Tim Pizey

MySQL VIEW error "Table doesn't exist"

2012-01-20T17:13:00.000Z


mysql> select table_name
    -> from information_schema.tables
    -> where table_type='VIEW';
+---------------+
| table_name    |
+---------------+
| ClinicalDrugs |
| Studies       |
| StudySites    |
| pkAnalytes    |
| pkSamples     |
| pkdetails     |
+---------------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from chassisDb.pkDetails;
ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table 'chassisDb.pkDetails' doesn't exist

The listing gives the named view but we are told it does not exist. I was also able to provoke


mysql> select * from viewname;
ERROR 1356 (HY000): View 'dbname.viewname' references invalid table(s) or 
column(s) or function(s) or definer/invoker of view lack rights to use them

If you try to access the view from JDBC then you will see


java.sql.SQLException: View 'chassisDb.Studies' references invalid table(s) or 
column(s) or function(s) or definer/invoker of view lack rights to use them
 at com.mysql.jdbc.SQLError.createSQLException(SQLError.java:1073)

This is caused by MySQL's weird, newish, security defaults for the CREATE VIEW command.


create view Studies as 
select * from Entry, Study where Study.EntryId = Entry.Id;

is translated, after defaults are applied, to


CREATE VIEW SQL SECURITY DEFINER Studies AS 
SELECT  Entry.Id, Study.Id FROM Entry, Study WHERE Study.EntryId = Entry.Id;

If you now try to use this view as any user other than the definer of the view you will get the error above. What you wanted, and have to write explicitly to avoid the default is


CREATE VIEW SQL SECURITY INVOKER Studies AS 
SELECT  Entry.Id, Study.Id FROM Entry, Study WHERE Study.EntryId = Entry.Id;

This page in the hope that it helps!

Simple MySQL reporting database

2012-01-19T17:41:00.000Z

We have created an XML based repository of clinical trials study data.

To report upon this we create an isomorphic MySQL database using HyperJAXB. Our main configuration of hyperjaxb is to use an information preserving naming convention plugin.

The builds are under Continuous Integration.The database is created during the course of the Maven build, after this views are created and the database dumped.


mysql chassisDb < views.sql
mysqldump chassisDb  --complete-insert --skip-opt --add-drop-table  > $file

The dump file is then copied to an Amazon Web Services T1 instance, which only has MySQL installed.Two users exist: reader and uploader.

These two users have usernames and passwords configured in .my.cnf in their home directories containing


[client]
user=user
password=password

uploader has a cron job configured to update the database from any uploaded files:


mysql chassisDb < chassisDb_20120119.sql

The database can now be accessed using the Pentaho reporting tool.

Functional Programming in Haskell

2011-11-22T12:30:00.001Z

Wow, I have submitted my assignment for the Functional Programming in Haskell course.

I am really tired.

The period allotted to the assignment is six weeks. I have put in over 60 hours and taken two days leave. Yeah, I know, they said about 25 hours should do it, but it takes as long as it takes.

I have known that Functional Programming was the missing element of my experience for a long while. I asked for and was given this course by work - yay work! It is an expensive course and I could not have afforded the 7 days holiday it would have taken without their support.

These seven weeks started much earlier:This year I have written some R code, which is a sorta functional language. I tried to do some prestudy: I bought the course book and read chapter 1 twice (once on holiday). I read through the prestudy material. Very little of this cohered, but it was just enough to enable me to keep my balance during the course.

The course was great! The lecturer served on the Haskell committee. The SoftEng department at Oxford is smart in every sense. The lunches at Kellogg College were great. The other students were really bright. I just about kept up, contributing more than most and not being wrong as often as some. On Thursday I caught myself gurning during the lecture: it was all so elegant!

Immediately the course ended, I had hopes of Friday afternoon but it was not until the evening, I started organising myself. Reading the questions repeatedly, I tried chipping away at them.

Things soon went pretty horribly wrong: I could not be sure I understood the meaning of the questions, what level of completeness was expected or what shape the answers were meant to have. The assignment centred upon producers, which we had hardly touched upon and which did not feature in the course documents, consumers being the main focus. So I continued to erect a structure of yak hair: we would need a test harness, Latex processing, bibliography.

I did manage to get an answer, thought it was right, was elated. Read in Bird that my answer was wrong (though, infuriatingly the answer was 'left as an exercise'), was pretty disconsolate.Researched further and discovered that the answer was that the number of trees that can be generated from n leaves is the Catalan number for n-1.

Managed to write the generator and tests. Yay!

In between the ups and downs I had managed to pick off list, length etc.

Managed to do some pretty solid work around higher order functions, though was running out of time. I managed to finish Part I, but now only had a week for Part II and Part III.

Part II did fall out pretty easily, but it was still probably 12 hours. The tests were in place when I started to embellish with nice-to-haves, which helped.

Part II

If all tests pass then the page is written to the file system.


output :: IO ()
output = do
writeFile "fpr.xhtml" (charSequToString (showXHTMLPage testPage))
The resulting xhtml  file can be seen at [output] and is shown valid at [W3C Validator].

Part III (the essay - mine ended up as something like Discuss the Influence of FP on Java) got significantly squeezed, as I kept returning to polish Part II.

At 11.30pm I spotted a mistake in Part I - in the length function and its test.

Submitted the thing at 12.40am. Have printed it out but resisted the temptation to read it. Am feeling like a zombie.

After the deadline had passed I added a missing line break to the output, just to show that this is for me, not just for the marker.

Specify InnoDb as default table type in JDBC

2011-11-07T13:56:00.000Z

One of the recurrent gotchas with MySQL is that the default table type is MyISAM, whereas you almost definitely need InnoDB, if you want transactions, indexing or anything else that would make MySQL a useful database.

Set default table type for all databases

In /etc/mysql/my.cnf add:[mysqld]
default-storage-engine=InnoDBBut this requires that you have root access to the server and that you want all tables to use InnoDB.

Specify default on JDBC url

database.url=jdbc\:mysql\://localhost\:3306/chassis_studies?autoReconnect=true&sessionVariables=storage_engine=InnoDBYou could of course use a real database!

cvs to github

2011-10-14T15:25:00.000+01:00

Following How to export revision history from mercurial or git to cvs? I created an id file mapping cvs ids to github name, email format for all contributors:


timp=Tim Pizey<timp@paneris.org>

then create a repository on github (melati in this example, I already have uploaded my ssh public key for this machine)


git cvsimport -d /usr/cvsroot -C melati -r cvs -k -A ../../git_authors melati
cd melati
echo A jdbc to java object relational mapping system. 1999-2011 > README.txt
git add README.txt
git commit -m "Initial" README.txt
git remote add origin git@github.com:timp21337/melati.git
git push -u origin master

See https://github.com/timp21337/melati.

