the corner office : tech blog

It's a pity - with very few exceptions I've managed to avoid having gaps in my monthly archive list, but September just went *poof*.

Ironically, I wasn't entirely idle... the blog software isn't something I'm inclined to devote too much time to, but it needed a few things doing, and to make it all happen I needed an easier way to set things up and drop in changes. So I set up one VM wired up much like the one at my hosting provider. Then I set up another VM (Crunchbang, for the heck of it) which thinks that my domain names point to the first VM, so I could test redirects and virtual hosts etc etc. And then some scripts to push the right bits and bobs on the right place on the prep and real hosts.

Then a tweaked CSS file which is something that's needed doing for a while, and which has been made much easier with Chromium and Firefox's built-in web dev tools. I haven't done anything resembling web development in many many many years, and while Firebug was pretty good back then, the world has come a long way. It was fun spending a few nights tweaking the CSS and experimenting, but it did remind me why it's not my day job. Anyhow, two open source web browsers and they're both awesome. So here it is: voila!

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

This case really shows only one thing. The patent system, especially when it comes to software, is utterly and totally broken.

Man. Untold pain with Maven 3.0.4 and the maven release plugin with git. I haven't touched this stuff in over a year, using 2.something, and perhaps it didn't work properly then, either.

The biggest headache is that I want clean release versions, but I don't want to hard-code servers and paths into my poms. If I ever push the code to a public repo it's just noise, and my home set-up changes often enough, besides.

So, to get mvn release:prepare working with the local git repo, I did the following:

In the pom, I added:

<scm>
    <connection>scm:git:file://.</connection>
</scm>

and in the plugins section:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <pushChanges>false</pushChanges>
        <localCheckout>true</localCheckout>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Then because I don't have a distributionManagement element, mvn release:perform falls over. I could fiddle with the deploy goals, but I do have a 'private' (not local) repo where I keep my release builds. The trick is getting the altDeploymentRepository argument passed to the forked maven process:

mvn -B release:perform -Darguments="-DaltDeploymentRepository=id::default::file:///path/to/my/repo/"

(the -B hides the progress output when downloading)

Git relative pathing broken with release plugin (mvn release:perform borked with git and cygwin)

Tinkering on a few been-on-the-TODO-list-for-years things on the blog app, led me to the Tomcat JDBC Connection Pool and BoneCP. I don't need crazy performance, I just want to move away from JNDI and find something easier to set up in code than DBCP. So I'm going to try the Tomcat pool, and see how it goes.

• TechCrunch: So, That’s It For Thunderbird (official). Not really, since they're still maintaining and doing security patches. Pity but makes sense. Usual outcry: how dare you stop spending effort on a product I use but have never paid for or contributed code to. Pfeh.

Studies are over, and for the first time in 3 years I (notionally) have free time again. Programming in Scala 2nd Edition arrived in the post a couple of days ago. Lessee how this goes...

youtube-dl rocks.

CAST: computer aided statistics training

I've already got two jdk's installed, what more do I need to get maven running on the fresh new LXDE install?:

mavis ~ # aptitude install maven2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ant{a} ant-optional{a} antlr{a} bsh{a} bsh-gcj{a} ca-certificates-java{a} fop{a} gcj-4.6-base{a} ...
*snip eleventy billion other packages*
... maven2 openjdk-6-jre{a} openjdk-6-jre-headless{a} openjdk-6-jre-lib{a} rhino{a} tzdata-java{a} velocity{a} 
0 packages upgraded, 113 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 95.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 218 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.
mavis ~ # 

Think I'll just download my own copy and add it to my PATH, thanks.