What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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Tuesday November 23, 2004

Adding a file system hierarchy into a CVS module I had a whole bunch of code that needed to added to a CVS repository. Normally with just a new directory or two and a few files, doing "cvs add" for each one is no big deal. But when there's a whole file system hierarchy that can be a real PITA. This is where "cvs import" comes in handy.

I usually only use "cvs import" to create a new CVS module but it can also be used to do a "bulk add." Maybe it's common knowledge for CVS jockies but it's easy to forget about unless oft-used. Here's the scenario:

module webservice already exists with subdirectories perl, python and php
a new subdirectory java is in your sandbox and needs to be added and it has a complex hierarchy of source packages, jar files and test data
to add webservice/java do this
- cd webservice/java
- cvs import -m "adding java implementation" webservice/java vendorname tag
vendorname and tag aren't really consequentially, if doing for your company, that sounds like a good choice for the vendorname... the tag should be indicative of the CVS module change i.e. java_implementation_start

There, that's a lot easier than individually adding directories and files.

( Nov 23 2004, 11:09:35 AM PST ) Permalink

Friday November 19, 2004

Editing Perl with Eclipse and EPIC I've been bouncing between development in Perl and Java a lot this, two languages that I both love and loath at various times. One of the things that I love about developing in Java is using Eclipse. This week I decided to give the Eclipse support for Perl a spin. Well, I'll be saving my love for the Java support.

The only gripe I've heard about Eclipse that I haven't had a good answer for is the absense of Emacs key bindings. Otherwise, what's there not to dig about Eclipse?

Dollar costs

zilch

Support for refactoring

renaming and changing method signatures, moving them around... all with dependent references kept in tact

Extracting interfaces

OK, that falls under refactoring but worthy of its own mention

Source and javadoc stub automation

Spontaneous method stub creation, constructor and accessor creation, javadoc stubs

Test case generation and running

JUnit and ant awareness, yum

Syntactical and semantic error highlighting

Fixing errors early and often is easy cause they're usually obvious

I was hopefull that the EPIC plugin would provide at least some of those things for Perl development. This is what I found:

Syntax highlighting
Module outlining
Dependency checking (i.e. "use" statements validated)

OK, that's a pretty good start. But some things I wanted like syntax completion (i.e. when editing Java, you can type "for", hit shift-space to pull up options to loop over an array or a Collection and voila: a for loop is materialized.

The semantic checking hangs sometimes (a popup with "Building Workspace (Blocks User Operation) [thermometer bar] Invoking Perl Auto Builder" will just put it under spell for a brief period)
Sometimes the dependency checking makes mistakes... it'll falsely indicate a problem with a an import (a "use" statement)
No refactoring, build system, testing or perldoc support

...so basically all of the goodness you get for Java development is lacking for Perl. Nonetheless, I think it's a promising start. I'll be trying the EPIC updates from time to time as new occasions to develop in Perl present themselves.

In the meantime, you can enjoy the fruits of this week's labor by pulling it off of CPAN; that's where you can get WebService::Technorati. It's also part of the latest release of the Technorati web services SDK. Thanks to David Wheeler for turning me on to Pod::Simple::HTML ...I'm still trying to figure how he gets it to output nice docs from pod, mine didn't come out nearly that purty. Ah well, I guess that'll be part of next week's Perl fun.

( Nov 19 2004, 10:59:25 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday November 17, 2004

XML::Parser on Mac OS X I needed to fiddle with XML::XPath on my powerbook today, it depends on XML::Parser. Complacent with how most unixy things I want to do JFW on Mac OS X, I dropped down to my CPAN shell and typed "install XML::Parser" -- bzzzt!

It turns out that expat is not installed, grrr. So I fired up Fink Commander and had it gimme some expat lovin'. Tried it again -- bzzzt! This is what I did in the CPAN shell

cpan> o conf makepl_arg "EXPATLIBPATH=/sw/lib EXPATINCPATH=/sw/include"
cpan> install XML::Parser

-- ding-ding-ding! We have a winner! XML::Parser installed! Thereafter, XML::XPath JFW'd and I'm on my way.

( Nov 17 2004, 04:53:44 PM PST ) Permalink

Sunday November 07, 2004

Tomcat's "Content-type" header parsing busted? One bit fun this week was trying to figure out why some XML output I was working was mangling characters. I thought I was doing all of the right things as far as handling the data goes. Well, I think I was but Tomcat 5.0.28 wasn't.

