p4 sync
mkdir -p jython/workflow
p4 edit *.py
bash # I use tcsh
for f in *.py; do
 p4 move $f jython/workflow/$f
done
exit # Back to tcsh
p4 submit

<script type="text/javascript">
 
function gup( name ){
name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
var regex = new RegExp( regexS );
var results = regex.exec( window.location.href );
 if( results == null )    return "";
else    return results[1];}
 
function reload() {
 window.location = window.location
}
 
var refresh = gup('refresh');
if ( refresh > 0 )    window.setInterval(reload, refresh*1000);
</script>

Now users can add refresh=nn and the page will reload every nn seconds. This ought to work in most cases where you can sneak some HTML into a Web App.

Function gup stolen from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/979975/how-to-get-the-value-from-url-parameter.

I cast about a few times for a fix. I tried VMWare KB 196, and a few solutions offered in an abandoned blog. But what did the trick is good old xset.

I added this to my .bashrc:

xset r rate 500 20

As I understand it, this means “key repeat only happens if you hold a key down for at least half a second, and then not for more than 20 times.”

My workstation has been way more pleasant to deal with ever since.

How can I contemplate moving everything to the cloud, especially Google’s cloud, if services are going to flicker in and out of existence at the whim of Google’s management? That’s a non-starter. Google has scrapped services in the past, and though I’ve been sympathetic with the people who complained about the cancellation, they’ve been services that haven’t reached critical mass. You can’t say that about Google Reader. And if they’re willing to scrap Google Reader, why not Google Docs?

An excellent point.

I recall the first time I adopted a “cloud” service for my technology. It was Flickr. I had managed my photos with my own scripts for years. Others had installed Gallery, which always struck me as limited and ugly. Flickr was new at the time, and I really liked the aesthetic. But, upload all my photos there? They had just been bought by Yahoo. How long is Yahoo going to support the service? I still keep local archives of my photos, but I have thousands of photos shared on Flickr, and how do I know that all those captions, comments, geotags, annotations, sets and collections, that all that data might not one day go down with the slowly sinking-ship that is Yahoo?

What reassured me was the Flickr API. Worst case, I should be able to write a script to pull all that data to a local place somewhere and later reconstruct my online photo archive. If Flickr were going down, someone else would probably write that script better than I could. It is a grim thought, but at least when Flickr dies, there is an exit strategy.

That is one reason why I can sort of trust Google. They’re pretty good about supporting APIs. They’re killing Reader? That’s dumb. But in an instant, Feedly was able to take over my subscriptions from Google for me, and I just had to spend a few minutes learning a somewhat different interface.

It would be nice, though, if, when software was retired, especially cloud software, that it could be open sourced and available for the die-hard users to keep it running on their own servers somewhere. Admittedly, cloud services especially are vulnerable to further external dependencies . . .

You would think, though, that it shouldn’t take much effort on Google’s part to announce that a service has been retired, but they’ll keep it running indefinitely, at least until some point where the vast majority of the users had wandered on to more compelling alternatives. They still keep the Usenet archive around.

And, yes, I rely on DocsDrive. This killing Reader fiasco sounds like an advertising ploy for Microsoft. I rely on DocsDrive, but maybe Excel is a more trustworthy option for the long term . . . ?

If you are naming files on a computer, please use this format. The beauty is that if you list files in “alphabetical order” then these dates get listed in chronological order, because as far as a computer is concerned, the “0″ comes before “1″ and so forth. (And a year is more significant than a month is more significant than a day of the month . . .)

It is important to have that leading zero! Why? Because we have more than 10 months! Allow me to demonstrate:

0-11:32 djh@noneedto ~$ (echo "2013-02-27" && echo "2013-12-27") | sort
2013-02-27
2013-12-27
0-11:32 djh@noneedto ~$ (echo "2013-2-27" && echo "2013-12-27") | sort
2013-12-27
2013-2-27

If you are interacting with strftime() then what you want to remember is %F!

