1. the official news will now be hosted from our Confluence space at Codehaus (the switch is transparent for Feedburner subscribers)
2. like most Atlassian tools, Confluence is such a superb piece of software that I have launched a call for contributors to rewrite the documentation there (if you have reasonable writing skills then please step-up!)

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You can now officially download a cross-platform installer for Groovy!

I’ll prepare an updated version within the next few days with some important patches from the current development versions.

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I recently decided to revamp my academic homepage and use some nicer tools than what I had been using before. I chose a drastic solution: I bought the ponge.info domain name and switched it over to Google Apps. For the very low-price of a domain name, I am now putting most of my stuff “in the cloud”, and I must admit that I like very much!

First off I used to redirect my professional email addresses to GMail, as I’m much more efficient with it than with a traditional MUA. Oh and it filters spam so well! The first thing I did was to create an email address on the domain for this purpose. This way I have now a “professional” mailbox with all the benefits of GMail, minus the problems of having my personal and work emails mixed together.

The second thing I activated was Google Docs. I’m using OpenOffice.org all the way for office things (minus LaTeX for serious writing and Apple Keynote for presentations). Given that Google Docs is highly friendly both ways with the OpenOffice.org documents, I’ll have a place to put some materials like teaching lectures, quick notes and so on.

I have also activated Google Sites, the very nice wiki solution that they provide. I like the fact that you can quickly put up sites online. I have already added one for my publications, and I already envision to create spaces for some of my lectures, and put assignments and other teaching materials here. Great stuff, really.

The last thing I did was to set-up some web pages at http://julien.ponge.info/. This content is expected to be relatively static anyway, so all I wanted was an easy-to-use solution for editing pages remotely with minimal efforts. The editor is not as great as the Sites/Docs ones, and I had to fight it at times. The themes are ok, but you should probably avoid looking at the source code… and obviously you should offer more themes, Mr Google.

I’m quite satisfied with it anyway: the page creator fits the need in the end of the day. Indeed, if you browse the pages content, you will also discover that:

• I’m not the typical academic
• I’m industry-friendly
• I’m under contract for one year with my university (this is not renewable, and things are pretty much open after that)
• I’m interested in a new research direction that should fit me quite well, and for which there are tons of applications: “Next-generation version control and software distribution infrastructures”.

Feel-free to share you experiences with Google Apps and/or thoughts on the rest of this post

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Pack200 compression offers a drastic reduction of the installers size. The flip side of the coin is of course that it takes much longer to create an installer

On the IzPack installer itself, enabling Pack200 reduces the installer by 4Mb.

The way it works is simple: all you need to do is add an empty pack200 tag in your info section of your installers, then every JAR that is added to a pack is compressed. As a special exception, signed JARs are not compressed using Pack200 (remember that Pack200 is only semantic-preserving). It should also be noted that the Pack200 compression that has been implemented is highly aggressive as it also strips debug symbols. Feel-free to send us a patch if you would like a more fine-grained Päck200 compression.

Here is a small excerpt:

<info>
   <appname>IzPack</appname>
   <appversion>4.0.0</appversion>
   (...)
   <requiresjdk>no</requiresjdk>
   <pack200/>
   (...)
</info>

If you want to test the feature, you will need to get IzPack from its Subversion trunk.

Finally, there is more to come in IzPack 4.1 in terms of installers footprint reduction. I’m really glad that Google released Protocol Buffers, as I was going to develop a similar binary data encoding system. Indeed, IzPack currently relies a lot on Java objects serialization (which is costly), so switching to more compact data encodings will drastically reduce the size of installers. My personal test case for this will be Glassfish v3 from Sun. Stay tuned

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Mix (2008.06.29)

Enjoy!

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By the way, I am a doctor since tuesday (July 1st 2008)

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J’ai changé par mégarde la sonnerie de notre téléphone de bureau l’autre jour, sans savoir pourquoi ni comment celle-ci avait changé. Évidemment nous nous sommes retrouvés avec une sonnerie horrible : un bip qui ressemble à un reboot de PC

La solution est assez simple :

1. appeler sur le téléphone Alcatel (depuis un autre téléphone évidemment …)
2. appuyer sur 1, 2, 3 ou 4 pour choisir une sonnerie

Et voilà !

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Subversion 1.5.0 est officiellement disponible !

Le principal apport de cette version est qu’il va enfin être possible de fusionner des branches de façon simple et intuitive. En effet la technique habituelle pour gérer des fusions répétées entre deux branches consistait jusque là à noter le numéro de révision de la dernière fusion pour le réutiliser dans la prochaine fusion.

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Shortcuts to asadmin, the update center and the uninstaller are now created in the start menu hierarchy:

The Windows Add / Remove Software settings box will also display an icon for the Glassfish installation:

Lastly, the installer was generated from a snapshot of the IzPack Subversion trunk.

Oh and I forgot one more thing: the Glassfish installer has been downloaded at least 1326 times in May

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One thing that is highly important when you manage a JIRA project is to take some time to set-up a customized dashboard.

A customized dashboard is extremely helpful to have some stats on your project and don’t loose a bit of information on important issues. Leave an issue without at least an acknowledgment that someone took notice of it and your project will get a bad reputation quickly by making unhappy users.

Here is an overview of my dashboard for IzPack at Codehaus:

The first piece of information that I like to have is a roadmap and progress bars for the upcoming releases. Just below it a created vs resolved issues graph gives me an overview of where we are going with the project handling of issues. There will always be more issues created than resolved, but what is important is to measure how the gap between them evolves over time.

I then put some fancy graphs regarding the issues. They are nice to have and certainly useful.

On the right hand of my dashboard I keep a list of important issues. Those views play a highly critical role in my case.

• I track the issues that have been assigned to me. Memory is a versatile resource
• The unassigned and unresolved issues are quite important. Those ones need to be checked, assigned, scheduled or closed quickly if invalid. Enhancements and new feature requests can stay here for a while. This should however not the case for bug reports.
• The unscheduled issues are open and not yet scheduled, but at least someone has been assigned to them.

As I am still learning JIRA, feel-free to drop suggestions on how I could be even more efficient with it

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