Jan 13

Sometimes its amazing how slowly development can work. This bug, the lack of scrollbars for the headers panel in Thunderbird, has been open for more than three years. The fix, based on the comments, seems to be a CSS addition of less than 10 lines. The bug has 72 votes and 112 comments which should make it a fairly popular bug. Still, it’s not fixed in Thunderbird 2.0 beta 1.

Luckily, there is a great extension that does fix the problem, and with some hacking of install.rdf it seems to work in 2.0 beta 1 as well.

Nov 4
Languages of the year
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 11 4th, 2006| icon32 Comments »

Inspired by Bill de hóra I’ve tried to list the languages I’ve used the last year. This list might not be complete so it’s pretty likely that I’ll append some additional items later as I remember them.

  • Java
  • MQ script
  • Javascript
  • C#
  • ESQL
  • HTML
  • JSP
  • Velocity
  • JACL
  • CSS
  • SQL
  • XSLT
  • Relax NG
  • XML Schema
  • Ant
  • Jelly

As Bill, I find it interesting to follow up in a year and see how my behavior developers. This list has probably stayed fairly stable for the last three years or so. This year some of the web stuff (like JS and CSS) made somewhat of a comeback for me. I expect more of that for next year.

Nov 3
Almost Maven 2.0.5
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , , . | icon4 11 3rd, 2006| icon3No Comments »

Looks like Maven 2.0.5 might finally get out. Now, if they could only get up to speed on development once again.

Jun 22
Pulse getting closer
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 06 22nd, 2006| icon3No Comments »

A few weeks ago I blogged about the newest build server in town, Pulse. All in all it looked very promising for matching our requirements for work. Two major things was missing, dependent builds and LDAP authentication. Now both seems to be implemented, I just have to wait for 1.1 being released :-)

May 29
Got Pulse?
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 05 29th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

Lately I’ve been testing a bunch of the continous integration servers. I’ve gone through installations of CruiseControl, Parabuild, Continuum, Anthill, Luntbuild and now, Pulse.

Pulse is, for such a new product (current version is 1.0.4) an amazing piece of software. It got a very nice, intuative interface, support for the main SCMs (CVS, SVN, Perforce), SCM or timer triggered builds, support for the main build tools (Ant, Maven, Maven2, make) as well as custom builds. It also got a clever feature where the CI build defintion is stored with the source code in the SCM.

With the requirements we have at work, there are three major features missing, remote builds, project dependencies and LDAP integration. LDAP, which is a must have for us, is scheduled for 1.1. Remote builds is currently more of the nice-to-have type of requirement but based on the DamageControl matrix it seems like it’s planned for the near future. So, that leaves project dependencies (if project X has been updated, also build project Y and Z which depends on X). Feature has been requested (requires login) so hopefully it will be coming.

Even with these shortcoming, I think that Pulse got a bright future in this competitive space. It seems that Aussie developers just can’t fail these days.