There are a million ways to do CI.  My goal is to keep it as simple as possible.  Concepts:

• My target projects include multi-platform C++ applications, Firefox addons, cross-platform desktop apps, mobile apps, and web apps with lots of JavaScript and JavaScript libraries.
• I want to use a simple-to-use very-capable cross-platform scripting language.  I’ve concluded that I will use JavaScript via Node.js.  It is async and portable from the day it was born.  Installing a node.js module for scripts means they are available from any path on any platform’s command line.
• For CI tasks, I will avoid dependencies on anything else.  The core Node.js API is very capable.  Modules are available if needed (eg the amazing aws-sdk) but will be avoided whenever possible.
• I need intelligent placement of CI windows (eg a popup shell for build-on-save).  My Ubuntu i3 window manager is capable of this, as is Autohotkeys under Windows.  These auto-placed windows will always run cross-platform node scripts.
• If you want to use Powershell, for the love of all that’s holy, make sure you fix its terrible default of hiding debug output with:

     $global:DebugPreference = "Continue"

• Goals:
  • on code save: automatically build
  • on code commit: automatically build, do any custom build steps, run any unit tests, run any end-to-end tests, and report results dynamically
  • on app production release: compile artifacts, assist in automatic versioning

See the wiki for details.

I’ve put off upgrading my XBMC media center forever, as it has Just Worked for years, and I was using an old hw raid box that newer kernels didn’t like.

Then a drive in my raid went bad, and I realized I’d better upgrade or die. I started by copying the system to a second drive and trying to reboot off of that. But the root was ext3 and the second drive was ext4 and it wasn’t going to work without some tweaking, which is hard on an oooold system. So it was “put up or shut up” time…

Here are the adventures of me brutalizing my old gentoo box into upgrading (let’s see you do THAT with any other three-year-old distro)… (continued…)

A new release of Hang The DJ (v 0.8.2) is available on Sourceforge.

Features:

• mobile client can stream your collection to you on all mobile platforms
• desktop client UI makes it easy to add and remove new DJs and get your songs rated fast
• multiple user and multiple server support makes sharing easy

Send me an email if you want help trying it out.

I have a couple of urls that have become quite attractive to spammers as of late, for some stupid reason. Stupid in that most situations involving spam are stupid, as the inefficiencies would make anyone of any intelligence balk at the very concept. But still, many desperate and immoral thugs persist.

My urls that appear to make spambots salivate with misguided hope are those that allow anonymous users to add content that will be later displayed to others. Specifically, there are two:

• anonymous trac ticket creation
• wordpress comments

Both trac and WordPress have fantastic tools that fight spam (Akismet, for one, is priceless). These tools prevent tons of spam on my sites every day. But thanks to mindless bots, the spam, while pretty much always unsuccessful in creating tickets due to Akismet and captcha, can morph into the DOS category. I was getting 5 apache requests every second, 24×7.

I started using mod_evasive to stop the flood, which certainly helped. But it did not break the spambots to the point where they gave up. I was dealing with some seriously inept and overzealous spambotting – I don’t even have heavily trafficked sites. What recourse is left if you just. keep. getting. mindlessly. hammmered!?

I got out the big gun and decided that, in the case of my trac ticket site, it was better to just move the whole damned url. The ticket site is a part of a larger site devoted to my music player project, and valid users should really navigate through the top site anyway. It took me a while to decide this was best. It’s certainly not optimal for supporting a site that might be heavily bookmarked by end users. It’s kind of out of the box thinking. But in my case it was worth the cost.

For trac, it was just a matter of a couple trac.ini and apache config changes, and then changing the referring websites.

trac.ini:

[trac]
base_url = https://mysite.com/mynewurl

apache conf:

WSGIScriptAlias /mynewurl /var/lib/trac/apache/trac.wsgi

I am loving cross-platform development with Qt, it’s robust and logical and leads to amazing native desktop apps. Before getting started, I expected that there would be lots of platform-specific hackery required, and going cross-platform would slow down the end product by 20-30%. But Qt is so reliable, and well-laid-out, and provides so much more than just lowest-common-denominator functionality, that I’m finding it to be much faster than, e.g., developing a desktop app with C# or Java.

Another reason it is giving me leverage: [n] compilers are better than one. (continued…)