Posts tagged Office
How to get logged-in username in Hudson?
Mar 3rd
Quick background
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>”.
Intel-speak during out-of-office hours
Aug 8th
There is no denying that the corporate work culture has a big impact on our off-office life. For example, if you are a SW development manager by profession, you automatically tend to map many of the things learnt in the office on to normal house activities – ‘Lets put a detailed requirements list for the the new entertainment unit we are going to buy this weekend”, “Hmm…this seems too risky. We need to think of the mitigation plans now before going on with this!”. If your partner is not from IT background, God help you!
How many times have we checked ourselves after looking at the blank / quizzical stares from others?! It has happened more than once in my case! Today, during lunch time, I decided to watch out for Intel lingo that people use. Kinda funny to notice so many of the corporate terms becoming a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.
Chaos!
May 25th
Lot of things happening right now in my life; Am stuck in the middle of a group transition, with the additional responsibility of arranging a function in my house (Ahhh!) + my pet projects demanding more and more time….Whew, I wonder how the company senior VPs and GMs manage to squeeze in some time for their family amidst their busy schedule!!
I managed to setup a full fledged media center last week, at last! I moved over from TVersity to Vista Media center, using my Xbox360 as the extender. Setting up transcode360 was pretty challenging though…I will post regarding this later. Also, fixed my old computer (a P4), so now I can use this as the download-station (?!) and leave my C2Duo for other important things (hmm…like, movie watching, browsing… 
)
Amidst all this chaos, over the past 3 weeks I managed to watch around 10 East-Asian films too, don’t ask me how!
- JennyJuno (Japanese)
- RPoint (Korean)
- The legend of the seven cutter (Kariseuma talchulgi) (Korean)
- Infernal affairs (Korean)
- Dog bite dog (Gau ngao gau) – Vietnamese/Cantonese/Thai
- Suicide club (Japanese)
- Death note 1 & 2 (Japanese)
- Shaolin soccer (Chinese)
I have the Infernal affairs (2 & 3) and Romantic Warriors DVDs, don’t know when I will watch them.
Finally caught up with the reports of Mtel masters 2007 by updating my Chess blog, today. Starting this Sunday, World Chess Candidates matches are also starting, I hope I get enough time to watch them live (I know, I know, it is too much to ask for!). One thing I haven’t been able to concentrate is my Chessvideos blog, will appreciate if someone can help me out there.
Management Gibberish
Mar 30th
An effective way to stop managers talking!
If you don’t see the image above, click here. Some more of my images are availale here.
Performance appraisals – Should they be so complex?
Mar 21st
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.
Meeting the customers!
Jan 31st
[Sorry, Dilbert image no longer available]
This reminded me of my conversation with one of my customers (internal) last week. I was trying to sell him my teams tool. I setup a meeting requesting him to give us what his generic requirements are (basically what he is looking for!), so that we could make a detailed presentation of our tool geared towards his req. He declined that meeting request asking how he could give me the requirements with out knowing what my tool can do. It took a long time to convince him to tell us what he was trying to do and why he approached our group in the first place!
Workplace redefined!
Jan 29th
I have rearranged my monitors, this time to make it easier for me to read lengthy contents
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!
Goodbye E5076
Sep 29th
My team is moving to sixth floor tomorrow. I have got a big box sitting in my cube, which I have to use for packing all my junk. Who knows? I might find my parker which I lost 2 months back. Kidding apart, I am worried about my Z-Pro. Can I depend on the office boyz to take it safely upstairs to my new cube? Hopefully, yes! So, goodbye E5076 & Here I come K6152!
