September 10, 2010

SPoE: Dud fuses, mvc fun and Mockups

So SpringFuse was a dud. In the end it was just wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m trying to learn java and spring along the way and the library conflicts were getting out of hand. I dumped it and more or less zeroed out my checkout. On the bright side, trying to debug springfuse taught me quite a bit about maven, java dependencies,Â using eclipse for debugging, and spring classes.

September 3, 2010

SPoE Update: findbugs, emma and springfuse

So far,Â getting infrastructure in place has been much easier than actually doing any coding. As it stands now, I have added the following helpers: Cobertura and Emma: Code coverage. Findbugs: finding obvious bugs in my code PMD: Find other problems in the code. So far that’s all I have- bells and whistles to distract me from doing actual work. Ideally they’ll help keep me honest about code quality, but this early in the game they don’t offer much value.

August 28, 2010

SPoE Roles Vs. Classes

One thing I knew going into creating SPoE was that there were two types of users, Reviewers and Authors. Authors are essentially Reviewers with an expanded view. Since I’ll be using Spring and MVC, it made sense to make Reviewer a model class and Author a child class. Then I could simply add the functionality to Author as needed. I’m starting to rethink that; Spring Security has the concept of Roles, which I’d originally planned on reserving for regular users and admins, but now I’m thinking that it might be a superficial distinction.

August 21, 2010

SPoE: Slow but steady.

So I have a few user stories; time to start putting the infrastructure together. So What have I decided on so far? Language: Java Framework: Spring* Repository: Subversion IDE: Eclipse Continuous Integration/ Deployer: Hudson Build Automation: Maven2 I’m in the process of getting all my pieces together and in place. I’ve set up a subversion repository and eclipse. I have a very basic .war file setup committed and a maven script to build the war file.

August 17, 2010

SPoE: User Stories

This is intended to be a set of user stories/use cases for the author beta-reader site I intend to build (the initial article can be found here). The purpose of this project is to create a site where Authors can go to have their content beta-read. Site is meant as an author-to-author tool for critiqing snippets. User Stories User Account theme As a user I want to be able to log into the site [done] I want to be able to create an account [done] I want to be able to change passwords [done] I want to configure profile information [done] I want to be able to recover passwords via email [done] General User stories

August 17, 2010

Beta Reading and the Quest for Critiques.

I’ve written three books- not my cheesy guitar tab book, but three actual manuscripts. The problem I have is editing; I can’t seem to make it good enough to show to others. This is fairly common with authors (I’m told), so I’m not really surprised by it. One coping mechanism is to have a beta reader review parts of your work and give you feedback. Jackie has been harping on me pretty hard to find a beta reader to review some of my work, which will hopefully give me the confidence to press on and get past the nine-month-long editor’s block.

August 15, 2010

How Does my Garden Grow?

Not too great, to be honest. Some things grew great only to not produce, while others were surprisingly abundant. Starting from left to right, these are notes for myself for next year. Parsley: Survived the winter only to be transplanted to a planter and die. Next year will keep it in the ground. Chives: Gangbusters. more than I’ll ever eat. Will keep them around. Cillantro: Seeded out too quickly, but produced well.

July 25, 2010

Revisited: Epson Perfection v350 on Ubuntu

Jackie wanted me to reconfigure her scanner (since she hasn’t used it since I reloaded her system a while back) and I remembered what a pain it was to configure. A quick google search turned up the article I wrote three years ago, so I thought I’d do follow-up article to see what’s changed. Get the Drivers Since my last installation, things have changed. a bit. Many different distros are now supported, so we don’t have to shoehorn the RPMs onto the system with Alien.

July 13, 2010

Raw WinXP Virtualbox Partitions on a Thinkpad

New job, new laptop. Many utilities here are windows only, so it requires a bit of… effort… to get myself up and running efficiently. The solution to the windows problem is VirtualBox. I had set this up on my last laptop with little effort, but this time around required a bit more effort. Hopefully the instructions below will help others get up and running quickly. Disclaimer– your laptop may catch on fire and explode (or worse) if you attempt this… or something.

June 30, 2010

The Philosophy of Monitoring

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.