Birthday Skydiving

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When Jenny was a youngling, she read a National Geographic Magazine that talked about indor skydiving. This month was Jenny’s birthday, and when I was talking to some friends they mentioned an Indoor Skydiving Place near us in Raeford, NC. They said it was fun, so I figured it would be a great birthday idea. The name of the place is Paraclete XP I called them up, and come to find out they could handle all ages. So, I called up my parents and they were willing to go. This past Tuesday Jenny, myself, the kids, and the grandparents all headed down to Raeford for Jenny’s Birthday.

This place is fabulous.

We headed down after work, and got there 45 minutes early. We were met by some friendly folks, and told to head up. There we saw the wind tunnel with 3 folks doing all types of fancy tricks. They were floating upside down, doing flips, and shooting themselves up 30 feet in the air. The tunnel was all glass, so we got to watch and see how cool it would be.

We then met Selwyn, our instructor. He was a Jamaican Dude with a Welsh Name. He was very friendly, and did a great job with both the kids and a the adults. He took us down to watch a goofy video, and then gave us some basic instructions about how to hold out bodies, and how to know when he wanted us to straighten our legs and bend them. He did a great job with the kids making sure they understood. Then we went to get dressed in our flight clothes. Let me say, we looked cool:

We then went in to fly. It was more physical than I thought it would be, but much easier to get control. Kudos to our instructor Selwyn who always seemed to know what we needed to do and did a great job communicating alot of information without talking. We were in 90-120 miles of wind, so you could not hear very much. But he did a great job.

All and all, we did good. Jenny did great on her first flight:

And both kids did great on their flights:

And for the proof that all ages can do it, here is my father in flight:

By the time it was over, we had all done 2 flights of 2 minutes each. This was more than enough time. We were able to get up to about 12 feet on our own and to do basic moves. At the end, the instructor asked us if we wanted to fly to the roof. He promised there was nothing we needed to do, and nothing we could do cause any issue. Needless to say, looking into a tunnel and seeing your wife shoot to the roof at 120 miles per hour is pretty wierd.

For folks in the Raleigh area, this is a great time. I highly recommend it!

Do not use private if you write frameworks

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If you write a framework, please do not use private. You may think that you know how I am going to use it. I promise, if it works as it should I will not try and override the basic functionality. However, if I am looking at the code to know it is private then I have a use case you did not expect.

My current example is rails active resource. This is a great framework if you are planning to use it to talk to another rails app. If your url does not end in .json then you have to override / reimplement many high level methods because of one or two private methods.

I know they teach you this in school. I know it makes you feel smart. Stop it. Private methods makes your frameworks less usable and less extensible.

My Office

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This is my office. A great use of mobile technology, on location support, and ambient cooling.

My Office

Need help testing new libvirt java bindings

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I have moved the java bindings for libvirt up to 0.8.1. It is mostly cut and paste code, but the test driver does not support some of the new features so I would appreciate if someone could bang on them a bit. Specifically, I would like to see someone try out:

Snapshots
Streams (Callbacks in particular)
Secrets

I have put an SRPM out at [1] and a compiled jar at [2]. You can always clone the repo at [3] and build it from there.

Thanks!

[1] http://bkearney.fedorapeople.org/libvirt-java-0.4.5-ALPHA.fc12.src.rpm
[2] http://bkearney.fedorapeople.org/libvirt-0.4.5.ALPHA.jar
[3] http://www.libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-java.git;a=summary

Rest: Going from Simple to Good

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We have been playing alot more with Rest at work, and we are seeing that there is alot of docs on how easy it is to spin up a REST interface. However, there is not much on how to make them good. Fortunately, I work with alot of smart people we can have good discussions with. Bill Burke has put up the results of one of the discussions on a good way of modeling state transitions on rest. Check out his post

Rest, I dont think I get it

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I sent this as an internal email.. but figured I would post the question as well. File this into the “I dont get it” category. Not as bad as Google Wave, but close.

So.. I hear that Rest is a panacea, but mostly because it is “Rest not SOAP”. I actually understand many of the benefits that REST is gives you:

1) I can use a simple http client to access resources, therefore it is easier to adopt.
2) I inherit alot of the WS-* enhancements from the underlieing http transport, so the frameworks are lighter weight.
3) The ability to use the service both by a client and a browser.. mashups become easy.

What I keep getting hung up on is the absence of a formal description of the interface. I see WADL, but whenever I dig into this it seems to get brushed aside as a nuisance. If i want to write typed clients, then I need to have some formal contract of what can be passed in and what is returned. This contract seems to be what alot of the cruft around SOAP is for. Is there something I am missing with this? The answer the books/articles seem to give is “who needs a formal spec, it is all URI’s”. This tends to be a load of hooey, since some clients (rails in particular) do not handle nicely objects of the same type with heterogeneous data sets.

