A glimpse of the workflow around the Linux stable tree

Found this small fun to watch. Notice how using scripts and aliases can make things quite fast.

Reminds me when I was using quilt to manage extra patches on top of cruisecontrol (about 6 years ago...).

Groovy/java/maven: ultra short coding cycles, not

The whole Java (maven, groovy, gradle, ...) experience starts pissing me off more and more. I want to write code with ultra short compile/test cycles.

To wean

the unix way

2. To detach from that to which one is strongly habituated or devoted

$ grep 127.0.0.1 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 lemonde.fr liberation.fr rue89.com lequipe.fr alterslash.org aftenposten.no
127.0.0.1       www.lemonde.fr www.liberation.fr www.rue89.com www.lequipe.fr www.alterslash.org www.aftenposten.no

Deleting large amount of emails from gmail make your account unaccessible for several minutes.

My Gmail account has been too slow lately. As it approached 90% size, I tried to reduce its size, by deleting old mailing list emails.

I deleted 3 times more than ~50 k emails, and each time, my account became unavailable for several minutes (about 30), including through IMAP! Got several errors on the web page (16 or 17 and 67 if I recall properly).

You've been warned. Plan ahead if you try to do the same thing :)

Final words: I am now down to 57% gmail usage. Need to find or write a tool to be able to identify the culprits. Maybe some kind of FUSE IMAP file system to reuse something like baobab (aka http://windirstat.info/ for Gnome) ?

"To tag" en francais

Searching for how to write taguer/tagger/tagguer in French. I won't use etiqueter neither. Nobody will understand...

So I found this. Not sure that's conclusive either...

Fun read anyway. In particular the longest sentence written using the 4 ADN 'letters' A, C, G and T.

Here's my version:

"Cata, ta tata gaga gâta, tagga 'caca! tacatac !', ça t'agaça !

Kung-fu coding

Derived from KUNG FU FIGHTING (Douglas, 1974)

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

They were funky Geeky men from funky Geekytown
They were coding things up and they were hacking them down
It's an ancient Geeky art and everybody knew their part
From a fix into a script, and coding from the heart

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

There was funky Billy Joy and little Sam Ruby
He said here comes the big job, lets get it on
We took a bow and made a stand, started writing with the hand
The sudden action made me flip now we're into a brand knew trip

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

(repeat)..make sure you have expert timing
Kung-fu coding, had to be fast as lightning

Licensed under fair-use/parody/whatever you have to do to not get sued for copyright infrigement these days.

(first one to upload a video on youtube with him singing that song, dressed as a kungfu coder gets some drinks from me)

Interesting CI / test distribution strategy

From: the hudson user list

In order to split our build across multiple servers, we have implemented a JUnit "PartitionedSuite" class. When we run our build in maven, we say -Dtest=PartitionedSuite and we pass in an "x/y" parameter like "2/5" or "1/5". The "PartitionedSuite" class scans the classpath for JUnit test classes and puts them in "y" buckets based on the hash of the Test Class name, and then only executes the Tests in bucket number "x". This way, we just define the "x/y" parameter as a per-server variable, and execute the build on y servers, and each server runs one "Partition" of Tests.