I poked around the Jakarta bug database and the only mention I could find that close was PR 31442, which described having this

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

and saying that the text was coming back ISO8859-1 when the page is requested as a GET but not as a POST. Well, someone from the Jakarta project marked the bug INVALID glibly saying to ask on the user's mailing list and look at the Connector configuration because it's not a bug. WTF? Are you kidding?

Now I looked around in the Connector stanza's that come in the server.xml and see no mention of encoding configuration attributes. I've got a real simple test case.

<% response.setContentType("text/xml"); %>

triggers no funny encoding behavior, I get the data out as good old utf8 just as I wanted but if I did this

<% response.setContentType("text/xml; charset=UTF-8"); %>

....kablooey! Mangled encoding! That's just wrong. And if it's not wrong, I think it warrants a better answer than RTFM on the Connectors.

And the problem may not just be isolated to JSP handling. Judging from other reports that are turning up in Google's index pertaining to SetCharacterEncodingFilter, it's affecting the filter implemetation as well.

( Nov 07 2004, 02:46:58 AM PST ) Permalink

Saturday November 06, 2004

What are all of these stupid people doing in my country? There were some severe system problems last week that pretty much knocked this site out of commission, I'm hoping it's all in the past now.

In the meantime, the Big Lie that waging war on Iraq has some relationship to 9/11 and terrorism apparently has been successfully Jedi mind-tricked into the American psyche and we're destined to have four more years of high crimes and misdemeanors. It just makes me wonder what is up with the rest of the country. Plenty of folks abroad are, evidently, equally perplexed by this election, as we see in a recent Daily Mail cover.

If you're single, there are some Canadians offering asylum. I'm thinking of packing up the family and moving to New Zealand or something.
Just to keep track of where I don't want to be, I'm reckoning with the map:

	Strong Kerry (146)
	Weak Kerry (37)
	Barely Kerry (69)
	Exactly tied (0)
	Barely Bush (30)
	Weak Bush (66)
	Strong Bush (183)
	Needed to win: 270

Source: http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Do you live in a state of stupity?
Apparently 59,054,087 of you do.

Source: http://attenuation.net/files/iq.htm

State Avg. IQ 2004

1 Connecticut 113 Kerry

2 Massachusetts 111 Kerry

3 New Jersey 111 Kerry

4 New York 109 Kerry

5 Rhode Island 107 Kerry

6 Hawaii 106 Kerry

7 Maryland 105 Kerry

8 New Hampshire 105 Kerry

9 Illinois 104 Kerry

10 Delaware 103 Kerry

11 Minnesota 102 Kerry

12 Vermont 102 Kerry

13 Washington 102 Kerry

14 California 101 Kerry

15 Pennsylvania 101 Kerry

16 Maine 100 Kerry

17 Virginia 100 Bush

18 Wisconsin 100 Kerry

19 Colorado 99 Bush

20 Iowa 99 Bush

21 Michigan 99 Kerry

22 Nevada 99 Bush

23 Ohio 99 Bush

24 Oregon 99 Kerry

25 Alaska 98 Bush

26 Florida 98 Bush

27 Missouri 98 Bush

28 Kansas 96 Bush

29 Nebraska 95 Bush

30 Arizona 94 Bush

30 Arizona 94 Bush

31 Indiana 94 Bush

32 Tennessee 94 Bush

33 North Carolina 93 Bush

34 West Virginia 93 Bush

35 Arkansas 92 Bush

36 Georgia 92 Bush

37 Kentucky 92 Bush

38 New Mexico 92 Bush

39 North Dakota 92 Bush

40 Texas 92 Bush

41 Alabama 90 Bush

42 Louisiana 90 Bush

43 Montana 90 Bush

44 Oklahoma 90 Bush

45 South Dakota 90 Bush

46 South Carolina 89 Bush

47 Wyoming 89 Bush

48 Idaho 87 Bush

49 Utah 87 Bush

50 Mississippi 85 Bush

There you have it: the closer you are to the coasts or Lake Michigan, the more likely you're not a dumbass.
I was never particularly enamored with John Kerry, in fact I would've been happy with a Wesley Clark-Howard Dean ticket. Nonetheless, I don't think Kerry would have been so driven to a war that he would have disregarded counter-indicative intelligence and the advice of allies to wage one.
Another idea that no longer seems entirely ridiculous is to secede from union. Seriously, who wants to be part of this country when California's vote is under represented in the electoral college and yet our youth are being sent to Fallujah to wage war against a culture and people most people here know little of. We're the country's vegetable stand and it's cannon fodder. I don't think so. Suddenly, Ecotopia sounds like a reasonable proposition.
Independence for California!

( Nov 06 2004, 01:12:57 PM PST ) Permalink