Not Just Java

Installed Windows 7 today

ralfwagner — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:12:17 +0000

I installed the RC of Windows 7 today on my company laptop. Not as the actual OS, but inside of Sun’s VirtualBox. (While VMWare may be better, I like the small footprint of VirtualBox, especially on my not-at-all-state-of-the-art laptop.)
I only assigned a 8 GB disk for Windows 7, of which the OS uses about 5,5GB. The rest should be enough for the testing I’d like to do. When I need more space, I can swap to VirtualBox image to an external harddrive and increase it.
As I haven’t worked with Vista yet, I can’t actually say what which feature is new – so far, everything looks quite new to me

Packing FSFS Repositories in Subversion 1.6

ralfwagner — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:11:22 +0000

After Subversion 1.5 introduced sharding to handle repositories with lots of commits more efficiently, 1.6 adds another feature: packing
Here’s an article that explains the why and how: Packing FSFS Repositories

The most important information:

In order to use FSFS packing, you simply need to ensure that target repository has been upgraded to the latest format, and then pack the repository using svnadmin. Note that repositories do not automatically pack themselves, so for heavily used repositories, you may want to install a cron job or post commit hook to do the packing. Users can continue to use the repository while it is being packed:

$ svnadmin upgrade repo
Repository lock acquired.
Please wait; upgrading the repository may take some time...

Upgrade completed.
$ svnadmin pack repo
Packing shard 0...done.
Packing shard 1...done.
Packing shard 2...done.
Packing shard 3...done.
Packing shard 4...done.
...
Packing shard 36...done.
$ svnadmin upgrade repoRepository lock acquired.Please wait; upgrading the repository may take some time...

Upgrade completed.$ svnadmin pack repoPacking shard 0...done.Packing shard 1...done.Packing shard 2...done.Packing shard 3...done.Packing shard 4...done....Packing shard 36...done.$lt;br />

Let’s see how this works out with our repo (~ 55000 revisions).

How to test code snippets

ralfwagner — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:23:15 +0000

A great tip for Ganymede and something that I’m going to use often

http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/wayne/2008/07/07/paste-snippet/

Subversion 1.5 Clients

ralfwagner — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:08:49 +0000

Since this Monday, I’ve been using the new Subversion 1.5 clients on two Windows machines: Tortoise SVN, the SVN command line client and the Subclipse 1.4 Eclipse Plugin for Eclipse Ganymede.
I first thought I had encountered a problem with the Subclipse Plugin. When I tried to update a folder / file in a project, the client worked fine. But when I tried to update the project itself (or the top level foldet, so to speak), I got an error (I think I first encountered this on Tuesday.). During the last two days, the problem didn’t occur again.
This may have happened because I only updated parts of my local checked out projects, so they were only partially converted to the new format.
Anyway, I think I’m going to use the new client for other machines as well.

Firefox 3

ralfwagner — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:23:45 +0000

I’ve been using Firefox 3 (Beta) for some time now due to the update that came with Ubuntu 0804, but haven’t looked that much into the new features.
Now, that the final release is available, I looked a bit into it.
Here’s a helpful website for tips and tricks: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/tips/

I especially like the tagging of web sites and the new shortcuts for accessing the location bar (CTRL + L) and the search bar (CTRLK + K).

Subversion 1.5 release candidate 8 available

ralfwagner — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:17:30 +0000

RC8 has been released, there might be a RC9, but according to this post, Subversion 1.5 will be out soon.

Eclipse Ganymede JEE RC1 released

ralfwagner — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:20:38 +0000

The recently released Eclipse Ganymede JEE RC1 packages seem to solve my problem with using M7 and Subversion 1.5.
After installing the Subclipse plugin I had no problems using the workspace that contained subversion projects.

Hudson: The right choice?

ralfwagner — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:08:41 +0000

One of the things to consider when thinking about switching tools is “How long will it last?”. CruiseControl is a mature open source product, well established with a large user base and several developers.
Hudson in comparison is relatively new, so I have no idea about the adoption and seems to be mainly Kohsuke Kawaguchi’s pet project.
Imagine my excitement, when I read this week on his blog that he is now working full time on Hudson. I think, there are great things to come for Hudson.

Happy with Hudson

ralfwagner — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:55:29 +0000

I’ve been using Hudson as a continuous integration server now for about a week and I am pretty happy with it.
Currently, I run CruiseControl on one machine and Hudson on another one. Both are building three branches of a large Java project from a Subversion repository (trunk, current release, and an integration branch for the current release). During the last week, we had two broken builds due to incomplete commits to the repository, which both systems reported within half an hour. And both systems reported, when the build was fixed again.
So, both systems fulfill their main purpose.

In addition, Hudson has some features, that I didn’t actually miss in CruiseControl until I discovered them in Hudson:

A currently ongoing build can be stopped from the UI. Hudson is quite responsive here: Usually, this only takes a couple of seconds. It seems as if you don’t have to wait until the current ant target is completed.
There is a “Shutdown Mode”. Once activated, no new projects are build. In CruiseControl, I usually waited until the svn update within the build file was complete and then killed the process.
Hudson projects handle svn updates and checkouts themselves. I always found CruiseControl lacking in this regard. Even though it is easy to have a target in a special build file to update the checked-out project, why not let the tool do the job? To set up a new project in CruiseControl, you need to add the project to the configuration and check-out the sources. In Hudson you create the project or duplicate it from an existing project (quite handy!) and run the project. Hudson takes care of the check-out.
Hudson handles removing the checked-out copy when deleting a project.

Hudson: Found the mappings between user names in SCM and e-mail addresses

ralfwagner — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:05:56 +0000

I finally found the mappings between user names from the SCM and the e-mail addresses.
After my post about “how easy everything in Hudson” is, the only explanation is that I am either blind or it is too obvious:
Main page > People > {choose a user}
And there it is on the left side: A “configure” link that leads you to a page where you can enter the e-mail address.