iTunes and incoming connection requests

Some times ago, iTunes has started to ask me every time it launches “Do you want the application “iTunes.app” to accept incoming network connections?”. It gets quickly annoying.

There is a very simple solution. Move iTunes.app (from /Applications) to your trash, download iTunes and install it. The first time you start it, iTunes will ask you to change your firewall settings. Do so and you will be good to go.

If you want to know the tiny details, somehow your iTunes package got changed or corrupted and the firewall was not trusting iTunes anymore.

VPN connection after sleep

Another problem I had was that after the laptop goes to sleep, it is sometimes impossible to reconnect to a VPN. If that happens, you need to restart the right daemon. Open a terminal and run

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.racoon
sudo launchctl start com.apple.racoon

You are now able to connect to your VPN again.

If all of the sudden, Gradle raises Frankenstein errors at you like

$ gradle clean build
:buildSrc:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:buildSrc:compileGroovy
Note: /Users/manu/projects/notbackedup/git/core/buildSrc/src/main/groovy/org/hibernate/gradle/testing/database/DatabaseMatrixPlugin.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.
>>> a serious error occurred: hudson/util/DBAllocation
>>> stacktrace:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: hudson/util/DBAllocation
at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredMethods(Class.java:2427)
at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods(Class.java:1791)
at org.codehaus.groovy.vmplugin.v5.Java5.configureClassNode(Java5.java:318)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.lazyClassInit(ClassNode.java:263)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.getInterfaces(ClassNode.java:341)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.declaresInterface(ClassNode.java:929)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.implementsInterface(ClassNode.java:909)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.isDerivedFromGroovyObject(ClassNode.java:899)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.isGroovyObject(AsmClassGenerator.java:2752)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitPropertyExpression(AsmClassGenerator.java:2728)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.expr.PropertyExpression.visit(PropertyExpression.java:55)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitAndAutoboxBoolean(AsmClassGenerator.java:4122)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.makeCallSite(AsmClassGenerator.java:2182)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.makeCall(AsmClassGenerator.java:2019)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.makeCall(AsmClassGenerator.java:2005)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.makeInvokeMethodCall(AsmClassGenerator.java:1990)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitMethodCallExpression(AsmClassGenerator.java:2342)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.expr.MethodCallExpression.visit(MethodCallExpression.java:75)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitBooleanExpression(AsmClassGenerator.java:1959)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.expr.BooleanExpression.visit(BooleanExpression.java:40)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitIfElse(AsmClassGenerator.java:913)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.stmt.IfStatement.visit(IfStatement.java:41)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.CodeVisitorSupport.visitBlockStatement(CodeVisitorSupport.java:35)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitBlockStatement(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:165)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitBlockStatement(AsmClassGenerator.java:738)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.stmt.BlockStatement.visit(BlockStatement.java:69)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitIfElse(AsmClassGenerator.java:921)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.stmt.IfStatement.visit(IfStatement.java:41)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.CodeVisitorSupport.visitBlockStatement(CodeVisitorSupport.java:35)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitBlockStatement(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:165)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitBlockStatement(AsmClassGenerator.java:738)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.stmt.BlockStatement.visit(BlockStatement.java:69)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitClassCodeContainer(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:101)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitConstructorOrMethod(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:112)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitStdMethod(AsmClassGenerator.java:626)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitConstructorOrMethod(AsmClassGenerator.java:601)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitMethod(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:123)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitMethod(AsmClassGenerator.java:696)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassNode.visitContents(ClassNode.java:1039)
at org.codehaus.groovy.ast.ClassCodeVisitorSupport.visitClass(ClassCodeVisitorSupport.java:50)
at org.codehaus.groovy.classgen.AsmClassGenerator.visitClass(AsmClassGenerator.java:276)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit$12.call(CompilationUnit.java:748)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit.applyToPrimaryClassNodes(CompilationUnit.java:942)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit.doPhaseOperation(CompilationUnit.java:519)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit.processPhaseOperations(CompilationUnit.java:497)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit.compile(CompilationUnit.java:474)
at org.codehaus.groovy.control.CompilationUnit.compile(CompilationUnit.java:453)
at org.codehaus.groovy.tools.FileSystemCompiler.compile(FileSystemCompiler.java:67)
at org.codehaus.groovy.tools.FileSystemCompiler.doCompilation(FileSystemCompiler.java:180)
at org.codehaus.groovy.tools.FileSystemCompiler.commandLineCompile(FileSystemCompiler.java:148)
at org.codehaus.groovy.tools.FileSystemCompiler.main(FileSystemCompiler.java:162)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: hudson.util.DBAllocation
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at groovy.lang.GroovyClassLoader.loadClass(GroovyClassLoader.java:696)
at groovy.lang.GroovyClassLoader.loadClass(GroovyClassLoader.java:793)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
… 52 more

