Today I found two tools for testing: Byteman and YouDebug.

While I haven’t have a deeper look at Byteman I realized that YouDebug is writte by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. And it is very funny to recognizing him after Args4J and Hudson with another project. The world is small and you’ll see another every twice … or more

My laser printer Samsung CLX 2160 worked very fine under Vista. But now I have upgraded to Win7Ultimate and it does not any more. Ok – new OS, new search for drivers …

I found a new driver on the Samsung page. But after installing I even couldnt print. The OS silently ignored print jobs. I tried to check the settings, but I always get the error message

Then I got an idea: maybe the (default) access rules are too restrictive. So I tried to widen them (Everybody: configure the printer, configure the documents)

And now it works

77 Windows 7-Tips by Jeffrey Hick, Don Jones, Pav Cherny, J. Peter Bruzzese and Bill Boswell.

Webcast zur Windows Power Shell 2.0 by Holger Schwichtenberg. In this first of three episodes he talks about Commandlets, Pipelining, direct use of .NET- and WMI-Classes and remote access.

Java: If you want to have the diff between two lists (Arrays.asList(„a“, „b“, „c“) vs. Arrays.asList(„a“, „c“, „d“)), then you should have a look at this blog entry.

Microsoft Press publishes a new eBook „Deploying Windows 7″ for free. It is an introduction by the authors from Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine.

If you are interested in Darth Vaders daily routine … here are some pictures.

DE: Webcast: NET for JEE-Developer – In this first of six episodes Golo Roden shows „From Java to C#“

With „Mastering PowerShell“ there is another free eBook available. Content: The PowerShell Console, Interaktive PowerShell, Varables, Arrays and Hashtables, The PowerShell Pipeline.

For a long time an idea travelled in my head. But now it arrived.

In my several Ant build files I have constructs like

<javac source=”${javac.source}” debug=”${javac.debug}” target=”${javac.target}” …

and the according properties defined in an external file. Now have a compile run for the source code and the test code and you have doubled this amount of configuration. And I thought that just writing a <javac> and starting with an -autoconf option would be easier.

The idea is: apply the properties directly before the task execution.

So I could implement a method call in oata.Task.perform() direclty before calling the execute() method.
Hhm …. I don’t want to change the Ant core that deeply because so many external tasks exist and I don’t want to (maybe) break their build.

Another idea is using an AOP framework like AspectJ for jumping in: before <? extends Task>.execute() : applyAttributeValues()
(I am not familiar with AspectJ but you get the idea.)
But then I would depend on the AOP library. That’s nothing for the Core. And Ant options should not depend on any further libraries.
I could implement it as a task:

  <project><autoconf/><javac/></project>    

Better. But I have to learn AspectJ … so not for now…

On the Hudson dev-mailinglist I heard from the Hudson Clover Plugin. It gatheres code coverage from Ant jobs WITHOUT configuring the job itself.-It adds a BuildListener which stores the srcdir and destdir values from <javac> tasks.
Nice idea …. use the Listeners taskStarted(event) and taskFinished(event) methods for doing AOP-stuff.

This results in the <autoconf> task, currently in the sandbox and feedback is welcome.

The goal:

• apply attribute values from properties
• do not overwrite user specified values
• switch on/off the behaviour
• support name prefix for using different values for different targets

While the last two points are easily to implement (add/remove the listener, use a prefix for property search) the first two are difficult.

apply attribute values from properties / which attributes are supported by a given task?

Why is this difficult? Just ask mytask.getClass() for declared setters ….

The problem is that you don’t get the task object. Due lazy instantiation/configuration the only thing you get from the BuildEvent is an UnknownElement. And therefore you cannot just ask getClass() for the class object you need.

I saw three different strategies according to that value:

• if it is a <macrodef> I could ask it directly for its <attribute>s
• if it is a normal task I ask the class object
• if it is a <presetdef> I ask the class object from preset.getTypeClass()

do not overwrite user specified values

I could ask an object for its values, but which are set by the user and which are just implementation defaults? From the Java perspective you cannot distinguish between them…

My strategy is using a “clean” object (I called it template object) and compare its values with the values from the given object.

I just searched for "cloud computing" at amazon(.de). The suggestion for alternatives was very funny (Fahrradlampe – bicycle light?):

Microsoft has announced two analysis tools for security wholes: BinScope Binary Analyzer and MiniFuzz File Fizzer. The first one checks for forgotten security flags and the second checks against flow patten.

There is a nice paper about risks in cloud computing:

• Stalking in Amazon’s EC2
• Sidechannel Attacks
• Data Leakage through CPU Caches

If you are in N.Y. or Toronto and interesting in modeling, the Eclipse Modeling Days could be interesting for you.

German: event series about server virtualization.
Thu, 12.11.2009, Pullmann Hotel Köln
Wed, 18.11.2009, Gastwerk Hotel Hamburg
Thu, 26.11.2009, Novotel München Messe

Galileo publishes the „Linux Handbuch“ as free available OpenBook.

German: Microsoft publishes the eBook „Windows 7 – Auf einen Blick“ for free (since 31.10.2009). A free chapter is directly available, for the whole book you have to register.