0-11:38 djh@noneedto ~$ date +%Y-%m-%d
2013-02-27
0-11:38 djh@noneedto ~$ date +%F
2013-02-27
0-11:38 djh@noneedto ~$ date +%Y%m%d%H%M # I sometimes use this for file timestamps but dont tell Randall Monroe
201302271138

For my photographs, I have a directory hierarchy of %Y/%m-%B:

0-11:43 djh@noneedto Photographs$ find . -type d | sort | tail
./2012/08-August/Costa_Rica/Santa_Teresa
./2012/08-August/Costa_Rica/Ziplines
./2012/09-September
./2012/09-September/Sonogram
./2012/10-October
./2012/11-November
./2012/12-December
./2013
./2013/01-January
./2013/02-February

This gives me the human convenience of seeing the month name on my folders, but the computer sorts those folders in chronological order.

I am happy to point out that, while we don’t get free smartphones or free food, my employer does issue remote employees with a hardware VPN device that provides corporate wifi, and a videophone. And we are hiring.

In my experience as a non-management technical professional, there is some virtue both to working from home, and to working at the office. The office presents great opportunities for collaboration: working through ideas and solving problems. Working from home, for some people, provides an excellent space to focus on getting some work done without interruption. You can get more hours of productive work when your commute is shortened to a walk across the dining room, and when there’s no pressure to quit at a certain time to appease the demands of the train schedule or traffic.

For some people, there’s no place like the office . . . some people can do better work from home, some people do not. Managers and executives, the bulk of whose work is meeting with others to make collaborative decisions . . . it seems that they may take several meetings from home and when they get to the office they feel uncomfortable that the busy hum of productive creative energy isn’t located there. I believe that managers who can structure the working and communication practices of their teams to effectively collaborate and track work progress without requiring a physical presence have an advantage over those who can not.

I live near the office and frequently collaborate with my manager, so most days I make the trip in. Sometimes when I need to focus on a project, or work with a remote time zone, I’ll commute to the home office. I have been with Cisco for over five years, now. I spent one of those years in New York, and my tenure here would have been much shorter without the flexibility to telecommute.

David Fullerton makes a good case for effective remote work.

THIS is a modem!
CC: BryanAlexander

Except, DSL is actually an overlay on the analog telephone network. So, wait . . . what?

Wikipedia wastes its time on a pointless distinction:

“The term DSL modem is technically used to describe a modem which connects to a single computer, through a USB port or is installed in a computer PCI slot. The more common DSL router which combines the function of a DSL modem and a home router, is a standalone device which can be connected to multiple computers …”

Yeah, really helpful. But as geeks know, you need to check the Wikipedia talk page:

The usage “DSL Modem” is not erroneous. A DSL modem does indeed perform modulation and demodulation. It uses either Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) or Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation. Multiple modulated subcarriers are then combined into an OFDM stream. The distinction between this type of modem and a traditional one is that the traditional one modulates audio frequency signals whereas the DSL modem is upconverted to an RF band. But they both perform modulation and demodulation. The digital signals are not sent as baseband digital signals.

I do not know what all those words mean, but I read that as “a DSL modem is still a modem. It modulates and demodulates a digital signal into the RF band of a telephone line.”

I made my own contribution to Wikipedia’s Talk page:

The distinction between whether your “DSL modem” connects via USB, ethernet, wireless, or provides NAT, sounds like a spurious distinction to me. I interpret and interchange “DSL modem” and “DSL router” as “the network device that bridges your local computing resources to your network service provider.”

But if I have learned anything about nomenclature disputes on Wikipedia, it is that they are not worth the effort.

The current Google Car can operate on city streets autonomously, but it needs someone doing the backend work of getting all the streets mapped out perfectly, figuring out exactly where the lanes are. Then in order to do a truly autonomous taxi service, you’ll want a two-way video linkup for the dispatcher to pilot the car if it gets stuck in some situation like the fire department blocking the street, or to monitor security.

For that reason, the current livery model works really well: a small, local company will service its fleet and its IT needs. The biggest expense, the driver, will be eliminated. This will serve an evolutionary role of a taxi service within a limited service area. This will be mostly shopping trips for car-less people, and “last mile” services to transit connection points, like Taxis serve now. The evolution comes with lower cost: short-haul, off-peak commuter needs, more “last mile” transit service where an autotaxi will be faster and more convenient than the local bus service, but also cheap.