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ‘:compileGroovy’.
Cause: Forked groovyc returned error code: 1

* Try:

Run with –stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with –info or –debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Simply nuke the Gradle cache from your project. I don’t know if they are supposed to be in a standard location but for Hibernate the following commands did the trick

rm -fR .gradle
rm -fR buildSrc/.gradle

I wonder what will happen first, tools just working or world peace

Votes start soon (sept 19th) and end oct 31st. Go cast your vote, it’s always nice for an (open source) team to receive such a prize. And no I don’t think any JBoss framework is contending.

One of the category is Open Source CMS. Two of the big contenders in this space are Drupal and Joomla!. I have been involved in setting up Joomla! for my friend and… wife. I’ve got to admit that if I had to do it again, I would use something like Jekyll or Awestruct (my current favorite in this category). The website targeted was fairly simple but very quickly she ran into limitations and badly generated HTML (at least not customizable enough from a CSS point of view). She is a marketing person, so if she has decided that the picture, menu, color, text need to be that way, it must be that way. Teaching her Markdown and a few extra HTML tag is trivial. Heck she even learnt how to hack some CSS sheets. The big limitation is of course the lack of ready to use templates. That’s about the main issues for simple solutions like Jekyll or Awestruct.

Next time you deploy a CMS, consider a simpler HTML generator and see if it could fit your needs.

PS: My wife’s website is at Innora.fr.

I will personally be there to talk about Hibernate OGM and be part of a panel on Code and Cloud. I’ve put more information on my professional blog.

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 14400

where 14400 is the time in seconds between two backup intervals: 4h*60mins*60secs = 14400 seconds.

Make sure to restart the backupd daemon after setting this value. If you are unsure how to do it, simply restart your machine.

Follow this procedure:

• retrieve the .kth file (that’s the keynote extension for templates)
• alternatively open the .key file containing the theme you are interested in
• double click on it or open the file in Keynote
• In the File menu, click on Save Theme...

The file will be stored in ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Keynote/Themes.

This technique is known to work for Keynote ’09 (5.1) on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

It is so true that I always travel with two headsets in case one fails. And yes once both failed on me and I had to buy some at the airport. Funnily enough, that’s when I’ve discovered Klipsch and more specifically the Klipsch Image S4i.

Here are my unconditional requirements:

• they must isolate from the outside world sounds (in-ear)
• they must have a remote control compatible with iPhones
• they must have a microphone for phone calls

The Klipsch Image S4i is one of the most comfortable headsets I have ever had. Their oval shaped ear inserts are fantastic. Also, they survived 11 months of intensive usage (that’s about 600 hours in my case): a durability record for me.

What I like in them:

• price: for this level of quality and comfort, this is a good price point
• comfort: they are very comfortable in your ears even for long periods of time
• durability: real-life tested
• no friction noise from the wire: some headsets propagate the friction noise that the wire makes when moving on your cloths: that’s extremely annoying. This is not the case here.

What I don’t like:

• the remote is a bit too far from your mouth and too heavy (hint: Apple gets it right)
• the clip to attach the wire to your cloths is cheaply designed and I lost it eventually
• the wire length is a bit too long for my usage

I won’t discuss sound quality because frankly, my ears are not good enough to really appreciate and report on it. Check out other reviews for this kind of info. That being said, this model generally has good reviews.

That’s it. If you have the same kind of criteria that I have, definitively give it a shot.