DE: Screencast-Serie zur Windows 7-Kompabilität
How to install Win7 as VHD-Boot, create a PE-Boot DVD, .NET, Win7 API, …

EasyWeb4J: Java-Webanwendungen à la Ruby-on-Rails

DE: Video-Vorschau auf JDK 7

C# 3.0 – Pocket Reference; 230 pages C# knowledge

How to Secure a Web Server with Solaris 10

DE: SoftwareArchitekTOUR – Podcast. Nice episode about Cloud Computing

Microsoft Patterns & Practices publishes a new series about developing acceptance tests.

With Blende 8 Galileo Deisgn presents a video podcast about fotographing. New episodes will be available all 14 days.

VMWare provides several free information events about vSphere 4 in Germany, Austria an Switzerland from 26.August till 29.October.

Galileo Computing created a video training about VMWare vSphere4 – 83 lessons and 10 hours.

I also found a blog about a question someone was interested in too: Why is that action not available?

According to that roadmap MS Windows 8 is intended for 2012 with cluster support, one-way-replication, inproved file handling …

Denoise My Image is a free tool for improving the picture quality.

My favorit: Launchy is a free small app for starting programs, documents, urls … with just a jew keystroke.

Oracle provides free ebooks about SOA (after a registration). Content is

• Grid Enabled Architecture: Move to Modern Service Oriented, Grid Enabled Architecture
• Business Process Management: Achieve Business Flexibility through Oracle BPM
• Business Activity Monitoring: Stay Agile Responding to Changes in Real-time
• Data Integration: Integrate Data at High Performance and with High Productivity
• Application Integration Architecture: Accelerate Application Integrations
• History: Service-Oriented Architecture Milestones
• Case Studies: Comprehensive, Preintegrated, Hot-Pluggable Middleware

On 24./25.November there is the ix-Day – this time about Cobol. CfP ends on 28.September.

A nice toy (maybe a tool also). Draganfly is a quadcopter which transports and controlls a photocamera or videocamera. So you can take your own pictures from the air.

The VCC team at https://vcc.dev.java.net/ is pleased to announce our first bleeding edge pre-alpha release of the Virtual Computer Control API (version 0.0.3) and associated implementations (version 0.0.3) and plugins (version 0.0.1). The Virtual Computer Control API is designed to be a virtualization platform agnostic API for controlling (Ant, Maven, Hudson) virtual computers (VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation, Xen, KVM, QUEMU, libvirt, VirtualBox, AmazonEC2, xVM): list, start, suspend, stop and pause a virtual computer, take a snapshot or revert to a snapshot, clone a virtual computer, query their network settings.

There is a free ebook how to install Windows 7.

RMBench Relational Modeller is designed to be a one-stop Eclipse-integrated solution for grapically modelling relational databases. But sadly there arent any screenshots online. So you have to compile and install it for yourself.

JSR-294 Jigsaw & OSGi - maybe somewhere in the middle? Peter Kriens, BJ Hargrave and Richard Hall suggested a new approach for the moludarization in Java – not as complex as OSGi and Jigsaw, but compliant to the OSGi specs.

Microsoft Research publishes Code Contracts. Speaking with Java terms (sorry I dont write .NET code) the basic concept is a validator class which takes several closures. Then you could validate your object/parameters:

static private int TraditionalValidation(int Input1, string Input2, List Input3)
{
Contract.Requires(0 <= Input1 && Input1 <= 100);
Contract.Requires(Input2.Length > 5);
Contract.Requires(Input3.Contains(500));
Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result() >= 0);
…
}

When I read that two things poped up in my mind: the Notification Pattern and the validator for Ant tasks.

PHPUnit 3.4 is a stop before release.

Cloudera announces Hadoop World: NYC 2009.

CatsWhoCode lists 15 regexps for PHP developers:

1. Validate domain name
2. Enlight a word from a text
3. Enlight search results in your WordPress blog
4. Get all images from a HTML document
5. Remove repeated words (case insensitive)
6. Remove repeated punctuation
7. Matching a XML/HTML tag
8. Matching an XHTML/XML tag with a certain attribute value
9. Matching hexadecimal color values
10. Find page title
11. Parsing Apache logs
12. Replacing double quotes by smart qutotes
13. Checking password complexity
14. WordPress: Using regexp to retrieve images from post
15. Generating automatic smileys

On 4.September there is a Symfony Day in Cologne, Germany. This one day conference about the PHP framework will be helt in English.

Joel Reyes from NoUpe wrote about PHP frameworks. After in introduction he compares

• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• Symfony
• Codelgniter
• Seagull

Stefan Priebsch publishes his slides from his webinar „Migration to PHP 5.3″.

Microsoft publishes an eBook about virtualization for free. The title „Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions“.

Recently I wrote how to get a list of failed jobs in Hudson.

Rob Whitlock asked how to restart that list.

Here is the code:

joblist = hudson.model.Hudson.instance.items.findAll{job -> job.isBuildable()}  

startServer = "admin computer"
startNote   = "bulk start"
cause = new hudson.model.Cause.RemoteCause(startServer, startNote)
joblist.each{run -> run.scheduleBuild(cause)}

In the first line I just get a list of jobs from somewhere.

The interesting part is line 6: here I start the build or more precise – reschedule it. Hudson starts it somewhere in the future.

There is a scheduleBuild() method without argument, but it is deprecated. That’s why I create a ’cause’ first. So the build knows why it is run. Usually you have a „started by user XYZ“ or „started by upstream project“ here.