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Intel X25-M rules on Ubuntu 9.04

admin — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:17:44 +0000

I finally got tired of waiting for the prices to drop further so I bought me a little from-me-to-me present, the Intel X25-M SSD. Ubuntu 9.04 already boots pretty fast, but with this drive it’s amazing! As you can read from the chart belove it takes around 10 seconds to get to the login screen. When I bought it I had hoped that it would make NetBeans and compilation of some semi-heavy Java projects more snappy, but it turnes out that the CPU was a much larger bottleneck than I had expected.

Using Hudson to autobuild Maven2 project on Subversion (SVN) commit

admin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:49:32 +0000

The last days I’ve been testing out Hudson (in between lots of good Christmas food of course). Hudson is “an extensible continous integration engine”. That’s fancy-talk for what I like to call a build engine. It’s able to get updates from your SVN server and build the Maven project while keeping track of tasks, unit-tests and a lot of fancy things. The whole thing is extensible through a set of plugins. Hudson is really simple to set up, just download a jar file and run java -jar hudson.jar. Configuration and plugin download / installation is done completely within the webinterface.

I wanted to know whether it was possible for Hudson to build the project each time someone commits to SVN. It turnes out that there is two possibilities, a) Hudson can poll your version control server or b) you can use subversion hooks to notify Hudson of commits. Since we don’t like polling we’re going for the push method! Ps! I assume that you’ve already configured Hudson to pull updates from your SVN server and build the project.

In your svn repository folder you’ll find a “hooks” folder containing a lot of .tmpl files. As you might have guessed we’re using post-commit.tmpl. If you’re on Linux create a new file called “post-commit”, make it executable with chmod +x post-commit. Fire up your favourite browser and find the configuration interface for your project inside Hudson. Check the box saying “trigger builds remotely” and write your secret token in the text box. We’re going to need that token when we’re setting up our hook script.

It’s time to edit our post-commit file. I used something like this:

#!/bin/sh
wget -b http://your-hudson-url:8080/job/your-project-name/build?token=your-secret-token > /dev/null

Now after every commit subversion will execute this file and Hudson will build your project automaticly!

Sun is making a huge mistake with JavaFX

admin — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:03:41 +0000

Sun has released version 1 of their JavaFX today see relase announcment with out any form of Linux SDK, nor mentioning anything of when or if the Linux community can expect to see any support. I think this is a huge mistake in todays marked.

Even Microsoft(!) has realized that they have to add Linux support for their Silverlight platform and is doing so together with the help of Novell and their Moonlight project (whom actually had their second beta release two days ago).

It is going to be reallyt exciting to see all the competing RIA plattforms evolving the next year. Adobe obviously has a rather large head start with their FLEX platform due to the huge adoption of Flash. Microsoft has the money and monoply to support Silverlight which leaves Sun broke and desperate.

It pains me to say so I’m afraid that JavaFX is a last desperate act, although they deserve a smack for letting developers stuck with the horrible state their applet mess for so many years!

VirtualBox with USB support under Ubuntu Intrepid

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:00:38 +0000

As it turnes out you need VirtualBox non-free in order to get USB support. Bah.. That’s one wasted hour trying to activate USB support in the free edition you find in Ubuntu’s repositories.

Once I figured that out it turned out to be really easy. Just append this line to /etc/fstab

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=666 0 0

… and install the non-free edition from http://virtualbox.org