [seeming very annoyed]:  What is that sound?
• Rod [looking down on the floor by his feet]: Hmm… I think that's my UPS backup.
• Me:  It's annoying, make it stop.
• Rod: What should I do?
• Me: Push the button.
• Rod [pushes the button]
• Rod's computer [turns off]
• Rod:  D'oh…Ugh… That turns my whole computer off.
• Me: You shouldn't have pushed that button
• The rest of the engineering team: racous laughter

So, I swing by a Starbucks on my way into the office this morning and pick myself up a latte.  Nothing out of the ordinary yet.  

Now comes the odd part.  This lady behind me (who I had noticed walking from a table outside where her husband was sitting with their Dachshund - important to note that I had also noticed that her and her husband both already had drinks) tells the barista that she needs the usual for her dog.  That perked my ears up, but then I just assumed that she had intended to get her wiener dog a cup of water, so the whole thing tailed off for me.  

Then, I notice that the barista does not get her a cup of water, but instead shoots 3 pumps of vanilla syrup into a child-size coffee cup.  I'm captivated at this point, so as I'm waiting for my to-be-drank-by-a-human latte, I continue to pay attention to what's going on.  The end result of the coffee cup that started with three pumps of vanilla is a vanilla steamer (steamed milk) with whipped cream…. for the dog.

This situation officially turned into a bizarro world type of moment for me… the kind of moment where I started thinking that maybe I was the only person out there who doesn't get a Starbucks drink for their dog every morning.  Is this a common thing?  Are my dogs being abused because they're only drinking water?

Working in conjunction with my coworker Rod, we came up with a name for code like this:

begin

… 

rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid => error

end 

We're calling it 'THIS IS SPARTA!' code, as in the scene from the movie 300 where the king of Sparta kicks the Persian messenger into the archetypal infinitely deep black pit/hole thing. Obviously, this is the name because that is exactly what happens to the exception in this case.

Please avoid writing 'THIS IS SPARTA!' code.

Other movies with the "archetypal infinitely deep black pit/hole thing" scene:

- National Treasure

- Pee Wees Big Adventure (Rod knew this one, not me) 

- Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (again, credit to Rod)  

- Star Wars (Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc pit) 

So, the documentation that tells you how to do what I'm about to tell you already exists, it just wasn't easy for me to find.  Hopefully you've ended up here by googling for something like 'jruby cruisecontrol.rb'.

I needed to get our JRuby project going under CruiseControl.rb, and it didn't just work out of the box.  Out of the box, I got an error that read: 

rake aborted!

database configuration specifies nonexistent jdbc adapter  

So, I went to digging, and eventually found out how to get past this thanks to Alexey here.  You simply edit cruise_config.rb file in your project's work directory and you're good to go.  Actually the 'project.build_command' property you have to tweak doesn't just get you going on a JRuby project.  It is very generic and simple, and will let you put any possible command or sh/bat script you want right there.  I haven't had to set up and configure the original old java cruise control in a while, but last time I did it didn't seem to be quite so easy as this.

So, I'm chugging along, enjoying myself, writing some RoR code, and run across one of the funnier method names I've ever seen.  I had to make an effort to use it, so here it is… I'm using it in as many yml fixtures as I can.

created_at: <%= 1.fortnight.ago.to_s :db %>

Fortnight?  A fortnight?  Are there really enough webapps written that require time to be broken into chunks of fortnights to warrant a 'fortnight' method?  I honestly don't care, I just think it's funny that 'fortnight' made it into the Rails datetime extension library.

It reminds me of a quote from Abe Simpson.  

"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." 

http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html

So, this is interesting to me. Interesting only in that it is going to be annoying how much play this gets, particularly leading up to and at JavaOne. I can imagine it will be a large conversation point there, which bothers me. 

This is probably because (allow me to identify myself with marketing terminology) I am a technical pragmatist, and these types of things don't interest me in the least. It seems to me that there are just so many more interesting (and I'm thinking of using the word 'hard' here too, as offensive as that may be to some folks) problems to solve and ways to spend one's time than to have to hash this kind of stuff out.

Now, that being said, I begrudgingly recognize that this is the way the world works, that it needs to be done, that these types of issues do need to be dealt with, I'm glad someone is willing to do it, and I'm glad that someone is not me. Putting aside specifics regarding the Harmony project, if everything the letter claims is true, it seems to me that they (Sun) simply need to hold up their end of the bargain.

