magpiebrain

Some of you may recall my earlier experiences with “Ganymede”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganymede/ were “less that successful(magpiebrain – Ganymede – Log4J Logging inside eclipse)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000087.html. To recap Ganymede is a plugin for eclipse that receives messages sent from Log4J. My problems revolved around the complete lack of documentation to explain how to get the thing to work. Anyway, “Will Sargent(Will Sargent – Terse Systems)”:http://tersesystems.com/ was kind enough to point me in the right direction and explain “how to get Ganymede working(magpiebrain – Comments: Ganymede – Log4J Logging inside eclipse)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=87. After remembering to add a Socket Appender for my program it worked a treat. I don’t like it as much as Chainsaw or “LogFactor5”:http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/lf5/features.html (both of which are standalone Swing applications) in terms of functionality, however Ganymede is much more convenient that either of them as it sits right in my IDE.

If it added some more flexible filters (I cannot for example say only show INFO messages and above for a given category), allowed me to change the background of the eclipse view, added a tree-based view and a search function then I’d be a happy bunny. Oh, and some documentation of course – although I suppose it wouldn’t take me long to write that myself…

“Johnny Cash has died”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3103164.stm

After some service hick-ups Gradwell hae got things back to normal. Despite their main file server being down for two days, the worst disruption I faced was the blog being unavailable for a couple of hours, then it being in a read only state for an hour or so.

My otherwise excellent ISP Gradwell suffered a heart stopping (for me at least) outage today:

Our primary fileserver has failed, causing primarily an outage of out web and shell account services. We are working on recovering this machine as quickly as possible, and apologise for the inconvenience this will cause. We regret no ETA is currently available.

I was at work an unable to check the dates of my last backups, but its seems to be back and working now. The outage was reported at 8am and fixed by 10:30am so no harm done. I am however going to make sure I have everything backed up when I get home tonight!

I’ve been interested in XP for a while now. Whilst many of the rules outlined in XP have always made perfect sense to me (simple design, frequent unit testing), the one that really made me sceptical was the notion of “Pair Programming(Extreme Rules – Pair Programming)”:http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/pair.html, which forms much of the focus of a recent “Wired article(Wired – The New X-Men)”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/xmen.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=. For the uninitiated, pair programming has two programmers working at the same desk – one programmer ‘drives’ whilst the other watches. The idea is that they can bounce ideas of each other, and while the coder doing the actual typing can be quite focused on a single line, the other can pick up simple mistakes such as missing semi-colons and the like. The net result is that despite the apparent upfront loss in productivity bugs occur less frequently, and when they do appear they are fixed more quickly.

Although the practice adds 15 percent per programmer to the time it takes to complete a task, the lost productivity is offset by having fewer bugs to fix. “Pre-XP,” says Kevin Yu, “an eight-hour debugging session wasn’t unusual. With XP we spend about half an hour.” Meanwhile, 90 percent of the 41 coders in the study enjoyed working together more than alone, and almost all were “more confident in their solutions.”

My main reservation concerning Pair Programming is the issue of finding someone compatible to work with – I often find it frustrating to try and explain my ideas to people who take longer to understand the concepts being discussed than I do. Likewise trying to reign the enthusiasm of a colleague who completely understands how their one line obfuscated beyond all recognition Perl script works long enough to work out whats going on can really make a dent in my patience. That said maybe I should follow Kent Beck’s (the father of XP programming) advice:

“Extreme programming is an emotional experience,” he maintains. “When you feel it, you understand.” Then he adds a typically cheeky metaphor. “Talking about XP and trying it are two different things – like reading The Joy of Sex versus losing your virginity.”

Perhaps when it comes to looking for my next job XP should be on my “would like to have” list along with reasonable working hours, time for training and decent pay!

web standards, noun

A large stick or cudgel, used by the slightly more anal-retentive to beat the slightly less anal-retentive.

Just a quote from “The Devils Dictionary”:http://www.eod.com/devil/, courtesy of Tom Coates’ “Plasticbag.org”:http://www.plasticbag.org. At least it was until the dictionary seemed to vanish – the domain homepage then being replaced with the following:

The difference between

find /local/www -print | grep error_log | xargs rm

and

find /local/www -print | xargs rm

is subtle,

but very, very important.

Another gem from the “oh sh*t” school of Unix administration!

Ben Hammersley, whose “blog(Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent)”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/004246.html I like despite the ads, is “off to Afghanistan(Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent – In which the plans are announced.)”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/004246.html. I wish him a safe journey, and the hope he sends back some good copy.

What is it with windows? When I tell it to kill a program, it should do what it says! Fine, bring up all the dialogs warning be that I might damage my data that you want, but when I say End Process it should end the process! When I kill -9 something on UNIX /Linux, it dies and stays dead. This problem seems to be indicitive of windows as a whole. Time and again it tries to do much for you. I wouldn’t mind if Windows was the Nanny State of operating systems, if it worked! If you are going to take control out of the users hands you’d better know what you are doing. Linux doesn’t try to do too much itself, but at least it works goddamit!

From a statement over at the “FSF(Free Software Foundation)”:http://www.fsf.org/

According to the Journal, Mr Heise announced that SCO would challenge the GPL’s “legality” on the ground that the GPL permits licensees to make unlimited copies of programs it covers, while copyright law only allows a single copy to be made. The GPL, the Journal quoted Mr Heise as saying, “is preempted by federal copyright law.”

This argument is frivolous, by which I mean that it would be a violation of professional obligation for Mr Heise or any other lawyer to submit it to a court. If it were true, no copyright license could permit the licensee to make multiple copies of the licensed program. That would make not just the GPL “illegal.” Mr Heise’s supposed theory would also invalidate the BSD, Apache, AFL, OSL, MIT/X11, and all other free software licenses. It would invalidate the Microsoft Shared Source license. It would also eliminate Microsoft’s method for the distribution of the Windows operating system, which is pre-loaded by hard drive manufacturers onto disk drives they deliver by the hundreds of thousands to PC manufacturers. The licenses under which the disk drive and PC manufacturers make multiple copies of Microsoft’s OS would also, according to Mr Heise, violate the law. Redmond will be surprised.

Not being one to blow my own trumpet (well, actually I am) but I made a “similar point(magpiebrain – SCO’s attack on the GPL)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000066.html a while back.

The Inquirer has a piece detailing SCO’s plan to “challenge the validity”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11031 of the GPL. Their argument hinges around a federal law which states that only a single copy of software may be made for backup purposes. By this reasoning the GPL’s is void, as it states that you can make as many copies of the software as you wish, as long as all copies (and derivative works) are also released under the GPL. Apart from the fact that the inquirer seem to confuse the whole issue of copyright (contrary to the article, just because you release software under the GPL it doesn’t mean that you don’t have copyright of the work, just that you’ve chosen to allow its use under the GPL), they also miss the point that SCO’s legal challenge to the GPL applies equally to other open source licenses, such as the Apache and BSD-style licenses.
I am sure that the original Federal law was drafted with commercial software in mind (the US government runs its fair share of Open source software), but it looks like we’re going to have to wait until next year at the earliest when the SCO-IBM case finally comes to court to see this point clarified.
_Updated (11:23am GMT)_: I sent some comments to the Inquirer and they seem to of updated their article a little, although the misleading comment concerning copyright seems to remain.