Have you ever thought your manager keeps shelling out more on your plate other than the officially tracked tasks? Do not feel bad. You are not alone

My manager recently asked me to clean up the build server we use for our project. To put simply, it was a mess. I ended up deciding to start from scratch. Looking around, we quickly zoomed in on Hudson. A great build/CI server. Met literally all my requirements (one of which is extensibility – with the source for Hudson available as open source, we could not have asked for more!).

After many Hudson code changes and UI customizations, we now have a great CI server up and running. One of the code changes I did is to a plugin called email-ext. This enables customizing many aspects of e-mail notification that gets triggered. Unfortunately the stock plugin missed one important thing (at least to us!) – no way to get the user name who triggered the build.

I added a new variable called BUILD_USER to email-ext. When used in the email-ext mail template, this will get replaced by the user who triggered the build. Our server is plugged in to our corporate active directory and this plugin will pick up the logged in user name.

You will find the source code and binaries down below. Note that this is based off 1.3.4.2 Hudson code and is running in our snapshot very well. YMMV and do enough testing before putting in production. Do send me any bugfixes you make, I will make them available for download.

How to use this?

Copy the HPI file to your Hudson web apps folder. Restart Hudson. Go to <your job> => Configure. Scroll down to “Editable EMail Notifications” section. Click on “content reference” help to make sure BUILD_USER is showing.

See the highlighted text shown below.

Any instances of BUILD_USER will be replaced by the current logged in user. In case of timer activated builds BUILD_USER will show “timer”. In case the build trigger reasons cannot be found out, BUILD_USER will be replaced with “<unknown>”.

Attachments

Note that the above is modified from 1.3.4.2 source and is tested only with our 1.3.4.2 modified Hudson source.

After installation, I noticed my Windows server 2008 R2 booted in “Windows classic” mode. This was an eye sore, to say the least, after having used Windows 7′s themes. My machine has GeForce 9500GS along with the proper x64 driver. So I know it is capable of doing Aero. But, Windows “Personalization” option was not allowing me to select any Aero theme.

Quick googling showed me that I was not the first person trying to solve this – Here’s the link I used & found very helpful – http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/01/09/windows-server-2008-r2-beta-aero-enabled-workstation/. Though I had “Desktop experience” feature installed, my “Themes” service was not enabled.

I set it to “Automatic” and started the service. But, still Windows was not allowing me to set the Aero theme. If you are facing the same issue, remember to reboot at this point — that is after enabling the “Themes” service, do reboot once. Once logged in again, you will be able to switch to Aero!

BTW, its been close to 2 years now since I posted here — was heads down on a project all the time . We did a Wireless Display solution that recently hit the market. Will post more on it soon.

Demonoid, one of my favorite trackers, is down again. I was not running my torrent client last week, as it was used for doing “important” things like playing “Super bounce out” and “Half-life” by my relatives. I saw the “CRIA blocked us” message in Demonoid.com only this morning, a bad start to the week, I’d say!!

Demonoid.com lately has been giving lots of problems – site won’t load, blank pages, torrent files won’t download – all these irritating stuff, and now the site itself has “officially” gone down. Luckily the trackers are up, so your current downloads won’t be affected. Lets pray Demonoid finds a nice home in some country where people have other jobs than shutting down the torrent sites. How about Sweden?

Talking of Sweden, I read Prince is trying to curb Piratebay with the help of Web Sheriff. What a joke! Read this “fan article” to understand why Websheriff is such an interesting personality.

	CCleaner – The best utility for cleaning up the temporary files, IE/Mozilla/Opera cache and lots of other junk. This used to be called Crap Cleaner, If I remember right
	WindirStat – This tool allows you to visualize the file groups in your disk. There are umpteen number of tools out there that can do this, but I like the simplicity and effectiveness of this. Also, it runs off the shelf (no installation, I love it). Another thing I love about this small utility is its progress bars, it shows a pacman like character going from one end to the other, which is kinda cute! Check the images, click to enlarge.
	Duplicate File Finder – However organized you may be, you will be amazed to see what this tool digs out. It can apply CRC32 or MD5 on the files in your hard disk to find out the same content in multiple files. It takes its own sweet time to run, but very effective and highly recommended. An analysis on C:\ (120GB) is still running, almost 45mins now.

Let me know if you use some other tool not listed here.

I stumbled upon this interesting site today. It allows you to unleash (?!) your creativity by creating simple drag/drop operations. Above is my first cartoon, which is inspired by the happenings in my company Do let me know what you think!

If your Firefox is eating up memory, I suggest, start rootcausing by uninstalling the addons one by one. This’d atleast get rid of the addons from the problem space.

Below you can see the firefox memory consumption with and with out Adblock plus. Click the image to enlarge.