Installing lhs2TeX on Ubuntu

2011-10-09T21:42:00.000+01:00

lhs2TeX is a processor for literate Haskell code whose output is laTeX.The following worked for me on Unbuntu 11.04, though this was not the path I travelled, that is I discovered that, for example, libghc6-zlib-dev was a prerequisite the hard way.


sudo apt-get install ghc
sudo apt-get install libghc6-zlib-dev
sudo apt-get install cabal-install
cabal update
cabal install cabal-install
sudo apt-get install texlive
cabal install lhs2tex
logout  or 
export PATH=$PATH:~/.cabal/bin
lhs2TeX -o t.tex t.lhs 
pdflatex t.tex

Haskell - parse error in pattern: n + 1

2011-10-05T11:04:00.000+01:00

Should you get the following error from Haskell

Parse error in pattern: n + 1

this maybe because you are using the n+1 pattern, which is no longer included by default eg

> power :: Double -> Int -> Double
> power x 0         = 1
> power x (n + 1)   = x * power x n

the fix is to include

> {-# LANGUAGE NPlusKPatterns #-}

Hope this helps.

Proxying from apache2 to application server (eg tomcat, jetty)

2011-08-17T13:05:00.004+01:00

It is often convenient to proxy an application server, such as Jetty or Tomcat, as these tend to be mounted on ports other than port 80. The following steps worked in an Ubuntu setup.

Enable mod_proxy

a2enmod proxy

a2enmod proxy_http

Edit sites-enabled/default to add your proxying rule, eg:
ProxyPass /alfresco http://localhost:8080/alfresco
ProxyPassReverse /alfresco http://localhost:8080/alfresco
<Proxy http://localhost:8080/alfresco*>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You should now see your application server content on your default url ie http://localhost/alfresco will contain the same content as
http://localhost:8080/alfresco.

Alfresco setup

2011-08-16T16:34:00.006+01:00

Alfresco is AMAZING - it does not follow the Unix way, or even the Java way, but rather the bloatware way. This is a very bad smell (as is their constant pimping of the paid version).

Alfresco comes with ITS OWN COPY of Java, MySQL and Tomcat.
As I have copies of all these systems on my own box I have chosen to insulate my system and to play fair with Alfreco, and install on a fresh Ubuntu VirtualBox VM, with nothing other than OpenSSH installed.

VM Setup: I also enabled the VirtualBox Guest Additions, on my MacBookPro host, and found that the default bidirectional Copy/Paste functionality did not work.
Stop the VM and change Settings>>Advanced Shared Clipboards to Host To Guest

This vm (called alfresco) is on a virtual network, setup with help from Mr Sysadmin:

Add a Host only network in virtualbox >> preferences >> network

Add an adapter2 to vm >> settings >> network
attached to Host-only adapter

Add to /etc/hosts on host machine

192.168.56.10 alfresco

On vm add to /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
        address 192.168.56.10
        netmask 255.255.255.0

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Install alfresco (NOTE The x32 versions also works)

wget http://dl.alfresco.com/release/community/build-3370/alfresco-community-3.4.d-installer-linux-x64.bin
sudo su
chmod u+x alfresco-community-3.4.d-installer-linux-x64.bin
./alfresco-community-3.4.d-installer-linux-x64.bin

Take defaults, specify a password for mysql root and Alfresco admin.

/etc/init.d/alfresco start

Now the url http://alfresco:8080/alfresco/ should work.

Dual repositories: Subversion and Git

2011-08-15T15:24:00.008+01:00

Git and SVN

I have not got a completely pain free git/svn integration,
this seems to be because casutils started life as a git project.

Install git svn integration

sudo apt-get install git-core git-svn

I have two checkouts: local/casutils and workspace/casutils
workspace/casutils was created in the normal way with

git init casutils

local/casutils was created with

git svn clone https://tim.pizey@dsn-chassis.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/casutils

I work in workspace/casutils, when all is committed and pushed to master I switch to local/casutils

git pull -s recursive -Xtheirs ../../workspace/casutils

git svn dcommit

this pushes the changes, with their git commit messages, to svn.

Cretan Opinel

2011-06-21T23:03:00.006+01:00

On our holiday to Paleochora, Crete we spent a day on the East Beach. The sun was pretty hot, so we spent a lot of time under a tamarisk tree. I built a little wall.

On the way back I found an Opinel knife

which has cleaned up quite well. Note the change in the branding: no France and the Main Coroné has moved. This would indicate that it is quite a few years old. (I could not discover when this change occurred).

[Thanks to Laurent in the comments: it was made between 1986 and 1990.]

A button from Tom's Farm

2011-06-21T22:44:00.006+01:00

Really quite a long time ago, maybe sixteen years ago, I went to Tom's Farm, on Black Alder Road and walking up the Green Lane found this button. I rediscovered it recently and put it in some silvo, which seemed to show up a bit of silver, now black.

Will give it back to Tom, can't think why I ever took it away, except perhaps I was younger.

My first functional java class

2011-06-09T09:46:00.003+01:00

I have known about this particular hammer for ten years. It is a technique widely used in Melati, as William was mostly 'translating on the fly from OCAML' at the time, however I have never recognised a situation where it was the correct approach.

To a commercial programmer on the long journey from BASIC to lisp, via perl and java, even when you know of the functional hammer the world does not appear to have any functional nails in it.

Last night I did recognise such a situation. I wanted to reuse a bit of code:

if (lock()) {
  try {
    body();
  } catch (Exception e) {
    throw new RuntimeException(e); 
  } finally {
    unlock();
  }
} else {
  throw new RuntimeException("Lock file " + LOCK_FILE_NAME + " exists.");
}

The only way to reuse this, for a body2() function, would have been to cut'n'paste, which I will go to some lengths to avoid.