Seems to me that these types of things should be the easy things to knock out of the park. If you say you're gonna do something, do it (should I bother noting that this should apply in all walks of life, not just with regards to open source related drama?).

UPDATE: As of  9:15 AM US/Mountain time (on 04/10/2007), there are already 7 entries showing up in my JavaBlogs RSS feed about this topic.  I guess I'm probably adding to what I'm saying annoys me.  Hopefully the whole thing will be resolved swiftly.

So, I go to install the SpringIDE plugin, using the Callisto installation directions. I get part of the way through it, and receive an error, informing me that an internal error regarding the update manager's zip deflater has occurred, and it can't go on. After a bit of googling… I find this entry on Colin's blog, and follow Olivier's advice. So, I do a 'mv /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_11-64/bin/unpack22 /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_11-64/bin/unpack22.findme' (Java HotSpt 64-Bit Server VM build 1.5.0_11-b03, mixed mode running on SLED 10 by the way), try the eclipse update manager process again, and voila, it works.

Anyone who understands what's going on here and why what I did works, please tell me. I don't get it, but it went and ahead and installed what I needed, so I just moved on.

On a lighter note… I spend a good portion of my day listening to music courtesy of Pandora, which, as a side note, uses OpenLaszlo for its UI as I understand it. So, today I was listening to my Kid Rock station… a fairly interesting station in terms of how they pick which music ought to play. Interesting because it has such of wide range of music because of his style, from rappish to rockish, it has played everything from Sir Mix a Lot, to Naughty by Nature, to Beastie Boys, to Jet, to Limp Bizkit, to Saliva, to Metallica. Anyway, I'm going about my business, getting work done… and all of sudden I feel like throwing up a little in my mouth because the song is so bad. I alt+tab over to Pandora, and sure enough, I find none other than the song Lifeline… by David Hasselhoff… from the Baywatch album.

Ooph… can somebody tell me how in the world that happened? This is a case where Pandora users need more than just the 'Thumbs Down' button. We need a "Are you kidding me that you actually played this? Something slipped past QA button."

So, today was my first day at OpenLogic.  I'm sitting directly across from a colleague I've worked with before, Scott Nicholls… who also started today.  Scott and I shared the Situation Room at the last company we worked at.

(The quick explanation for that is that we were traveling on business together, and were flipping through channels on the TV in the hotel room, and one of the major news channels was covering something important that was occurring in the Situation Room.  So, obviously, the office we shared had to be given that name.)

This setup has a real Andy Bernard/Jim Halpert feel to it, with Scott constantly annoying me a la Andy annoying Jim.

All that aside, I'm pumped to be working here, and excited to immerse myself.  One cool thing that has given me renewed interest with PC's in general is the fact that I have switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux.  I made this switch between jobs, and hope to never look back.  (I say that, but chances are good that the family desktop pc will remain a Windows XP box.  1 - I don't want to convert MS Money records to GNU Cash and 2 - my wife uses software for her Speech Pathology job with a school that only runs on Windows.) I've sort of backed into this Linux world in an odd way, by getting used to a Unix-style terminal environment by running Cygwin on Windows for several years.

So, I'm basically an odd hybrid.  A pure Linux newbie, but can get around the terminal ok.  All in all though, I'm very pleased with how easy Ubuntu has been.  I installed it on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop, and everything just worked.  Beyond installing it, doing simple tasks in GNome has proved to be very intuitive.  One quick example of that was when I had the need to access some files on a Windows share today, I immediately thought "uh-oh… this is not gonna work, or at least not be easy".  Wrong… all I had to do was Places -> Connect to Server -> Select Windows Share as my Service Type and voila, connected.

To finish, I have to throw something technical up on the post.  Now, this won't be that earth shattering to people who are already Linux guru's out there, but it was cool to me, so maybe someone can get some use out of it.  From a terminal, try the following:

ls -l | tee ll.out

Basically, this pipes the output of 'ls -l' to both standard out and the file named 'll.out'.  It is useful because before I learned this, I only knew how to redirect standard out via '>' or '>>', which made it so you couldn't see it in the terminal, only by looking in the file once the process was done.  A good example of where I've found this useful is long-running processes like an ant or maven build, where you'd like to be able to search the output in the file, but also like to watch it scrolling by so you know roughly where you are in the process if your impatient like myself.