Before:

After:

Then, I noticed that the RPC server ping was not working. As you can see from the picture (click to enlarge, the RED ones are the errors), the coolcode.cn is returning a 503. My page just gets blocked for 19-20seconds, trying to get the rpc.php in coolcode to work! The site is obviously down and has taken all my videos down with it, I wonder how many more sites are also affected by this!

Man, how I wish I had installed the RPC server in my machine I couldn’t find a mirror with that zip anywhere. Till I setup my own RPC server, please do bear with the slow loading speed. Thanks.

Update (Mar 16,07 02:07pm IST): Hooray….the site is up and I have downloaded the needed zips

Update (Mar 16,07 03:00pm IST): Ok, I have the RPC setup in my machine now. No more worries.

I was staying in Penang. I checked out Bukit Jambul complex, did not find a decent enough deal or store. So, I went to Prangin mall in George town. The fourth floor, in the interior wing, is full of computers / electronics stores. Boy, did I have a great time there! I saw the Rw6828 there for the first time, though I have read online a lot about it. It was just released in APAC one week back, not anywhere else!

Basically, HP rw6828 is Quanta’s offering to O2 + HW/SW fixes + some cosmetic changes + more SW bundled + HP’s great aftersales service and customer support. The shop owner also offered me a 1GB miniSD + 1 leather pouch + 1 screen protector free. I went for it immediately

I got this photo off Pocket PC addict. I will update this with my phone soon.

I also picked up a Jabra BT-800 in Changi airport, on my way back home. Had no problem pairing this with rw6828. Works like a charm. The DSP for noise cancelling really works! There seems to be a firmware upgrade for this. I need to do it this weekend.

Some links:

- Rw6828 features
- HP official page for RW6828

As you can see from the perfmon output, one of my processor was sitting idle, doing nothing! Why isn’t Winzip using any threads to speed up things?? I became curious and decided to check out WinRAR 3.40. It is not multithreaded either! Is there some reason why compression programs don’t make use of the available CPU power to speed up things??

I got this idea from Adam Nathan’ s Channel 9 interview. He was demonstrating his WinFX based Hearts game and was actually going through the code using this setup.

Though I find this setup good for reviewing/coding/reading long documents, it actually a pain with Windows. There is a noticeable time lag in repainting windows, by my ATi driver. I am actually planning to go back to my old setup!

Yesterday I came across this Yahoo offer. Yahoo is finally allowing dots in email addresses. Good thing is you dont have to create a new account, instead Yahoo allows you to assosicate another e-mail Id with your existing one. You can get an extra email address here.

Yesterday, we decided to create our own custom tag library. Sudha wrote a prime number generator tag, a simple TLD and the corresponding taglib entries in web.xml. When deployed, it threw an exception “tag-class not found”. What the heck? Then we noticed our DTD was specifying a wrong version. After a quick fix, we deployed it again. Now, it threw an exception that said “PrimeTags definition not found”. It seemed that the server (weblogic) couldn’t find PrimeTags.class, our Tag handler class. We had it under /WEB-INF/classes. What could be wrong? We wrapped that tag handler in a package and redeployed the same. Now we got another error – “Bad class file. Current version is 49.0, expected is 48.0″, a quick search in Google told us that we are trying to mix java1.5 & java1.4 compiled binaries. Resetting the java_home / path variables to point to jdk1.4 solved the problem!!

Now the question is, why couldn’t the server pick up our class file when not packaged??

It seems the hardware/software has finally evolved to make this experience enjoyable (I “enjoyed” my encounters too, but thats more fun, this time it is serious business). Check out this post by John Udell.

Click here to see the SWF video of Udell trying his hand (voice!?) at dictating, with the latest Dragon Naturally speaking 8.0.

http://dolphin.twistification.net/

You need to download and install the Pulse client and create an account with them (all free). It sits in the background and counts the number of characters you type. Now, we can know when we are gonna get CTS….

Links to nearly all subjects in programming

http://www.geocities.com/kannanmr/extpgml.htm

Links to help you prepare for interviews (Found in SriHari’s blog)…

General Category:

1. http://www.cetus-links.org

C/C++ Interview Questions:

1. http://www.softcorp.demon.co.uk/c++2.htm

2. http://www.onesmartclick.com/interviews/interviews-programming.html

3. http://www.cpuniverse.com/newsite/archives/1999/mar/c++.html

4. http://www.oneparticularharbor.net/sam/interview.html

Microsoft Interview Questions:

1. http://halcyon.usc.edu/~kiran/msqs.html

2. http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/ASPscripts/PrintPage.asp?REF=/webtech/012700-1.shtml 3. http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm

4. http://www.acetheinterview.com/qanda/microsoft_interview.html

Puzzles(For Entry Level):