I extracted this to its own abstract class ExclusiveFunction

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * @author timp
 * @since 2011/06/07 22:00:01
 *
 */
public abstract class ExclusiveFunction {
  final static String LOCK_FILE_NAME = "/tmp/EXCLUSIVE_LOCK";

  abstract void body() throws Exception;
  
  public void invoke() { 
    if (lock()) {
      try {
        body();
      } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e); 
      } finally {
        unlock();
      }
    } else {
      throw new RuntimeException("Lock file " + LOCK_FILE_NAME + " exists.");
    }
  }
  
  private boolean lock() {
    File lockFile = new File(LOCK_FILE_NAME);
    if (!lockFile.exists()) {
      try {
        lockFile.createNewFile();
      } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
      }
      return true;
    }
    return false;
  }

  private void unlock() {
    new File(LOCK_FILE_NAME).delete();
  }

}

which is then invoked with:

new ExclusiveFunction() {

      @Override
      void body() throws IOException {
        body2();
      }
    }.invoke();

I think the world is soon going to appear to have a lot more nails in it.

Scala and Java

2011-04-14T23:30:00.002+01:00

HelloWorldScala.scala

package net.pizey.scala.toy

class HelloWorldScala {
  def m(message: String) {
    println(message + " - from scala")
  }
}

object HellowWorld {
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    val s = new HelloWorldScala()
    val j = new HelloWorldJava()
    s.m("Hello world")
    j.m("Hello world")
  }
}

HelloWorldJava.java

package net.pizey.scala.toy;

public class HelloWorldJava {

  public void m(String message) {
    System.out.println(message + " - from java");
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    HelloWorldScala s = new HelloWorldScala();
    HelloWorldJava j = new HelloWorldJava();
    s.m("Hello world");
    j.m("Hello World");
  }
}

Both output

Hello world - from scala
Hello World - from java

Ubuntu setup

2011-03-14T20:30:00.004Z


apt-get install emacs23-nox
apt-get install cvs
apt-get install git-base

#setup apt-get 

deb http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/jedit /

apt-get install jedit


wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -

emacs /etc/apt/sources.list

# Google software repository
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main

apt-get install google-chrome-unstable


cvs -d :ext:timp@paneris.net:/usr/cvsroot co timp
mv timp/.* .

Installing packages in R

2011-03-01T14:50:00.002Z


sudo R
install.packages('Rcmdr')
q()

Dropbox setup for work and home

2011-02-28T11:36:00.001Z

I instinctively created two Dropbox accounts, but soon found that Dropbox expects you only to have one Dropbox account per user account.

Googling revealed this setup for work and personal Dropbox files from Samuel D. :

My solution is to have a paid personal account with all the storage I need, and a free work account. The entire contents of my work account are shared with the personal account. I just have my work account set up on my work computer, and my personal one on my personal computer.

This means I can
- Access all my work and personal files on my personal computer
- Access ONLY my work files on my work computer, and even if the system admin figured out the password they would only have access to my work data, not my personal stuff.

Everything syncs fluidly between both computers, I don't have to unlink and relink Dropbox as I only have one account set up with each computer. This works very well.

looks like this is the way to go.

Window 7 Setup

2011-02-23T16:25:00.003Z

A new Windows 7 machine is setup by work admin team to have Endnote, VPN and Anti-Virus installed. Oh and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Installation list

The following are my list of initial installs.

Firefox
Chrome
VirtualBox

Cygwin

zip
unzip
CVS
git
git-completion
git-gui
gitk
make
ocaml*
svn
emacs
nano
vim
graphicsmagick
imagemagick
clisp
python
ruby
openssl
openssh
rsynch
perl
lyx
tetex
chere
catdoc
lynx
wget

java - set JAVA_HOME
jEdit
quassel
maven - set M2_HOME
WinMerge
IntelliJ
checkout all projects
Eclipse
Spotify
Dropbox
Visual Studio 2010 Professional
7-zip
git
R
TortoiseSVN
Skype

TODO

SPSS
Stata
StatTransfer
Talend

rrun - a bash R wrapper

2011-02-17T17:50:00.011Z

`rrun` - A script to wrap around R, passing some variables.

First some motivation, what is the problem?

The default command line interface for R is a bit idiosyncratic, and there are no defaults:


~$ R
Fatal error: you must specify '--save', '--no-save' or '-vanilla'

someone went out of their way to deliberately make it behave that way! This is a language which is taking no prisoners.


~/r$ r --help
Usage: C:\Program Files\R\R-2.12.1\bin\r.exe [command args]

where 'command args' can be

  --arch n   for n=i386, x64, 32 or 64
  any other arguments listed by C:\Program Files\R\R-2.12.1\bin\r.exe --arch i386 --help

Its rude to point and stare!

~$ r --arch i386 --help
Usage: Rterm [options] [< infile] [> outfile] [EnvVars]

Start R, a system for statistical computation and graphics, with the
specified options

EnvVars: Environmental variables can be set by NAME=value strings

Options:
  -h, --help            Print usage message and exit
  --version             Print version info and exit
  --encoding=enc        Specify encoding to be used for stdin
  --encoding enc        ditto
  --save                Do save workspace at the end of the session
  --no-save             Don't save it
  --no-environ          Don't read the site and user environment files
  --no-site-file        Don't read the site-wide Rprofile
  --no-init-file        Don't read the .Rprofile or ~/.Rprofile files
  --restore             Do restore previously saved objects at startup
  --no-restore-data     Don't restore previously saved objects
  --no-restore-history  Don't restore the R history file
  --no-restore          Don't restore anything
  --vanilla             Combine --no-save, --no-restore, --no-site-file,
                          --no-init-file and --no-environ
  --min-vsize=N         Set vector heap min to N bytes; '4M' = 4 MegaB
  --max-vsize=N         Set vector heap max to N bytes;
  --min-nsize=N         Set min number of cons cells to N
  --max-nsize=N         Set max number of cons cells to N
  --max-mem-size=N      Set limit for memory to be used by R
  --max-ppsize=N        Set max size of protect stack to N
  -q, --quiet           Don't print startup message
  --silent              Same as --quiet
  --slave               Make R run as quietly as possible
  --verbose             Print more information about progress
  --internet2           Use Internet Explorer for proxies etc.
  --args                Skip the rest of the command line
  --ess                 Don't use getline for command-line editing
                          and assert interactive use
  -f file               Take input from 'file'
  --file=file           ditto
  -e expression         Use 'expression' as input

