Fag On FOSS

If you can see this - it works!

Posted in My Brain | No Comments »

At Atlassian about 90% of my work is with Maven - so I’m editing a lot of XML every day. One invaluable tool I’d like to share is xmlindent.

Reformatting poorly formatted XML is as easy as

$ xmlindent -w crappy_formatted.xml


Posted in Atlassian, Build and Release Engineering | 2 Comments »

Erik, the pictures shown of the BCode scanners remind me of something out Startrek - Love itk

Posted in My Brain | No Comments »

Dear Google,
Excited as I was about Android I was even more excited to hear of the Dalvik virtual machine. Being a self styled VM geek, I went to go check your stuff out. But alas, no source dump on Google Code yet?

Can it be source time now please?

Your devoted fan,
James

Posted in Google | No Comments »

I don’t usually blog about company stuff but I was a little excited today.

We shipped Confluence 2.8 today, our wiki product. My non-company-sponsored word on it is this - Its shit hot.

We have redesigned pretty much the whole UI - it feels much more comfortable and intuitive to use. Check it out over here.

Congrats to the Confluence and Documentation team - you have truly out done yourself.

Posted in Atlassian | 1 Comment »

Thank you to Benno, Suzie and Anya for Burrito! We love him!

Posted in My Brain | 1 Comment »

For the last few weeks I have been working on a project called “Rhodes”. Rhodes is aimed to be a desktop automation scripting environment for the Linux Desktop. With Rhodes, users will be able to write small scripts to automate simple (and perhaps complex) tasks using a few lines of JavaScript.

For example, a user might want to create a script that helps them sync their portable music device. The script could prompt the user with some questions about the genre’s of the music they would like to sync and then query HAL for portable music devices and allow them to choose the device from a dialog. Rhodes will eventually provide a simple set of APIs that will make these kinds of automation tasks possible.

The current preview release does not contain this functionality yet but I’m working on it.

The APIs as mentioned above are able to be written in Python then exported to the Mozilla JavaScript runtime. Python was chosen so that developers working on API’s for Rhodes would not be messing around in C so that these API’s can be developed and prototyped quickly.

In the rhodes-python module a developer can make a Python object available by simply doing the following in Python:

In helloworld.py:

from rhodes import *

def printout(value):
	print value

def join_string(string1, string2):
	return string1 + string2

r = Rhodes() #Create a new Rhodes runtime
r.export(printout) #Exports the printout method to JavaScript
r.export(join_string) # Exports join_string method to JavaScript
r.run("helloworld.js") #Runs the JavaScript

Which then the python methods can be accessed by the following in JavaScript:

In helloworld.js:

var x = join_string("Hello, ", "World!")

printout(x);

When you run the python script (You will need to have the python-dbg package installed on your system) like the following:

james@plex:~/tmp$ python-dbg helloworld.py

The runtime will export the methods to JavaScript runtime, run the JavaScript and kindly output the following:

james@plex:~/tmp$ python-dbg helloworld.py
Hello, World!

To get the source code thats compatible with this example you can get it here.

Or if you want to have a look at the source code you can grab it using Baazar by:

bzr clone http://beta.unstated.net/~james/code/rhodes/

I’ll post more about Rhodes in a couple of days or so but for now your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome.

UPDATE: I’ve used the LGPL 3.0 license for Rhodes

Posted in My Brain | No Comments »

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m in the need of a curses (or curses like) diff viewer for some deployment scripts I am writing.

I would like to have two panes showing different files and how they are different.

Anyone know of something that could fit my needs?

Thanks,

Lazy Coder

Posted in My Brain | 6 Comments »

A most amusing bugzilla issue for the Mozilla project.

I quote:

"If profanities in source code is worth mentioning in a "negative" for a
review... I take that as a badge of honor.  If they need to dig that deep, lets
give it to them."

Posted in My Brain | 2 Comments »

The recently announced Microsoft Surface looks conceptually the same as research as done by Edward Tse.

By clicking visiting Microsoft Surface website and then clicking on the “Origins” link at the bottem of the page, you can learn that beyond a doubt (ahem), that Microsoft were the sole inventor of the concept.

But no one has accused them ever of capitalising on other peoples ideas.

Posted in My Brain | No Comments »