Lunar Ocean

Tracks

2009-01-01T21:40:44Z

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to have a working system to organize myself. I need to empty my mind somewhere, and paper solutions don’t work anymore.
I also have issues with scheduling items. I don’t have so much to plan, I really need to use deadlines though.

I tried Remember the milk in the past. It’s super easy, but you need to enter a subscription to access the iphone interface.

I also tried using SugarCRM, but the interface is too complex.

I headed to Chandler, tried the desktop application, installed the server. I didn’t like having one more application running on the laptop, as nice as it looks. The server was consuming quite a lot of memory too, and my modest VPS didn’t like it.

I tried the tasks list in gmail ; not too convinced yet, it’s lacking features to organize items.

Tracks

I found Tracks by accident. I was looking if somebody had done a todo list with Rails, before I started eventually having to do one.

It looks awesome. It has a good multi-user support, you can manage projects, you can create tasks with contexts, you can share them. You can publish them in ical format or RSS.

Installing Tracks on your VPS

To install Tracks, I downloaded the latest release, unzipped it in a directory owned by www-data, and used Passenger for the configuration:

<VirtualHost 67.207.128.50>
   DocumentRoot /var/tracks/public
   ServerAdmin admin@localhost
   ServerName tracks.lunar-ocean.com
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/tracks-error.log
   CustomLog /var/log/apache2/tracks-access.log combined
   <Directory /var/tracks/public>
      AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I tried using MySQL as the backend for the application, but there was an error while creating the database schema. Using Sqlite, as it is recommended by default, works just fine.

If there was really something to complain about…

I spotted a few inconveniences so far:
Tracks is licensed as GPL. That’s a problem for me when I intend to build on software that uses this license, that shouldn’t be the case for me.
Deadlines can be set on dates only, you can’t give them a particular time. I’ll try looking at the code and proposing a patch to the Tracks team if that helps.

JDTc

2008-12-29T22:33:19Z

I worked with Ketan Padegaonkar on creating a wrapper around the JDT compiler.

Usually, you would call it by installing the compiler jar, and reference it while calling the java compiler:

java -classpath org.eclipse.jdt.core_3.2.0.jar org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.batch.Main -classpath rt.jar A.java

Granted ruby and rubygems are installed on your system, installing JDTc is easy:

sudo gem install jdtc

JDTc installs the compiler for you, and places it at a convenient location. Then running the JDT compiler is a bit easier:

jdtc -classpath rt.jar A.java

A bit easier, hey ?

Eclipse just had a japanese smoothie

2008-12-19T12:59:27Z

The huge contribution made by the Blanco project, sponsored by NEC, and watched over by Mori-San, was effectively added to the Babel database today.

Thanks to everyone for your hard work on making this happen.

The Union of The CheckBoxTreeViewer TreeItems : We shall be disabled together, or die in single combat!

2008-12-17T23:20:09Z

Dear committer, prepare your jFace-foo !

We have a case where we have a CheckBoxTreeViewer that represents a list of elements.

The list in itself is informative. The user is going to be very interested into what is selected, and what isn’t.

It’s certain that at some point he will expand the tree to look at some nodes, come back, etc.

Right now, you cannot disable the checkboxes of a CheckBoxTreeViewer without disabling the whole tree.
So that means that your users cannot check checkboxes (that was the intent), but they also cannot expand the tree.

What if you’d like to disable some checkboxes only ? That’s unsupported too.

Unfortunately, there is no solution for this problem so far. I filed 259092 earlier today to investigate the issue, and it seems you can try to add a listener to revert the check event when the user clicks on checkboxes. Users would still see the items as enabled though, and given the complexity of the interface, adding a tooltip, a new decoration is just going to be confusing.

If you have a spare vote to cast for this bug, a comment, and idea, and ideally a patch, let’s talk about it on the bug!

Open the internal web browser with Firefox (when Safari is default)

2008-12-17T22:55:53Z

Somehow I had the feeling that I was in control when it came to specifying the browser I wanted to open.

Apparently, it’s true for external browsers. For internal browsers, ie those that show in a view or an editor in Eclipse, not so much.

What happens is that the information get lost. You specify the browser type when you do the call to open the browser:

PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getBrowserSupport().createBrowser(SWT.MOZILLA, ...);

But this is simply ignored by the internal editor. Not for too long though, since I attached a patch to 259171 fixes the problem.