One or more -e options can be used, but not together with -f or --file

An argument ending in .RData (in any case) is taken as the path
to the workspace to be restored (and implies --restore)



Or: R CMD command args

where 'command' is one of:
  INSTALL  Install add-on packages
  REMOVE   Remove add-on packages
  SHLIB    Make a DLL for use with dynload
  BATCH    Run R in batch mode
  build    Build add-on packages
  check    Check add-on packages
  Rprof    Post process R profiling files
  Rdconv   Convert Rd format to various other formats
  Rdiff    difference R output files
  Rd2dvi   Convert Rd format to DVI
  Rd2pdf   Convert Rd format to PDF
  Rd2txt   Convert Rd format to pretty text
  Sd2Rd    Convert S documentation to Rd format
  Stangle  Extract S/R code from Sweave documentation
  Sweave   Process Sweave documentation
  config   Obtain configuration information about R
  open     Open a file via Windows file associations
  texify   Process a latex file

Use
  R CMD command --help
for usage information for each command.

I think we may need some help here.

A simple interface

rrun is intended to simplify the above, or at least be a handy place for my defaults and to enable me to pass parameters to R in addition to an input file of R commands.

sorry about the escaping


rrun s=\"nice\" f=1 s.R

Where s.R contains


print(s)
print(f)

The result:


~/r$ rrun s=\"nice\" f=1 ls.R
> # Temporary file generated by rrun
> # Date: Thu Feb 17 21:11:26 GMTST 2011
> # Command: rrun s="nice" f=1 ls.R
> #
> s="nice"
> f=1
> print(s)
[1] "nice"
> print(f)
[1] 1
> warnings()
NULL
>
~/r$

Gygwin setup for Debianistas

2011-02-16T15:18:00.009Z

An on-going log of the tweeks needed to make Cygwin more intuitive to those of use who use Debian based systems when given a choice.

cygwin is not Ubuntu, you may have noticed :)

Allow customisation

To end of /etc/profile add


. $HOME/.bashrc

A little welcome

Add to your .bashrc


if [[ $(uname -o) == Cygwin ]] 
then
echo "Usable Windows"
echo `uname -a`
fi

Simplicity rules

To the Cygwin specific block created above add


alias more=less

Blogging cooking

2010-12-12T20:37:00.001Z

Now blogging my cooking at http://weekend-chef.blogspot.com/ as I could not remember how I last cooked duck.

I blog as I cook, which brings the stress of cooking to a head, but should bring a little more planning and structure to future meals.

A Trigger Servlet for Hudson

2010-12-03T16:48:00.006Z

Have written a little Trigger Servlet for Hudson, to enable post commit builds on Google Code projects.

By relying upon a shared secret, it enables pre-authentication of the trigger url; which should only be visible to someone with administrator access to the Hudson job and
administrator access to the triggering site, for example the Google Code Administer Source page.

Managed to hit 100% line and branch coverage Yay!.

CSV unification

2010-11-23T15:00:00.035Z

Unifier on GitHub

A simple problem

Given an excel spreadsheet with three sheets within it, all with approximately the same rows but with differing columns, produce a unified CSV file. If a sheet does not contain a row then insert blank columns. The unique key for each sheet is column 2, called ID, move this column to column 1. No doubt you can see all the issues, as I can in retrospect, but after a week and a bit the job is done. High test coverage enabled me to refactor and add features through to a completely different beast.

Lessons learned

hashcode() for enum constants

The members of an enum inherit their hashCode() method from Object so it varies between JVM invocations. Hence I used

result = prime * result + unificationOption.ordinal();

in CsvTable.hashCode().

Bridging methods

During the compilation of generic code Java quietly generates what are called bridging methods these are visible to Cobertura but not to you, the coder, so Cobertura tries to tell you that you have not exercised these methods by marking the class definition line as not covered. Using the following code to print out all methods

for (Method m : CsvTable.class.getMethods()) {

  System.out.println(m.toGenericString());

}

I discovered the generated bridging methods

public net.pizey.csv.CsvRecord get(java.lang.Object)

public java.lang.Object get(java.lang.Object)



public net.pizey.csv.CsvRecord put(java.lang.String,net.pizey.csv.CsvRecord)

public java.lang.Object put(java.lang.Object,java.lang.Object)



public net.pizey.csv.CsvRecord remove(java.lang.Object)

public java.lang.Object remove(java.lang.Object)

The put(Object key, Object value) cannot be accessed normally, as it is masked by the generic version. So we have to introduce a reflective mechanism of invoking it.

public void testBridgingPut() {

  CsvTable t = new CsvTable("src/test/resources/sheet2.csv", UnificationOptions.LOG);

  Object o = t.get((Object) "1");

  Method method = t.getClass().getMethod("put", new Class[] { Object.class, Object.class });

  method.invoke(t, "jj", o);

}

Finally I had to deal with the generated bridging methods for clone. This is done by not supplying a generic clone method but using the pre-generics signature.

I have come to enjoy Java6 however Generics do feel like an expensive compromise.

Tools and sources

The CSV parser was written by WilliamC and incorporated in a CSV importer in 2000 by MylesC. I started from that framework, but as it was written before Java Collections, let alone Java 6, not a lot remains of the original.
The tools used: GitHub, Hudson CI, Maven, Eclipse and Cobertura.

Sharing and Deployment

The code is at https://github.com/timp21337/unifier.

To include the jar in Maven:

<dependency>

 <groupId>net.pizey.csv>/groupId>

  <artifactId>unifier</artifactId>

  <version>1.0</version>

</dependency>

Deployed to a Maven repository at http://pizey.net/maven2/

Adding a framebuffer to a headless unix server

2010-10-05T12:50:00.018+01:00

Some java software, including GWT, expects a framebuffer to be present.
This post shows how to install Xvfb (X virtual Frame Buffer) on a Ubuntu/Debian system. This assumes that you do not currently have an X server running (it is a headless server).

apt-get install xvfb xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable xfonts-cyrillic

(the fonts are not needed but their absense is warned about)
Place the following in /etc/init.d/xvfb

case "$1" in

start)

echo "Starting virtual X frame buffer: Xvfb"



/usr/bin/Xvfb :0 \

-auth /etc/X99.cfg -screen 0 1024x768x24 \

-fbdir /var/lib/xvfb \

-extension RANDR &



export  DISPLAY=:0



;;

stop)

echo "Stopping virtual X frame buffer: Xvfb"

echo "noop"

;;

*)

echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/xvfb {start|stop}"

exit 1

;;

esac



exit 0

then

chmod u+x /etc/init.d/xvfb 

echo localhost > /etc/X99.cfg

mkdir /var/lib/xvfb

/etc/init.d/xvfb start

should be good to go.

