Pearl

By some weird coincidence, we were at Pearl last night. We had no idea that Pearl was the headquarters for the Democratic Party of Hawaii. Luckily there were some portions open to the general public and we were there early enough to actually get some seats.

It was pretty awesome. We were on the fringes of the celebration and not really part of the party...but it felt like we were. I actually had goosebumps when they announced that Obama had won.

Oh, and happy hour beers are only $3.

Tenkaizen rebuttal

I've been thinking about a post that a friend wrote last month regarding Kaizen and Tenkaizen. There was something about it that bothered me and I guess I'm one of those types of people that always thinks up a snappy comeback 10-minutes after the person you were talking to has left.
So anyway, here is my response....a month later.

I think that Kaizen (continuous improvement) and Tenkaizen (revolutionary thinking) are different aspects of a similar concept. Kaizen, to me, is a big part of how you should live your life, both personally and professionally. You should always strive to better yourself. The key with Kaizen is not necessarily the size of the improvement so much as the fact that at you are doing things to improve yourself or your abilities and that this is a constant goal. This does not mean that you just improve upon only what you already know, for me, it means making yourself better, or more efficient, or more knowledgeable by whatever means that presents itself. This improvement could and probably should involve radical new ways of doing things, which to me is the Tenkaizen concept.

So perhaps, my new mantra should be:

Live Kaizen...Think Tenkaizen

Atlassian Backup chore

I was tasked with backing up Confluence and Jira. Sounds easy enough. They both have an XML backup that can be run automatically. The only problem, for me at least, is that the XML backup can take up a lot of space especially if you backup the attachments. On the last server we had, we actually ran out of drive space because the backups were just piling up.
So I decided to go a different route. The Atlassian folks actually recommend not using the XML backup anyway since it will eventually take too long or take too much space or could even become unstable. According to the documentation, all I needed to do was take a dump of the database and backup the Attachments directory.
I also wanted the backups to be run on a daily basis and wanted some way to monitor the backups. We use Hudson for our daily builds, so I wanted to use that for the backups. I also wanted to use Ruby (actually JRuby) to write the scripts. I really only wanted to use Ruby because it seemed cooler than writing a batch file.

I don't want this post to be too long so let me just go over the major issues and realizations from doing this little chore.

First of all, it took me a while to figure out how to get Hudson to run stuff on a remote machine. Basically you just need to create a free style project and then have the Job execute a Windows Batch file. Of course, nothing is that easy: If you run Ruby or a Batch file from Hudson, it assumes you are executing on the Hudson server and not on the remote machine.
I ended up using PSEXEC to enable Hudson to execute the program remotely. PSEXEC is an awesome tool that I've never heard about before. It just worked. How cool is that?
Anyway, after that find, it was just working out little kinks in the system. For example, PSEXEC did not like output streams when you run it from Hudson. It would give you an ERROR Code 1. To fix this, all you do is make sure your batch file has ECHO OFF at the top. PSEXEC would also hang when run from Hudson and I ended up putting an /accepteula switch to prevent it from hanging.

Secondly, I've come to the conclusion that Ruby ain't all that. I'm sure it is good for certain things, but just doing simple file manipulation (copying and zipping files) is just a pain. I had a hard time finding examples of copying directories and zipping files. And the ones that I did find didn't work. I ended up spending half my time trying to figure out how to do things in Ruby. Granted I don't know Ruby at all, but still, I would have thought examples for these simple tasks would be everywhere. So maybe Ruby is just not meant for those tasks. I ended up doing the script in a Batch file. Kind of ghetto, but it worked really well. Batch files may be a bit under rated.

So anyway, the chore is over. Everything works just the way I wanted it to work, with the exceptions of the tools that I ended up using. I think that's just the way things go sometimes. You need to roll with the punches and use the tools that fit the problem.

One final note. I obviously did not figure this out all by myself. It took a lot of Googling of the discussion boards, blogs, and all that good Internet stuff that is out there to find what I needed. Thanks to everyone that posted solutions to their problems because it sure helped me. I just wish I saved all those links so that I could give them proper credit for their work. I was working on an app that would help do just that...Shoebox v 0.1...maybe I should dust that one off and start working on it again.

Flex Graphics Library

I wanted to include custom graphic into my Flex application. I wanted to have something that I would be able to manipulate in code and also look the way I want it to look.
After some searching I found Degrafa. Degrafa is a graphics framework for Flex. It allows you to create custom, sophisticated graphics using the Flex markup language.

I haven't done too much with it yet, other than verifying that it works. I got it to display a simple circle in about 4 lines of Flex XML code. The only real problem, or inconvenience so far is that the graphics do not render in the Flex Builder designer. You need to compile the code and view it in the run-time application. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or not, but at least it works.

This sample application that was done by Thomas Gonzalez for the 360 Flex conference in San Jose was done using Degrafa.



You can check out the working application here.

Flex Unit

Tried out Flex Unit today. Setup was really easy. I followed the instructions that I found here and was up and running in 20 minutes.
Writing the tests were similar to the older version of JUnit. You basically create your tests, then you need to create a test suite to run them. Creating the test suite is kind of a drag, but on the plus side, you get a pretty nice UI from FlexUnit.





This is a snippet of the UI, but right out of the box, it just looks nice.

The Zoo

This post is a little off topic but I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Last weekend we visited the Honolulu Zoo. In the past I've been really disappointed with the zoo. It used to look run down and the few animals that they do have are usually hiding out somewhere and you really never get to see them. Anyway, I think they did some major renovations because the zoo looks great now. We got to see a lot of the animals and the exhibits looked really nice. We were about a foot away from a pair of Cheetahs, a Siberian Tiger, and ... Fancy Chickens (?).
Kama'aina rates are just $4 for adults. It's totally worth checking out.

Inspiring

I've been going through a rough couple of months with my work. Mainly it's been a bit boring and not too much fun. I was recently forwarded a link to The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon. I saw this when it was first posted sometime last year but I decided to watched it again.
Without even going into the fact that my problems are minuscule in comparison, his lecture was inspiring to me on many levels. He talks about having dreams and working hard and living right as ways to achieve your goals. He also talked about mentoring, something that I really enjoy doing but have not been able to do too much recently.
So I've decided to get out of my funk and focus on building upon my skill set, working hard to achieve my goals, and try to help others as best as I can.
I have also decided to spend the rest of the Summer teaching my son to use Alice. Alice is a tool to help students learn to program using a 3D interactive programming environment. It makes learning the basics of programming fun and interesting. Randy Pausch was one of the people who helped to put Alice together.
Thanks Randy...