So.. it seems like Rest (which is not SOAP) makes it easy for the easy clients by skimping on the tools for the more complex clients. I can easily do jersey -> jersey, and I presume Resteasy -> Resteasy. But w/o that neutral definition.. cross implementation clients (robust ones) are actually harder.

Am I missing something?

Latest RHQ Build:l 3.0.0 Build 2

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The second community build for RHQ has landed. You can download it from http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Download and check out the release notes at http://rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Release+Notes+3.0.0.B02. There is lots of goodness here including better content management, better alerting, and other stuff you will have to play with to see. Come on bye, and check it out. Better yet… contributions are welcome.

Cobbler Settings Lens for Augeas

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After much help from David Lutterkort, I have a first cut of an Augeas lens for Cobbler . The settings file is basically a single YAML document, so this lens could be used to do generic yaml processing, but I would assume it would need some tweaks before then.

I figure it is best to get the first cut out there though. So here it is.

(*
	Parse the /etc/cobbler/settings file  which is in
	YAML 1.0 format.

	The lens can handle the following contructs
	* key: value
	* key: "value"
	* key: 'value'
	* key: [value1, value2]
	* key:
	   - value1
	   - value2
	* key:
	   key2: value1
	   key3: value2 

	Author: Bryan Kearney

	About: License
	  This file is licensed under the LGPLv2+, like the rest of Augeas.
*)
module CobblerSettings =
	autoload xfm

	let kw = /[a-zA-Z0-9_]+/
	(* TODO Would be better if this stripped off the " and ' chracters *)
	let kv = /([^]['", \t\n#:@-]+|"[^"\n]*"|'[^'\n]*')/ 

	let lbr = del /\[/ "["
	let rbr = del /\]/ "]"
	let colon = del /:[ \t]*/ ": "
	let dash = del /-[ \t]*/ "- "
	(* let comma = del /,[ \t]*(\n[ \t]+)?/ ", " *)
	let comma = del /[ \t]*,[ \t]*/ ", "

	let eol_only = del /\n/ "\n"

	(* TODO Would be better to make items a child of a document *)
	let docmarker = /-{3}/

	let eol   = Util.eol
	let comment = Util.comment
	let empty   = Util.empty
	let indent = del /[ \t]+/ "\t"
	let ws = del /[ \t]*/ " "

	let value_list = Build.opt_list [label "item" . store kv] comma
	let setting = [key kw . colon . store kv] . eol
	let simple_setting_suffix = store kv . eol
	let setting_list_suffix =  [label "sequence" . lbr . ws . (value_list . ws)? . rbr ] . eol
	let indendented_setting_list_suffix =  eol_only . (indent . setting)+
    let indented_list_suffix =  [label "list" . eol_only . ([ label "value" . indent . dash  . store kv] . eol)+]

    (* Break out setting because of a current bug in augeas *)
	let nested_setting = [key kw . colon . (
											(* simple_setting_suffix | *)
											setting_list_suffix |
											indendented_setting_list_suffix |
											indented_list_suffix
											)
						]

	let document = [label "---" . store docmarker] . eol    

	let lns = (document | comment | empty | setting | nested_setting )*
    (* let lns = (setting)* *)

	let xfm = transform lns (incl "/etc/cobbler/settings") 

	(*
	test lns  get "" = ?
	test lns  get "Simple_Setting: Value \n" = ?
	test lns  get "Simple_Setting2: 'Value2@acme.com' \n" = ?
	test lns  get "Simple_Setting3: ''\n" = ?
	test lns  get "Simple_Setting4: \"\"\n" = ?
	test lns  get "Setting_List:[Value1, Value2, Value3]\n" = ?
	test lns  get "Empty_Setting_List: []\n" = ?
	test lns  get "# Commented_Out_Setting: 'some value'\n" = ?
	test lns  get "---\n" = ?
	test lns  get "Nested_Setting:\n Test: Value\n" = ?
	test lns  get "Nested_Setting:\n - Test \n" = ?
	let  cset = Sys.read_file "/etc/cobbler/settings"
	test lns  get cset = ?
    *)
(* Local Variables: *)
(* mode: caml *)
(* End: *)

My next steps will be to clean this up, and to submit it along with some tests.

RHQ Build 1.4.0.B01

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My new project at work put out it’s latest open source release. You can learn about it in this here If folks are looking to contribute to a very successful open source Java management project I suggest coming over and taking a look.

Stupid Error Messages

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On Fedora 11, If you get this error message:


gconf-sanity-check-2 exit status 256

When you log in. Check that your /tmp file is not write protected. If it is write protected, or the disk is full, you will get this error. Save yourself a few hours of installing/unintsalling and check the /tmp directory.

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