1. http://www.techinterview.org/archive/

2. http://puzzle.dse.nl/index_us.html

Operating Systems Notes:

1. http://williamstallings.com/Extras/OS-Notes/notes.html

2. http://www.ibilce.unesp.br/courseware/opsys/ostart.htm

Software Testing Notes:

1. http://louisa.levels.unisa.edu.au/se1/testing-notes/testing.htm

2. http://hebb.cis.uoguelph.ca/~dave/343/Lectures/testing.html

Mathematical Puzzles(For Entry Level):

1. http://thinks.com/webguide/mathpuzzles.htm

2. http://www.syvum.com/teasers/

3. http://www.eduplace.com/math/brain/

4. http://www.brainbashers.com/

Online books:

1. http://www.hk8.org/old_web/

2. http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/workshops/workshop/pthreads/MAIN.html#Mutexes 3. http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/nandigam/list.htm

4. http://pweb.netcom.com/~tjensen/ptr/pointers.htm

5. http://javafaq.nu/cgi-bin/url.cgi?name=http://www.scism.sbu.ac.uk/jfl/jflcontents.html

6. http://www.c-for-dummies.com/lessons/chapter.15/01/index.html

7. http://www.intelinfo.com/cat2-2.html#Critchie

8. http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html

9. http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/420/

10. http://www.nist.gov/dads/

for more links, click here (Thx Srihari)

http://www.bugmenot.com/

This site provides you with a username/password for all those pesky sites. If you have one username/passwd, you can submit them here too. How convenient!

There used to be a site (http://www.mailnator.com/) which gave you some random valid e-mail addresses for using in those registration pages. But, I guess, nowadays they are outta business.

One of my elder brothers has started learning computers, you know, all the basic stuff that everyone goes through when first exposed to computers – “Using DOS/Windows“, “Microsoft Office applications“, “Fox pro” et al. Yesterday, he was exploring my old machine (1 GHZ Celeron, 384MB SDRAM, 2 x 40GB + 17GB HDD, nVIDIA TNT2 64M) and was bragging about how his instructor goofed up one of the practical sessions and how he corrected him (typical statement from a person who has just entered in to Computer-adolescence! ). Usually I do not allow the conversation to go in to subjects that I don’t remember or I usually suck at! But, probably because of the heavy lunch I had just before this conversation, I answered “Yes” when my brother came up with “BTW, Kanna, Foxpro theriyuma unakku?” (BTW, Kannan, do you know Foxpro?). Immediately, he opened Fox pro 2.6 and asked me to explain how to do this, that, blah blah…

Gosh, that was one hell of a test for my poor memory. It got stretched beyond all sane limits But, I really enjoyed talking about those old beasts once again. Kind of hanging around with your school friends !

Here are some interesting links about those neanderthals we dealt with in our past life.

Some generic things

• Bill Gate’s interview to Playboy

Software museums

• Borland Developer Museum
• Online Software Museum
• Click here to see a list of all active Abandonware sites
• All SideKick versions are available here for sale. Just grab the covers

Some Fox pro stuff (v2.6). Hope my brother reads this. Naren anna, ithu ungallukkaga.

• Check out this Fox pro books list
• Can anyone get a job with their Fox pro 2.6 skills?
• Decompiler for Fox pro 2.6 compiled modules – http://www.softpile.com/Development/Databases_and_Networks/Review_22778_index.html

In Word, If I choose one of the TSC fonts then everything looks fine…but how do I do that in Blogger? Should I specifically mention the font directive everytime?? What to do if I use of the blogger software available, like w.bloggar? What does Murasu’s “Convert to Unicode” feature do? I guess I will lose interest in Tamil blogging by the time I make this work!

This page has a collection of more than 3000 tutorial links on the web and it looks really a very good compilation.

check it out: http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/programming.html

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/versioncontrol/article.php/c3129

This solution makes use of Application_BeforeBuildStart() handler to increment the RC VERSIONINFO. The Build # is incremented even for failed builds.

http://www.codeproject.com/cpp/rcversion.asp

Not exactly an auto-increment solution. This allows you to enter the version info during the build process.

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/article.php/c3183

Another solution posted in CodeGuru. It is assignable to any key and when invoked it updates the RC “FileVersion” field and does “BuildToggleBuild”.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q237870

Solution posted by MS. The autoincrementing code is attached to Application_BuildFinish(). It updates a #define in versionno.h which is included by the user resource file (RC2) .

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=Tip-AutomaticBuildVersion&forum=totd&id=-1

I haven’t tried this. But, the author claims to combine the best of MS & Codeguru (second one) solutions.

I used a modified version of the solution from MS (mine didn’t update the RC; instead it updated a H file that was included across the project). If there is a neat/effective solution for this, let me know.