Your feedback on this is welcome, of course please feel free to comment on the bug rather than here.

Building Eclipse plugins with Buildr

2008-12-11T10:56:38Z

As of now, the right way to build Eclipse plugins is to use the releng code or Buckminster.

It all comes down to an ant task that calls a JDT batch compiler (copied from the scripts of SWTBot):


<javac destdir="${temp.folder}/@dot.bin" failonerror="${javacFailOnError}" verbose="${javacVerbose}" debug="${javacDebugInfo}"
      includeAntRuntime="no" bootclasspath="${bundleBootClasspath}"
      source="${bundleJavacSource}" target="${bundleJavacTarget}">
			<compilerarg line="${compilerArg}" compiler="${build.compiler}"/>
			<classpath refid="@dot.classpath" />
			<src path="src/"/>
			<compilerarg value="@${basedir}/javaCompiler...args" compiler="org.eclipse.jdt.core.JDTCompilerAdapter"/>
			<compilerarg line="-log '${temp.folder}/@dot.bin${logExtension}'" compiler="org.eclipse.jdt.core.JDTCompilerAdapter"/>
		</javac>

This code is pretty heavy because you have to specify the classpath yourself (the @dot.classpath in there).

I have watched Buildr since its inception. I had made the wish to hack it in a way that I could build our plugins with it.

Essentially, what’s cool with Buildr is that it does what you want it to do, not more. It is written in a minimal way, so you can script and chain tasks. Think of it as make for Java.

Ketan came up to the Buildr user list some time ago with the same idea. He is maintaining SWTBot and he already hacked Buildr to make it behave for plugins.

Together, we are opening a new project Buildr4eclipse, that will take place on Google Code and Github.
We are going to provide an extension to Buildr to make it possible to build Eclipse plugins, first by plugging the JDT compiler in, then by making it even easier by using the dependencies declared in the manifest directly.

We welcome feedback and your help towards that goal.

This work takes place as SOA Tools is working on its build system to make it more adaptable and suited to our brand new sub-projects.

Would you like the Eclipse Foundation to support a git repository ?

2008-12-05T14:08:12Z

Would you like to be able to be hosted on git at eclipse.org ?
Then please vote for this bug.

If you are interested into tooling support, Egit should be your deal. They are currently building an informal proposal to join Eclipse. How about having the git tooling project hosted on git ?

Thanks to rcjsuen, ketan and ijuma for the insightful IRC chat.

IRC logs as a feed

2008-11-27T09:44:34Z

That might be old news to you ; I re-discovered that the Eclipse IRC log for #eclipse and #eclipse-e4 are stored on this server.

However Remi mentioned that the logs are rotated, so it’s not really an archive.

I’d think those logs would be better stored as a feed (RSS or Atom, whichever is easier to implement).

The hard part is to have a bot, and we have KOS-MOS already. What do you think ?

Collect praise for your Eclipse project

2008-11-26T16:33:28Z

At Intalio, my company, we find very important to collect feedback at the end of trainings. From that feedback, we sometimes extract very nice quotes from actual customers.

We pride ourselves with them and we display them on the website as a proof of our ability to deliver.

And of course, it helps people to trust our product.

So how about we do the same thing for our Eclipse projects ? I could imagine having a json array on the CVS website, from which I would randomly pick three quotes every time the home page is reloaded to place them on the right.

Thoughts ? Quotes ? Please comment on this bug.

Links for 2008-11-20 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-21T00:00:00-06:00

