TimShadel.com

I’ve played with Furl.net’s Site Integration and I’ve begun to wonder if there’s other content that’s useful in a sidebar. For example, could I take an RSS feed like CodeHaus issues submitted by me and turn it into a sidebar? Could I merge that with JIRA issues I’ve submitted and others to get a full watch list across several distributed systems? If so, I’m sure I could also do the same for open issues assigned to me. What about Confluence posts, and perhaps Subversion or CVS commits? Would it be beneficial? Interesting questions.

This piece —

Alternatively, if you’re taking a laptop, you can have Pebble up and running on Tomcat in 5 minutes.

From Simon Brown’s JavaOne tips got me thinking. I could use Pebble to edit my blog anywhere, and use Subversion to keep it syncrhonized. I think it would work. All the config and data files for Pebble are text (XML), and they all live in one directory hierarchy. I can use a local installation of Pebble on my laptop, at work, and at home. I can use Subversion to keep them in sync, and ultimately decide when a group of edits goes to my public blog site. Perhaps I’ll try it.

It seems like Dave and Andy do this, but they edit the source files directly. I know that bloxsom supposedly supoports using Subversion, but I never got it to work. Blosxom uses files as well, but Pebble vs. blosxom is meat for another post.

OK. I’m selfish. I want to know what GMail thinks of the various suggestions I’ve sent in. I want to know if I’m wrong, if I’m being ignored, or if I’m shelved while some really cool stuff happens first. I want to see what others have suggested, and vote for things I like.

So it’s official. The Open Source way of life has permanently corrupted me. I want deep information publicly accessible. I want to participate, and I want to see the group’s reaction to my input. I don’t care so much about Google’s code. I want Google to use JIRA in the Open.

Today I wanted to find out, using Ant, if any of a set of files existed. Based on that information, I would conditionally execute a target. Well, really I needed to solve a problem in Maven, but an Ant solution would plug in just fine. Here’s what I came up with:

<project name="test" default="test" basedir=".">
    <target name="test">
        <delete file="target\dir\status.file"/>
        <copy todir="target\dir">
            <fileset dir="target\dir" includes="*.xml"/>
            <mapper type="merge" to="status.file"/>
        </copy>
        <available property="test.any" value="true" file="target\dir\status.file"/>
        <property name="test.any" value="false"/>
        <echo>any.xml: ${test.any}</echo>
    </target>
</project>

That seems to work. The side effect is that one file is duplicated exactly, but only one.

I’ve just tried to checkout Pebble’s source, and build the evolving version of 1.5. I couldn’t do it. There weren’t any instructions on building that I saw, so I tried a few things.

• Run the setenv.bat file. This seemed to mess up my ANT_HOME.
• Run ant -projecthelp. This gave me a NullPointerException.
• Run ant. This gives me TagUnitTask cannot be found.

I don’t have the time or energy to dig in and figure out how the build system works, so for now I’ll wait. It’s hard to have all of the Prime Directives right all of the time.