Using both Http-basic and session based form-login authorisation in Spring Security with wget (--auth-no-challenge)

2010-07-01T12:27:00.018+01:00

We recently changed our Spring Security configuration from http-basic to form-login, well actually we used

<http 

auto-config="true" >

which is shorthand for

<http>

<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />

<form-login />

<anonymous />

<http-basic />

<logout />

<remember-me />

</http>

The above, and the rest of the documentation suggests that both http-basic and form-login should work simultaneously. However my wget script broke on the change over. The wget command was

wget  --user=foo@example.org --password=bar --post-data="" \

-d http://localhost/protectedUrl

This got redirected to the forms login page, as though the authorisation header was being ignored. However alimanfoo was able to use authenticated requests from java to access the protected urls.

Further research revealed that wget only issues authorisation headers in response to a challenge, unless the --auth-no-challenge qualifier is added.

wget  --user=foo@example.org --password=bar --post-data="" \

--auth-no-challenge -d http://localhost/protectedUrl

You might have thought that supplying username and password meant that you wanted to set them, and this was the behaviour of wget 1.10.2 and prior but no longer.

In fluent manpage we get:

Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to

support some few obscure servers, which never send HTTP

authentication challenges, but accept unsolicited auth info, say,

in addition to form-based authentication.

So I am off to explain the use-case to the maintainer list.

Android fonts for Debian/Ubuntu

2010-05-25T15:05:00.008+01:00

I first came across the mention of the free, Open Source, Android fonts a while ago; here, I think.
They are clean and easy on the eye.

You can install them with

sudo apt-get install ttf-droid

which will place fonts in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-droid

However if all you want is to use a droid font in a web page just use

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans' 

rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Bringing WebMacro up for air

2010-02-21T16:39:00.010Z

WebMacro was the first OpenSource community that I followed, so I love it and still feel a sense of hurt that licensing issues meant that Velocity had to be born.

On top of that I have quite a few WebMacro templates around, and anyway the world needs more than one templating engine.

However, WebMacro went the way of all flesh: The original author moved on, the push to version 1.0 was slow, and I for one stopped following every thread. Versioning was a real mess; (which was more recent 1.0b or 1.0?) Then came the painful, acrid push to 2.0.

I have revisited a few times, cleaning the code of warnings, ensuring tests continue to pass, even regenerating with new versions of javacc.

However what was really needed was a restructuring of the source tree to align with Maven conventions and a thorough cleanout.

The only way to do that used to be to backup the CVS tree, restructure and then ask a SF admin to recreate the repository, which was too big a hurdle.

Recently (well some time in the last ten years) SF have introduced adminrepo, which enables you to lock a repository, restructure it and then replace:


ssh -t timp,webmacro@shell.sourceforge.net create
adminrepo --checkout  cvs
cd /cvsroot/webmacro/webmacro
mkdir src/main
mkdir src/main/java
mv src/org src/main/java
cd ~
adminrepo --save  cvs
exit

By this means I was able to move current code into the places Maven expects them and move non-core code out to ../contrib.

Then I upgraded from Doug Lea's venerable Concurrent to his java.util.concurrent.

Thanks to a message from Brian Goetz himself I was able to surmount the only real hickup: EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.ClockDaemon becomes java.util.concurrent.ScheduledExecutorService.

Now WebMacro had only one compile-time dependency: the logging system. On inspection it seems that WebMacro's own logging (yes its has a complete logging system built in) should be ripped out in favour of slf4j.

WebMacro 2.2 should be back in the swim.

Deploying large war files to Tomcat under Hudson: use Cargo

2009-12-17T12:17:00.001Z

Whilst

mvn tomcat:deploy

works for the majority of war files under Hudson, for a large war (34m) the deploy failed with Out of memory error, though not at the shell prompt. Failure to fix by tweeking memory arguments led me to use Cargo instead. Note that the local tomcat is treated as remote to reduce rework when deploying to a remote server.

<build>

<plugin>

<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>

<artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>

<configuration>

<wait>true</wait>

<container>

<containerId>tomcat6x</containerId>

<type>remote</type>

</container>

<configuration>

<type>runtime</type>

<properties>

<cargo.tomcat.manager.url>http://localhost:8080/manager</cargo.tomcat.manager.url>

<cargo.remote.username>admin</cargo.remote.username>

<cargo.remote.password></cargo.remote.password>

</properties>

</configuration>

<deployer>

<type>remote</type>

<deployables>

<deployable>

<groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>

<artifactId>${project.artifactId}</artifactId>

<properties>

<context>${project.artifactId}</context>

</properties>

<type>war</type>

</deployable>

</deployables>

</deployer>

</configuration>

<executions>

<execution>

<id>do</id>

<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>

<goals>

<goal>deployer-redeploy</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

</executions>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

Setting up Hudson CI for GWT Development

2009-11-11T13:07:00.004Z

GWT development requires a 32 bit Sun JDK.

We decided to do this by using a 32 bit VM, which could be moved to another server at a later date.

Install VMWare Player (Ensure networking is enabled during installation)
Download a 32 bit ubuntu ISO (or 32 bit Debian)
Create a new VM from the ISO.
Enter VM and establish your ipaddress.

