I just found an application called Today and wanted to share it. It is unfortunately freeware, but it addresses a key complaint I have with the included groupware applications. iCal has a horible interface for adding tasks and Mail.app is such a strange place to have task lists, but no calendars. Today gives a view very similar to the “Outlook Today” interface in Outlook 2007 which I am accustomed to and love. I am currently using the trial version and will have to decide soon if I want to spend $15USD for this product. This is one thing I dislike about the Mac, there are tons of really neat applications for sale but each one costs enough that it isn’t worth it to buy each one. It is better than in the windows world, where there are tons of choices, all not doing what you want them to. It would be great if they could do an “App Store” for the mac platform for all these neat to have applications that are done by companies I don’t know if I trust with my credit card
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Release 0.142 – BuildBot is Botting Builds
For my first release I set out to set up a BuildBot instance at CDOT. My original plan was to have a try server running so people could check their code in and test it on all needed platforms locally. After a little while I decided that I will aim for this at a later date because it is not needed for my project and is apparently very complicated to set up. My journey started with checking out the BuildBot sources from the Mozilla CVS repository. I then built and installed BuildBot and it’s dependencies Twisted and ZOPE. Once I did this I downloaded the BuildBot documentation and got stuck in.
Reading the BuildBot documentation was a strange experience. I felt both at ease with the documentation and confused by its structure. I found that the best way to learn what BuildBot is and what it does is for someone to explain it to you. Thankfully, Armen helped me out with that (thanks 
). This week he and I went through a couple BuildBot master configuration files which really made it clear what was going on with BuildBot. With that information I was able to set up a manually driven BuildBot that night.
Currently, my BuildBot requires a forced build to do anything. This is because I still need to configure a change source to tell BuildBot when to start a build on its own. After consulting with some of my peers I decided that this is probably what I have now is probably the best setup for doing my work on Twisted and BuildBot as it will make my testing a lot less waiting around for a change in the repository and a lot more debugging. Depending on how my testing is going I may decided to test only one of Mozilla’s modules so there are much shorter builds. Rather than using a smaller, unrelated project, this will ensure I am still seeing all the Mozilla specific things happen.
In order to ensure I have a build-able tree I have a checked out copy of the mozilla source code which I know to work and am serving this on the BuildBot master. My goal for the next two weeks is to work on getting Mac OS X and Windows BuildBot slaves into the mix and make a change to Twisted and/or BuildBot. The change that I plan on doing is to have some rudimentary form of timestamps on the build logs. This is not my final patch for twisted because I will be aiming to have it as a non-configurable change. This change will help me learn the code bases as well as to understand the methods I will be modifying. My release after next will be to have a configurable logging subsystem. Currently I have a couple plans for how to do this but I will leave them for my next blog post.
I am starting to think that I should maybe start a bug somewhere to ensure that my progress is visible and increase the chance of a speedy review.
Posted in School
BuildBot do you hate me?
I have been trying to get a buildbot setup going at school with no success yet. For those of you unfamiliar with buildbot, it is is a build and test system which works to constantly build code for a project. Mozilla currently uses this system to perform build and test in many different configurations. For our CDOT setup, I’d like to create a try-server so people can test their patches the supported platforms before submitting it. Right now, I’d be happy with getting the sample buildbot configuration to run.
Originally I tried using Mozilla’s modified buildbot but have since decided that for learning purposes that I am going to start with a plain upstream version. I have been reading the buildbot documentation and found it to be very helpful and informative. I did noticed, however, that there is no mention of which version of the dependant packagetwisted buildbot is known to work with. This is making it difficult to ensure that the errors I get are not due to an incorrect version of twisted.
When I try to check the sample configuration file, I get this output:[buildbot-master@australia Buildbot]$ buildbot checkconfig master.cfg
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/buildbot-0.7.9-py2.5.egg/buildbot/scripts/runner.py", line 855, in doCheckConfig
ConfigLoader(configFile)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/buildbot-0.7.9-py2.5.egg/buildbot/scripts/checkconfig.py", line 31, in __init__
self.loadConfig(configFile)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/buildbot-0.7.9-py2.5.egg/buildbot/master.py", line 487, in loadConfig
exec f in localDict
File "master.cfg", line 105, in
f1.addStep(Trial(testpath="."))
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/buildbot-0.7.9-py2.5.egg/buildbot/steps/python_twisted.py", line 392, in __init__
raise ValueError("Must either set testChanges= or provide tests=")
ValueError: Must either set testChanges= or provide tests=
I am 99% sure that this is because my master.cfg file is flawed. I am getting this on the sample master.cfg file. I am going to read the relevant section of the documentation tomorrow morning as I am too tired to look at it right now. I am also going to need to serve up a mercurial repository to allow people to check in their code to try.
Some information for those interested in the BuildBot @ Seneca, I have some zenit wiki pages which might be of interest here. Right now, there isn’t much useful information there, it is a scratch pad. In time I will build this up to have lots of useful information, or at least that is the plan.
Posted in School
DPS911 Project
While speaking with John and Aki from release engineering this winter we decided that it might be a good idea for me to start work on a project that I could continue when I get to California for the summer. On a phone call this past Friday John, Aki and myself discussed a possible project. It sounds really interesting and I have decided to focus on this for my DPS911 course. The goal of this project is to add trending and historical information to the buildbot system. I have a project plan on our school wiki. Right now, my main tasks are to set up a buildbot system at school and try to come up with a name for the project. I am really excited to work on this as it is a very neat project
As far as my work with JBoss goes, I would like to continue working on that when I have spare time. I have been in contact with someone who has set up a couple SIGs within Fedora who has offered to help me set one up for JBoss inclusion. At this point, the project requires 200+ projects be packaged for Fedora which will take up a lot more time than there is in one semester. Through this SIG the community will be able to work together in packaging. Once the dependencies are met, the next step is to actually package the different parts of JBoss AS.
Posted in School