Awestruct is a project started and lead by Bob McWhirter, a JBoss fellow known amongst other things for the awesomeness of his project names. Let me tell you this tool is fantastic. It is a ruby based tool that generates a fully static website (.html, .css and resource files) based on:

• content written in a few available markup languages (Markdown is one, haml is another)
• layouts letting you template the structure of your website
• style via Sass, a superset of CSS that ends up generating .css files

I am not a web savvy guy. I know HTML a bit and CSS half a bit. Actually, I know that the best resource on the web is w3Schools.com and that’s it. I was able to redo my website in about half a day from downloading Awestruct to deploying the generated site. The beauty is that I can now add pages very easily in an extremely consistent look.

Another useful part is Awestruct extensions and helpers. While the site is a static website, any content you can generate based on some structured data can end up as a part of your website:

• a blog (ie take elements in a directory and render them as blog entries including the rss feed)
• display a tag cloud and generate the list of pages per tag
• display the list of your project releases
• your own extension (if you know some Ruby, you should be good)

Now add some dust of Javascript and you can add things like

• Google Analytics integration with one line of config
• Comments support on your static website thanks to the javascript integration with IntenseDebase.

What I like about Awestruct is that the good libraries are picked for you (Haml, Compass-style etc) but the killer features are two-fold:

• you can tell it to deploy and it will rsync the new website for you in one simple command (it has profiles too like dev, staging and production)
• you can store everything in Git

Now you have a Git stored, simply deployable, easily customizable and templated website. With a bit of scripting you could get people pushing content in Git and get the website automatically generated and published. Heck you can even generate content automatically as part of a project release and script that (my dream!).

Awestruct sites are in the middle between fully dynamic sites reading stuffs from a datasource and purely static pages manually edited. It’s kind of a dynamic static website.

The only feature I miss is a search engine but one could imagine:

• generating index pages during the website construction (/index/emmanuel.html, /index/hibernate.html …)
• get some piece of Javascript that read queries and do n intersection of the content stored in all matching indexes

Bob, got some free time?

Which leads to a second problem. Should we trust votes on the internet?

They come in diverse forms:

• vote for a technology in an award contest
• up vote a link on DZone or Digg
• up vote an answer on StackOverflow (awesome site BTW, I wish all support forums were like that)

In a non biased environment, the vote at stake resolves itself in an organic way within a given community and thus is closer to a result that would have been run on the full targeted corpus. But if one of the contender reaches to his community and asks to vote for his product, the vote does not reflect the natural interest of the product but more the power of the contender on his community (like a bot master sending a command for all the bot slaves to vote). Let’s be a bit less cynical and call this marketing power. All in all, this is not the result we are interested in.

Even when no competition is at stake, bias is right around the corner. How many times have you had to argue the merits of a vote result posted to a biased community and getting the marketing guy answering “I know but that”s the best we can do and we will treat this results essentially at face value”? I’m pushing here but you get the idea.

A better voting system would:

• properly define the corpus (community) targeted
• ignore votes from outside the corpus (ie Grand’ma voting for Hibernate OGM because his grand-son worked on the project)
• inform the whole corpus of the vote at stake

StackOverflow’s voting system is quite close to this though if you consider that most people monitor questions under a given set of tags and that a tag is quite close to a corpus (community). Also, the sheer number of questions makes it less likely to (ab)use the power of your crowd, at least on average. I’m sure though that questions of the style “what’s the best product for…” are biased.

I’m not sure how to properly define a system that would ensure such organic voting system (let’s call it the green vote), but that would be a nice little project. A few ideas:

• people register to the voting system
• they list the communities they belong to (Java, Hibernate, Programmers etc)
• they are not authorized to vote for x weeks (to avoid “hot questions”)
• questions on a given subject targeting a community are run through a random subset of the valid community members
• people not voting to enough questions are excluded out of the community (is that a necessary rule?)

Such a system would have a few interesting properties

• it would be mainly unbiased
• results would be comparable over time (ie could see the evolution of a community toward a subject

WDYT?

Note that binary vote (vote for one candidate/solution only) is less than optimal in itself but that’s another topic.