Add hudson repo to /etc/apt/sources

deb http://hudson.gotdns.com/debian binary/

Install Sun JDK

apt-get install sun-java6-jdk 

update-alternatives --config java

update-alternatives --config javac

Install Tomcat
```
apt-get install tomcat6

apt-get install tomcat6-admin
```
Modify /etc/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml and add
<user username="admin" password="" roles="manager,admin"/>
(or add a password and add password to ~/.m2/settings.xml)
Set Tomcat security off
```
sed -i "s/TOMCAT6_SECURITY=.\+/TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no/" \

/etc/default/tomcat6
```
Increase Tomcat default memory allocation in /etc/defaults/tomcat6
JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024M -Xms1024m"
Install Hudson
```
apt-get install hudson
```
Change Hudson port and ajpport by editting /etc/init.d/hudson to add
```
HUDSON_ARGS="--httpPort=8081  --ajp13Port=8102" 
```

Install Apache

apt-get install apache2

a2enmod proxy

a2enmod proxy_http

Setup /etc/apache2/httpd.conf (or similar)

servername hudson

ProxyPass   /  http://localhost:8081/

ProxyPassReverse  /  http://localhost:8081/

ProxyRequests   Off

<Proxy http://localhost:8081/*>

Order deny,allow

Allow from all

</Proxy>

Install Maven
```
apt-get install maven2
```
Configure Hudson
- setup smtp
- set MAVEN_HOME to /usr/share/maven2
- set email from address
- set url to ip address

Download GWT toolkit 1.7.1 and extract then install gwt-dev-linux.jar to your local repo

mvn install:install-file \

-DgroupId=com.google.gwt -DartifactId=gwt-dev \

-Dversion=1.7.1 -Dclassifier=linux \

-Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=gwt-dev-linux.jar

Add individual projects to Hudson

Enabling private cross site scripting with a XMLHttpRequest proxy servlet

2009-09-30T11:25:00.006+01:00

The problem

You have a list of URLs and want to interrogate them for their Content-Type using javascript in the browser.

You cannot do this because the javascript security model forbids this activity, called cross site scripting, as it could be used to invoke malign code.

The solution

Install a proxy on your server which can make the request on your behalf and relay it back to you. You have not violated the javascript security model and you are free to invoke any url on the net by a call to your own, originating, server.

However the proxy does need to be protected otherwise it could be abused by other sites. To protect the proxy we ensure that it can only be accessed from a page generated by our server, indeed one which has set a named session variable.

The code As implemented within the Melati framework, which wraps the HttpRequest and HttpResponse objects in a Melati object:

private String proxy(Melati melati, ServletTemplateContext context) {

  if (melati.getSession().getAttribute("generatedByMelatiClass") == null)

    throw new AnticipatedException("Only available from within an Admin generated page");

  String method = melati.getRequest().getMethod();

  String url =  melati.getRequest().getQueryString();

  HttpServletResponse response = melati.getResponse();

  HttpMethod httpMethod = null;

  try {



    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

    if (method.equals("GET"))

      httpMethod = new GetMethod(url);

    else if (method.equals("POST"))

      httpMethod = new PostMethod(url);

    else if (method.equals("PUT"))

      httpMethod = new PutMethod(url);

    else if (method.equals("HEAD"))

      httpMethod = new HeadMethod(url);

    else

      throw new RuntimeException("Unexpected method '" + method + "'");

    try {

      httpMethod.setFollowRedirects(true);

      client.executeMethod(httpMethod);

      for (Header h : httpMethod.getResponseHeaders()) {

        response.setHeader(h.getName(), h.getValue());

      }

      response.setStatus(httpMethod.getStatusCode());

      response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache");

      byte[] outputBytes = httpMethod.getResponseBody();

      if (outputBytes != null) {

        response.setBufferSize(outputBytes.length);

        response.getWriter().write(new String(outputBytes));

        response.getWriter().flush();

      }

    } catch (Exception e) {

      throw new MelatiIOException(e);

    }

  } finally {

    httpMethod.releaseConnection();

  }

  return null;

}

Software Development with Certainty

2009-09-04T10:15:00.000+01:00

My most recent project was to turn an impressive prototype developed by one person into a library, and applications based upon it, that can be simultaneously developed and used by a team.

The development process gains a new dimension once you have published your first version or have your first user. The task is made more tricky due to the absence of the original author.
In other words: situation normal, don't start from here.

The Erewhon applications, Gaboto library and its main dependencies ng4j and Jena are all changing rapidly. New functionality is being added and code and dependencies are being refactored and changed. The challenge is to enable this change without breaking installed systems or at least not breaking them unknowingly. This is ensured by establishing a contract between the code and the design by the use of tests. The tests guarantee that the system actually does do what it claims. Or, more properly, the tests are exactly what the system claims to do.

The minimum requirement to ensure that a project remains alive is that it keeps up with the current versions of all the libraries it depends upon. There are two approaches to the management of dependencies: Saltation and Continuous Integration.
Saltation is when you leave updating the dependencies until a blitz, you update all of them and re-test. The problem with Saltation is that it appears to the outside world that nothing is going on, the project is approaching stagnation, and when you do address the issue there is a lot of work to do, there is no obvious connection to the change that caused the problem and the developers of the library who have caused the problem have moved on and will not immediately know what they did to break your build.

By contrast using a Continuous Integration methodology one can expect to identify the particular commit that broke the build!

Continuous Integration relies upon repeating a repeatable build process. For this we turned to Maven as it addresses the other problem which we and our dependencies have: Dependency Management.

Dependency Management is a much re-invented wheel to address a problem which has re-occurred time and time again. In the world of Windows programming the problem is known as DLL Hell. In the Linux world there are two predominant dependency management systems: Deb from Debian and RPM from RedHat to manage package dependencies. Quite astonishingly, in the java world the problem was re-invented, as jar hell, by the practice of not versioning jar files. This anti-pattern was thought to be extinct by about 2001, however it has clung on in the eco-system surrounding Jena.

In addition to a repeatable build process with dependency management Maven offers code quality tools such as static analysers and style checkers and runs tests so enabling code coverage metrics.

Unlike Ant, which is a Turing complete scripting language with XML syntax, Maven is a project build system guided by an explicit definition of best practice and a widely used set of conventions which all Java programmers can now be expected to know.

Maven project definitions do not quite take us to Continuous Integration nirvana, we have a repeatable build but now we need to repeat it and to define when it should be repeated.

To repeat the build we use Hudson which can schedule, monitor and record builds defined as Ant scripts, bash scripts and commands as well a Maven builds. Hudson is currently the best of breed of the java CI servers, based upon experience with Continuum and Cruise Control: it just works.

The build should be repeated whenever any code within the project is changed or whenever any code in any dependency is changed. This is achieved by publishing SNAPSHOT builds after every commit.

A Maven project defines a single artefact, usually a jar but possibly a war, ear or website.
The artefacts are published to a repository which has the same structure as the main Maven repository.
Projects are versioned in the usual way, however between explicit versions a SNAPSHOT version is published, usually nightly.

