Since Friday, a spammer tries to spam me via pingbacks 😦
It’s nice that WordPress lets me move this comment to spam, it’s not so nice that the spam keeps coming back.
But I’m sure they’ll fix that soon 🙂
Spammers Found Something New
15. May, 2011
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Posted by digulla
New Approach to Documentation
15. May, 2011Documentation usually has these three attributes: It’s incomplete, outdated and plain wrong.
That doesn’t apply to every bit of information in your documentation but it you can be sure the statement above is correct for the whole documentation.
As a consumer of such documents, it’s a nice puzzler to determine into which of the three categories a bit of information belongs.
This leads to the common “we hate documentation” stance that all software developers soon adopt, no matter if they have to write/maintain the documentation or if they have to use it.
As we all know, the only reliable source of documentation are unit tests. But they can still be incomplete (= missing the example you need) or outdated (= missing examples for the latest API).
The solution? Generate documentation from the source code. And I don’t mean “from javadoc in the source code”, I mean literally from the code. If a method is used in a certain way in 317 places in your code and once in a different way, then you have two examples. One of them probably works, the other is probably documents a bug which your tests missed.
Eclipse is starting to get support for this. The first step was code completion. Now we have a couple of guys working on Eclipse Code Recommenders.
This summer, Stefan Henß starts to work on an “extended documentation platform” for Eclipse.
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Development Tools, Documentation, Eclipse, IDE, Source code | Permalink
Posted by digulla
RC1 of Testing Ready For Testing [Updated]
15. May, 2011I’ve recreated the testing repository using the latest version of my Maven Tools 4 Eclipse.
To browse the repository, please use the Nexus interface.
If you pull in any dependencies from the repository, non-Eclipse artifacts will come from from Project Orbit. If you want non-Eclipse dependencies (like log4j) from Maven Central, you need to change your profiles.
Deactivate “m4e.orbit” and activate “m4e.maven-central“. From the command line, that’s “-P m4e.maven-central” but I suggest to put these into your settings.xml (add “<activeProfile>m4e.maven-central</activeProfile>” to it).
Note that you don’t need to deactivate the profile m4e.orbit. As soon as you specify a profile on the command line or via the settings, it’s deactivated automatically.
“mvn help:active-profiles” and “mvn dependency:tree” are your friends.
Let me know if you find anything missing, odd, broken by filing a bug or posting a comment here.
UPDATE 2011-05-30
Some dependencies from the new repo can also be found on Maven Central. One nasty problem is that both repos contain org.eclipse.equinox.app but the version from Maven Central contains odd dependencies which break your build.
To fix this, add this to your parent/root POM:
<dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.eclipse.dash</groupId>
<artifactId>dependency-management</artifactId>
<version>3.6.2</version>
<type>pom</type>
<scope>import</scope>
</dependency>
<dependencies>
<dependencyManagement>
This will limit all version ranges to the versions found in our new repository. Since Maven Central didn’t import new versions for at least one year, this should fix all problems.
Related posts:
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Apache Maven, Eclipse, Java, Maven, Maven2, Project Dash | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Safe Browsing At Home
13. May, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
If you’re worried about security while you’re browsing the web (and you probably should), here is a simple solution that might actually work (or at least raises the bar quite a bit): BitBox (German)
In a nutshell, it’s a secured Linux system running Firefox 4 inside of VirtualBox. The browser can only access the resources of the virtual PC.
So to infect your real system, the hacker must: Break Firefox on Linux (which is hard), break Linux (hard), break through the virtual PC layer (not that easy either) to be able to infect your real PC (as opposed to just infect your PC).
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: BitBox, Browser, Firefox, Firefox 4, Linux, Mozilla Firefox 4, Security | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Maven Tools for Eclipse: M2 Repository Analysis And Dependency Management
13. May, 2011I’ve finished RC1 of my set of tools to import Eclipse plug-ins into Maven 2 repositories. You can find the source on github. It needs Python 2.7 and lxml. pip is your friend.
The new features: There is now a tool to analyze the M2 repository for oddities. Currently, it can find these issues:
- Dependencies which are used but not part of the repository
- Dependencies which are used with different versions or version ranges (i.e. when one POM includes a dependency with 1.0 and another POM pulls in the very same dependency with version 1.1)
- Dependencies which are used without versions or version ranges or a catch-all version like [0,)
- Several versions of the same artifact in the repository
Plus it prints a list of all POMs in the repo with files (jar, pom, sources, test-sources, …). Here is a sample report.
The last tool can create a POM file with a dependencyManagement element containing the versions of the POMs in the repository. You can use this to nail down all versions to the ones existing in your repository (so you don’t accidentally pull in something you don’t want).
Lastly, I’ve enhanced the patch tool. Instead of overwriting replaced dependencies, it will now move them into a new profile. This way, users of the repository can specify which dependency they want (the one from the repository or, say, one from Maven Central).
I will try to build a new testing repo over the weekend so we can start wrapping up the necessary patches for a release.
Related posts: Eclipse 3.6.2 Artifacts for Maven 2
2 Comments | Software | Tagged: Apache Maven, Eclipse, Java, plug-ins, Project Dash, Python | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Use Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 in Ubuntu
11. May, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
If you want to run IE6-8 on Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro that support VirtualBox), see this blog post: Use Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 in Ubuntu
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: IE, IE6, IE7, IE8, Internet Explorer, Linux, Ubunutu, VirtualBox | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Good comparison between JAXB and Simple XML
11. May, 2011Here is a good comparison between JAXB and Simple – XML Serialization: How Does JAXB Compare to Simple?
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Java, JAXB, Simple XML, XML | Permalink
Posted by digulla
31 Great Tutorials for Inkscape
10. May, 2011If you like Inkscape, visit 31 Great Tutorials for Inkscape
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Inkscape, Tutorials | Permalink
Posted by digulla
When JIRA Hates You
10. May, 2011Ever had the problem that JIRA would not allow you in? Every time, it would say “wrong user name and/or password”?
Using my crystal ball, I can see that you’re using Firefox.
You’ve been hit by the extra space bug. It’s open since October 2009.
I’ve opened an issue against JIRA: JSP-79797: Password mail contains space after password
Let’s see who moves faster.
2 Comments | Software | Tagged: Atlassian, Bug, Firefox, JIRA | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Missing Icons in Buttons (Firefox, Ubuntu Natty)
5. May, 2011If your firefox has forgotten about all the nice icons for button in the UI (i.e. if there is a back button but it has no label or icon and all the “close tab” buttons are just tiny little invisible buttons), this bug is for you: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ia32-libs/+bug/641056
If you start Firefox from the console, you’ll see errors like this one:
(firefox-bin:30535): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading icon: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Leave a Comment » | Software | Tagged: Bug, Firefox, Ubuntu | Permalink
Posted by digulla
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