QUT | ePrints Archive - Communication Abstractions for Distributed Business Processes
Languages for business process definition generally suffer from myopic approaches to capturing communication between distributed processes. Effective communication between processes requires: support for conversations involving interrelated interactions spread over time; ability to select and group messages based on their content, regardless of format and transport technology; and resolving contention between processes or tasks for common sets of messages. This paper presents a set of communication abstractions that provide a ``glue'' between the process layer and the middleware. The paper also reports on an implementation of these abstractions and an experimental evaluation.
QUT | ePrints Archive - Major Issues in Business Process Management: An Expert Perspective
Process is perennial. Within any business activity or enterprise it is crucial that the variable of "operational efficiency" is maintained at sufficiently high levels, such that the return on investment is sustainable enough to justify its continued existence. Business Process Management (BPM) is the term used to encapsulate a process-driven approach to attaining enterprise operational efficiency. Despite BPM being ranked as top priority by organizations, current status of BPM research suggests a gap of addressing present industry demands. In this paper, we aim to identify the issues that organizations face in their efforts to manage business processes, as identified by BPM experts across the globe. The findings point to, among others, lack of top management support, lack of tool support for process visualization, and lack of connection between process design and process execution.
QUT | ePrints Archive - Extending Representational Analysis: BPMN User and Developer Perspectives
Over the last years, significant academic progress has been made in the area of representational analyses that use ontology as a benchmark for evaluations and comparisons of modeling techniques. This paper proposes a research model to guide representational analysis projects, which extends existing procedural models by incorporating different stakeholder perspectives. The paper demonstrates the application of this model for the purpose of analyzing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), a recent and popular candidate for a new process modeling industry standard. A brief overview of the underlying research model characterizes the different steps in such a research project, while the BPMN analysis project emphasizes the importance of validating with users the propositions obtained via the analysis and communicating those to the technique developers in order to increase the impact of evaluation research to Information Systems practice.
QUT | ePrints Archive - From BPMN Process Models to BPEL Web Services
The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language in which control and action nodes can be connected almost arbitrarily. It is supported by various modelling tools but so far no systems can directly execute BPMN models. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language supported by several execution platforms. In the current setting, mapping BPMN models to BPEL code is a necessary step towards unified and standards-based business process development environments. It turns out that this mapping is challenging from a scientific viewpoint as BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing methods for mapping BPMN to BPEL impose limitations on the structure of the source model. This paper proposes a technique that overcomes these limitations. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, this technique addresses difficult problems that arise...
QUT | ePrints Archive - Pattern-based translation of BPMN process models to BPEL web services
The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language in which control and action nodes can be connected almost arbitrarily. It is primarily targeted at domain analysts and is supported by many modelling tools, but in its current form, it lacks the semantic precision required to capture fully executable business processes. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language, targeted at software developers and supported by several execution platforms. In the current setting, translating BPMN models into BPEL code is a necessary step towards standards-based business process development environments. This translation is challenging since BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing BPMN-to-BPEL translations rely on the identification of block-structured patterns in BPMN models that are mapped into block-structured BPEL constructs.
QUT | ePrints Archive - On the Translation between BPMN and BPEL: Conceptual Mismatch between Process Modeling Languages
Business practice shows that, often, different process models are employed in the various phases of the Business Process Management life cycle, each providing a different paradigm for capturing and representing the business process domain. Recently, significant efforts have been made to overcome the disintegration of process models by providing complementary language standards for process design (BPMN) and execution (BPEL), based on the claim that these languages are semantically integrated. However, the conceptual mapping between both languages remains unclear, thus it is undecided whether any BPMN diagram can be transformed to BPEL. In this paper we argue that there is conceptual mismatch between BPMN and BPEL that needs to be identified in order to guide the language integration process semantically.

Disastrous experiment with Bugzilla

2008-10-31T13:55:44Z

I don’t have much love for Bugzilla.
It got bitter just now when I tried this search on Google. I just looked for references of the word bpmn on bugs.eclipse.org, and the page returns no results.

In the same category, did you know the feeds created with Bugzilla aren’t working with Feedburner or Y!Pipes ? Google Reader has apparently implemented a hack to turn around the issue.

Back in 2001 (?), Bugzilla was a nice choice. Is it still the case ? Can we put up with a silo at one of the most critical places of our system ?

Is the EMO still looking for places to accelerate Eclipse ecosystem growth ? Look no further!

Links for 2008-10-30 [del.icio.us]

2008-10-31T00:00:00-05:00

Invoking TPM/TokenService from custom UI - - Intalio|BPMS Community Edition

Links for 2008-10-21 [del.icio.us]

2008-10-22T00:00:00-05:00

Links for 2008-05-08 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-09T00:00:00-05:00

Bug 195555 – [Connections] The connection visibility is set by the compartment.
Indications to hack the visibility of connection edit parts.

Links for 2008-05-04 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-05T00:00:00-05:00

zx's diatribe: Painting the Workbench
A nice way to show SWT layouts while developing with PDE

Links for 2008-05-03 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-04T00:00:00-05:00

About Blackle - Energy Saving Search
Nice, a goth way of saving energy.

Links for 2008-02-26 [del.icio.us]

2008-02-27T00:00:00-06:00

A googleTalk badge with your status on your blog
Not dumping Twitter yet totally, but getting very near.