0.1
0.2-SNAPSHOT
0.2
0.3-SNAPSHOT
0.3
0.4-SNAPSHOT

A non-SNAPSHOT build should not depend upon any SNAPSHOT artefacts.

The process of publishing a new version is now straight forward and should only involve incrementing the version, removing the SNAPSHOT classifier from all dependencies, tagging the source control system and deploying the artefact. Immediately after publication the SNAPSHOT classifier is added back to this project and all its dependencies.

In this state of bliss the creation of a new version is very little work and any breach of the contract between tests and code is caught as it is committed.

Rendering ancient languages with CSS3 font-face

2009-08-19T00:16:00.000+01:00

Re-reading The Decipherment of Linear B led me to revisit the CSS3 feature @font-face and to address my ignorance of Unicode.

As always it is just about to be ready, really. The browsers which work: Firefox 3.5.2, Android cupcake, Safari (Mac). The browsers which fail: IE6, Firefox 3.0, Konqueror, Safari (iPhone). Opera works, but assumes one font per character sequence.

Unicode has Linear B sorted and will have Egyptian done sometime soon (October 2009).

There are some very nice, free fonts created by George Douros.

See the resulting Browser Unicode rendering test page.

Bye then Ben and Nevis. Coo Cows.

2009-07-27T09:16:00.000+01:00

This morning Herbie and the man from the abbertoir will despatch Ben and Nevis. They were brothers and were bought some eighteen years ago. They have kept their fields from turning into woodland and have become local landmarks. Although bullocks their size and six foot horn span mean that they are best viewed from a distance.

Whilst actively seeking out human company, especially in winter when they were fed, they have never been handled and so are impossible to treat for ailments. What has led the vet to say that they must be put down is an insect infestation under their fur.

They were bought by Noel to maintain the bio-diversity of the grassland, which they did spectacularly, the field is thought to have the highest score in the West Country, though this is likely to be as much to do with its bewildering geology as its management.

Noel also chose them because they themselves do not require the attention which he lavished on them anyway, as he just liked Highland cattle. The twice daily walk to feed them undoubtably added years to his life so their ending is even more sad, as another connection to Noel passes.

Hell is other people's code

2009-07-24T17:58:00.000+01:00

Refactoring java packages

Maintenance programming on OpenSource projects is much, much more pleasant than using non-writable libraries, as you are able to read with a pen; by which I mean that as you understand the code you can document that understanding. If code was difficult to understand due to it's lacking in structure or unevocative naming you can change it.

The maintenance programmer has a very different relation to the code than does the original author. The original author understands the intention of the code and inhabits the conceptual framework it embodies. The maintenance programmer strives to intuit.

As the understanding of the code grows so does the desire to rewrite it. Once I have tests for the main use cases for a library I am working with I am able to think about giving it a vigorous refactoring.

Refactoring is odd, it is hard and dangerous work yet nothing is meant to change. The functionality of the code should, indeed must, not change. It is tricky to come up with a defense against the injunctions if it ain't broke don't fix it and change for change's sake. I claim that unloved code is dieing code and unchanging software is no longer soft. At the end of the process there should be some increase in beauty and hence comprehensibility and maintainability.

These qualities cannot be measured, however there are things which can be measured: the links between packages (java classes live within a namespace tree where each node is called a package), the number of classes and the proportion of interfaces and abstract classes to concrete classes. These and other metrics are created by the JDepend code metrics tool.

Why package at all?

One of the code smells that refactoring should aim to reduce is the number of import statements within classes. There is a way in which to reduce the number of inter-package linkages: create all classes in the default package and be done with it. However you cannot control, or even be aware of, name clashes in the default namespace, it should NEVER be used. Another possibility is to put all of your code into one single package in a namespace you control. This too gets pretty silly pretty quickly for all but the most trivial project.

The purpose of java package namespaces should be to impose a conceptual structure upon your code which helps you and other programmers understand it. Java packages have no functional effect, given the prevailing practice of restricting visibility modifiers to public or private and eschewing the default package visibility. The compiler does not care how you group your classes. There are no tools that I am aware of which will make any comments about how you do it. The only measurable thing is the number of import statements required in classes within the package. My claim is that for two package schemas with equal number of packages one is better than the other if it results in fewer import statements.

Anti Patterns

Separating all exceptions into a separate package

This will necessarily increase the number of intra-package links, as each exception will have to be imported from the exceptions package.

Exceptions should be declared in the package they are thrown in or in the nearest parent node if they are thrown in two packages.

A new package for a new concept

Today is a new day, I am adding new stuff, I want my stuff to be separate from the previous work are all bad justifications for creating a new package.

Overuse of checked exceptions

Checked exceptions should only be used for events which the application programmer can respond to. Programming bugs should be unchecked exceptions.

Meaningless names and abbreviations

Naming is the most important aspect of writing maintainable code. Good naming removes the need to remember meaning.

Package names should be singular

Analogous to the naming of tables in an SQL database, you might think that you store people records in a table called people but everything falls out much more neatly if you call the table person, not just because you avoid English irregular plurals.

Do not repeat yourself (DRY)

In fully qualified names, as in much else in programming, you should not repeat yourself. So com.mycompany.myproject.mypackage.MyProjectEntity should probably be named com.mycompany.myproject.mypackage.Entity

Use your own default package space

If you are writing a modelling library and its root package is to be net.mylib then use that space for the main guts not net.mylib.model.

My latest refactoring with JDepend metrics before, nearly there and after.

Ant Rant - Version filtering deprecated

2009-06-17T10:43:00.001+01:00

Filtering is one of those features which Ant makes available which was overused in the initial excitement when Ant was new.

By using version filtering you are tying your codebase into being built by Ant, or at least a build system which has the same filtering mechanism as Ant.

In Melati, WebMacro and now ten years later in Jena there was a feature to filter the code and insert the version number. The uses are so similar I suspect they were in some popular "Introduction to Ant".

We even had tests to ensure that the version variable had been successfully filtered.

assertNotEquals("@version@", Product.VERSION);

When I came to convert to Maven I wanted to keep this handy feature, but of course the test was failing.

I asked how to do filtering on the Maven lists way back. They were very scathing about the notion of a build process modifying production code. It is not the Maven way.

The question that needs a very convincing answer is what is this for? Does it fit with how people use and develop the software.

As a developer, in your IDE, do you want to see


public static final String NAME = "@Name@";

or more sanely


public static final String NAME = "MyProject";

Filtering may work for the users but not for the developers.

