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.

Couple of months back, I was working on a chess application. I will not be able to discuss it further here, as I still think that app idea is a good one and is highly marketable. My chess GUI had to support UCI engines. UCI (Universal Chess Interface) is a protocol used by Chess GUI to talk to chess engines (see Figure 1). There are other GUI <-> Engine protocols, like Winboard, but UCI is an effort to create a standard. Since my software had to support all the existing UCI engines, I decided to understand the UCI protocol fully. I looked around for some way to capture the UCI transactions that go in between the GUI and the engine, but couldn’t find any tool to do that. So I wrote my own.

[Figure - 1]

In the attached file, you will find uciplug.exe, the main UCI tracer application. Tracer is a simple pump, which works as shown in Figure 2:

[Figure - 2]

It acts like a network repeater, by passing on everything it gets (either from the engine, or from the GUI) to the corresponding recipient, the only difference being it also logs that message to a file. Multiple instances can be used for running more than one engine simultaneously.

Download

How to use UCIPlug?

Download UCIPlug from above. There is nothing much to it. Just treat uciplug.exe as any other chess engine. The step-by-step process is given below:

1. Create a directory under your Chess GUI’s engines folder for each engine you want to capture UCI messages. Put a copy of uciplug.exe and the engine executable in that directory.
2. Open uciplug.exe.config XML file in a text editor. Put your engine executable name (with out the path) in “EngineName” field.
3. Open your Chess GUI and install the uciplug.exe from the newly created directory to load your engine.

uciplug.exe, by default, dumps all the UCI messages to “pluglog.txt” in the current folder. If the file already exists, the new contents are appended to the existing file.

For example, lets say you use Chessbase GUI as your main chess GUI and want to capture the trace between this GUI and Toga (a freeware UCI chess engine), the changes you need to do are shown below.

Step1: Create subdirectory

Create a directory TOGA under %CHESSBASE_ROOT%\Engines folder, where %CHESSBASE_ROOT% is the installation directory of Chessbase. Copy uciplug.exe, uciplug.exe.config & toga.exe to this directory.

Step2: uciplug.exe.config modification:

:

:

<setting name=”EngineName” serializeAs=”String”>
<value>toga.exe</value>
</setting>

:

:

Step3: Installing the engine in Chessbase:

Goto Engine > Create UCI Engine

[Figure-3]

Select the uciplug.exe from %CHESSBASE_ROOT%\Engines\Toga using the “Browse…” button. Press OK. Thats all, now you can go ahead and setup an engine to engine fight.

Sample log: [CMD represents the GUI command, RSP represents the engine's response]

uciPlug.exe Information: 0 : PUMP: Engine toga1.exe started @ 2:33:54 PM
uciPlug.exe Information: 0 : PUMP: SETUP complete
————————————————–
RSP: Toga II 1.3.4 UCI based on Fruit 2.1 by Thomas Gaksch and Fabien Letouzey. Settings by Dieter Eberle
RSP: EgbbProbe not Loaded!
——-|CMD: uci
RSP: id name Toga II 1.3.4
RSP: id author Thomas Gaksch and Fabien Letouzey
RSP: option name Hash type spin default 16 min 4 max 1024
RSP: option name Search Time type spin default 0 min 0 max 3600
RSP: option name Search Depth type spin default 0 min 0 max 20
RSP: option name Ponder type check default false
RSP: option name OwnBook type check default true
RSP: option name BookFile type string default performance.bin
RSP: option name Bitbases Path type string default c:/egbb/
RSP: option name Bitbases Cache Size type spin default 16 min 16 max 1024
RSP: option name MultiPV type spin default 1 min 1 max 10
RSP: option name NullMove Pruning type combo default Always var Always var Fail High var Never
RSP: option name NullMove Reduction type spin default 3 min 1 max 4
RSP: option name Verification Search type combo default Always var Always var Endgame var Never
RSP: option name Verification Reduction type spin default 5 min 1 max 6
RSP: option name History Pruning type check default true
RSP: option name History Threshold type spin default 70 min 0 max 100
RSP: option name Futility Pruning type check default true
RSP: option name Futility Margin type spin default 100 min 0 max 500
RSP: option name Extended Futility Margin type spin default 200 min 0 max 900
RSP: option name Delta Pruning type check default true
RSP: option name Delta Margin type spin default 50 min 0 max 500
RSP: option name Quiescence Check Plies type spin default 1 min 0 max 2
RSP: option name Material type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name Piece Activity type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name Piece Square Activity type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name King Safety type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name Pawn Structure type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name Passed Pawns type spin default 100 min 0 max 400
RSP: option name Toga Lazy Eval type check default true
RSP: option name Toga Lazy Eval Margin type spin default 200 min 0 max 900
RSP: option name Toga King Safety type check default true
RSP: option name Toga Extended History Pruning type check default false
RSP: uciok
——-|CMD: quit
PUMP: Hit a quit in the stream. Quitting!

Future plans:

• It’d be cool if we have some kind of GUI to visualize the log.
• Have the same instance support multiple engines, instead of separate uciplug instances.

Disclaimer: Note that this is not production ready code and meant to be used only for learning purpose. This utility is not even in Alpha stage, so am not responsible for any kind of damage that may occur by using this tool. I’d appreciate if you let me know of any problems, though.

[Update: May 14, 2010 - Fixed the download link]

I read with interest the article on their Chessbase Light 2007 software. It provides nearly all the functionalities of the full-fledged Chessbase DB software, one of their flagship products, for FREE. Of course, the catch word in the above sentence is “nearly all“. BW, CB Light allows only viewing, you cannot create databases or save games using that. For that you need to upgrade to CB Light Premium, which I guess is the same as Chessbase starter pack minus Bigdatabase 2007/Player encyclopedia/CB Magz.

The activation screen looks like the above screenshot (NOTE: I am using the screenshot provided by CB). When I saw this I was like ‘Eh?? What stupidity!!”…Do you see the captcha field in that window? Captcha are used for preventing the bots doing automatic signups, spams et al. Is there any sane reason why the user has to type the code shown in the image????

“Oh, ok…may be this code is part of the activation process”, I thought.

When I went to the site meant for generating Activation key, I didn’t find a field for entering the abovementioned captcha code. Then why the heck the CB Light programmers decided to show the captcha code in CB Light? Beats me!

Note that I may be totally missing a valid reason behind having that captcha in a desktop program, if so I’d appreciate if you’d enlighten me!

We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me

FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.

The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!

I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.

BDLC covers both web and desktop applications. The best part is, it doesn’t assume any prior programming knowledge. I am pretty sure this is a great resource and is gonna boost the Windows developer base exponentially!

Some interesting topics from BDLC

• Web as a platform. The absolute basics of browsers, HTTP et al
• Kids corner
• RSS reader project
• ASP.NET events and postbacks

I have bookmarked some for my wife to go through, this weekend. I am pretty sure I will be directing her to this site more often from now!!

define MONTHS_SIZE 12

typedef struct __monthNoPair
{
char *strNoMonth;
char *strMonthName;
} monthNoPair;

static monthNoPair months[] = {
("1", "January"),
("2", "February"),
("3", "March"),
("4", "April"),
("5", "May"),
("6", "June"),
("7", "July"),
("8", "August"),
("9", "September"),
("10", "October"),
("11", "November"),
("12", "December")

};

char *getMonthFromData(int noMonth)
{
int i;

for (i=0; i < MONTHS_SIZE; i++)
{
if (atoi(months[i].strNoMonth) == noMonth)
return strdup(months[i].strMonthName);
}
return NULL;
}