Lets look at the actual use cases, taking Jena as a typical project. A sensible place for these strings is Jena.java. Of the static strings in the following references are found.

PATH - 15 references - interestingly hardcoded, not interpolated.
NAME - 0 references
WEBSITE - 0 references
VERSION - 0 references
MAJOR_VERSION - 0 references
MINOR_VERSION - 0 references
REVISION_VERSION - 0 references
VERSION_STATUS - 0 references
BUILD_DATE - 0 references

We can see that after 6 years this facility has not actually been used. It was put in because the coder knew how to do it and thought it might come in useful. It hasn't. YAGNI.

If you REALLY want to use filtering then filter a properties file using Maven Resource Filtering.

However if you do just want to provide, for example, a version command in your application then explicitly add the version string as a static variable in a prominent place in your code and add a step to your release procedure document to update this variable.

Code should not depend upon the build system: rip it out.

You are using Continuous Integration, aren't you?

2009-05-29T10:25:00.000+01:00

This is one of those questions expecting the answer yes, like you have lost your virginity, haven't you?, which has a motivational impact.

Another prod in the right direction was when someone used Hudson as the term for CI server, as you would use Hoover for vaccum cleaner.

I have tried three times to use Continuum, only once with any degree of success. Hudson just works, straight out of the box.

I am proud to say I am, at last and later than most, using Continuous Integration.

The map is not the territory

2009-04-08T09:40:00.000+01:00

My new job on the Erewhon Project is largely based upon the work of my predecessor Arno Mittelbach.

In a series of posts leading up to the new OxPoints Arno rediscovers the issues around using first order predicate calculus on continuous dimensions such as time.

This would appear to be a rediscovery of the Yale Shooting Problem: the real world cannot be modelled in a monotonic logic. Locations are not points but areas, names are not simple properties but have implicit usage start and end times. Only in maths is something as simple as its description: the map is not the territory.

amd64 "no such file or directory" error with Android and Skype

2009-04-03T15:23:00.002+01:00

Using an amd64 debian (lenny and kubuntu jaunty) install I came across the least informative error message yet:

bash: adb: No such file or directory

and similarly for skype.

This appears to be due to not yet having installed the i36 compatibility libraries:

apt-get install ia32-libs

and it goes away.

Bye then Pepper. Good girl.

2009-04-01T11:07:00.000+01:00

On Wednesday morning, at about 8.15, Pepper died.

Whilst she was rather young (eleven maybe) to die, for a mongrel, her timing was pretty good. It was the first day of my new job and as it was all of us were stroking her as she stopped breathing, twitched and was gone.

Pictures tell of thousands of words

2009-03-20T20:49:00.000Z

Had to give a presentation for an interview with OUCS on "the challenges of creating mobile location-based services to students" so took a walk and photographed the signage.

Did the presentation in OpenOffice Impress, but of course the fonts were different on Windows and the colours were the first ones I chose not the ones I had settled on and saved and which showed on Apple and Linux.
If I don't get the job I will blame grotty software.

Ellie as Shiva

2009-03-19T14:46:00.000Z

Wavemaker 32 bit rpm on amd64 debian

2009-02-17T22:34:00.001Z

As there is no appropriate .deb file for wavemaker but the rpm is pure java so the following works:

rpm2cpio wavemaker-4.0.2.24308-community.i386.rpm >wm.cpio cpio -idv < wm.cpio

mv opt/wavemaker-4.0.2.24308 /opt/ /opt/wavemaker-4.0.2.24308/bin/wavemaker.sh

£900m googlewhack

2009-02-15T20:58:00.000Z

In Saturday's Guardian Jill Treanor treated us to an 'explanation' of the downfall of Lloyds, which left me perplexed and annoyed, so I turned to Google to try to decipher the jargon.

I discover that a "policy tax charge" is a googlewhack so am none the wiser.

"Yahoo!", the number two, plays a spoiling game

2009-02-13T21:31:00.000Z

I went to hear Mr Raghu Ramakrishnan of Yahoo! Research give a talk at ComLab, which was a real treat. Lovely people in a lovely building doing interesting things, this is the joy of living in Oxford and I am determined to take more advantage of it.

The talk was rather light on detail, if clearly and energetically given. The problem space was described very well, but the solution was mostly given by pointing to DBLife, so it can be done but the how is left for you to discover.

If, like me, you think of "Yahoo!" as a failing company with an incorrect belief that punctuation can form part of a name then you may not have paid much attention to them.
(Douglas Crockford's json excepted).

However the point was well made that as the number two in the market "Yahoo!" must, necessarily, play a market disrupting game and the way they are doing this is to open their API. The current monetised search model is sown up by big G. The next generation will be 'semantic' search:

- the search engine inferring the reason for the search and possibly tracking episodes in a search which may be engaged in over a number of sessions over a period of days or months.

- the search engine extracting more structure from the pages crawled.

How to do this is unknown so "Yahoo!" have opened their API, lowered the barrier to entry for academics and others to play with the results of spidering. No more having to setup the spiders, parsers or vast datastores previously required to start a websearch project.

"Yahoo!" do not want anything in return, all they want is the current incumbent de-throned, so that they can have another shot, possibly in partnership with the next big idea.

Bibliomania as a search provider

2009-02-05T20:34:00.000Z

A nasty bug surfaced , which I introduced to poem in 2007, when Bibliomania was reunited with current melati/poem, see Melati Developers for gory details. The site is now even faster.

That done I have created an OpenSearchDescription for Bibliomania, which can be installed from the site or via the Mozilla addon repository.

I would like a few things to happen:

Someone with IE7 or IE8 try clicking on the little search icon at the bottom of the 'your details' login screen on Bibliomania.

Someone with Mozilla go to the Mozilla Addon site, search for 'Bibliomania search', create an account and login, install the addon and then review it positively. Ideally this will be more than one person, but at least one is required, other than me, before it is accepted.

You might also want to check the new entry about search in the Bibliomania FAQ.

First Post

2009-01-21T16:52:00.000Z

Too busy to get a job!

Since end of the last one I have:

relaunched Bibliomania.

fixed the paneris mail server.

moved paneris.net,paneris.com, melati.org, melati.net to
bytemark, though annoyingly not paneris.org.

Installed OFBiz.

Installed Android.

Joined Twitter

Setup this blog.