What happens next? “Roaming” agreements among carriers sharing a common technology platform. The service areas of the autotaxi companies grow larger: your local autotaxi can drop you off on a shopping trip to a regional big-box store two towns over and the local autotaxi there can bring you back cheap. Expanded mobility, less reliance on transit.

This doesn’t mean the end of transit. Individual automobiles still require more energy and infrastructure to operate. The autotaxi will dominate short trips, but especially at peak demand, we will need to rely on higher-capacity transit backbones.

The biggest driver of the need for peak-period transit handoff is the capacity limitations of the autotaxi carriers. You simply can not carry everyone, but you want to be a part of the picture. So, yeah, the service gets you from your house to the transit hub, maybe work out relationships with local transit agencies so thaty “last mile” can be served by auto-taxi as a part of the transit fare itself.

The other limitation is for longer-range travel, even a fully autonomous rubber-on-pavement highway system will not be able to match the speed of rail-based or air travel. The autotaxi might drive you fifty miles to the high-speed train station, but then you’ll board the bullet train for LA which will be faster and charge a lower fare.

Anyway, the roaming evolution will mean that we go from local taxi service to regional airport shuttle service, and this will be great for those who live some distance from a long-haul transportation hub who want to make it to/from the airport, &c.

I think autonomous cars are a very reasonable evolution on human-piloted cars, which were a very reasonable evolution on horse-drawn carriages. In the twentieth century we evolved from horses to humans, and in the twenty-first we will evolve even more seamlessly from human to computer.

Our streets didn’t change much from the carriage to the automobile era. They’re wider and too dangerous for people to walk in. I doubt the streets will change much in the autonomous era, except they’ll narrow again and it will be safe to walk, bike, and play in them again.

My other prediction is that the autotaxi will make getting around so convenient, that car ownership will continue to decline. You will see a winners-and-losers scenario in the auto industry: the losers will realize too late just how badly they are in trouble. They will try to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt as to the safety and wisdom of reliance on autonomous vehicles, just as they try to sell some. The winners will have identified the coming trend and geared their business to serving the needs of autonomous fleet operators, and to those niche consumers for whom autonomous vehicles are not appropriate, or who just love driving their own car. Other winners will include pedestrians, cyclists, the young, the elderly, people with disabilities, suburbanites, night life, and very likely the environment.

So, in the interests of saving me sanity next time I need to set a Cascading Select, here’s a Jython function that works in Jira 4.2:

import logging
 
from com.atlassian.jira import ComponentManager
from com.atlassian.jira.issue.customfields.manager import OptionsManager
from com.atlassian.jira.issue.customfields.view import CustomFieldParamsImpl
from com.atlassian.jira.issue import ModifiedValue
from com.atlassian.jira.issue.util import DefaultIssueChangeHolder
from java.util import HashSet
 
# cf = custom field
# issue = issue to modify
# parent = top value to set (string value)
# child = child value to set (string value)
def set_cascading_select(cf, issue, parent, child):
    # Get the managers
    cfm = ComponentManager.getInstance().getCustomFieldManager()
    om = ComponentManager.getComponentInstanceOfType(OptionsManager)
    fli = ComponentManager.getInstance().getFieldLayoutManager().getFieldLayout(issue).getFieldLayoutItem(cf)
 
    parent_options = om.getOptions(cf.getRelevantConfig(issue))
    parent_option = None
    child_option = None
    try:
        parent_option = parent_options.getOptionForValue(parent, None)
    except:
        pass
    try:
        child_option = parent_options.getOptionForValue(child, parent_option.getOptionId())
    except:
        pass
 
    if parent_option and child_option:
        old_application = issue.getCustomFieldValue(cf)
        new_application = CustomFieldParamsImpl(cf)
        a_none = HashSet()
        a_none.add(parent_option)
        a_1 = HashSet()
        a_1.add(child_option)
        new_application.put(None, a_none)
        new_application.put("1", a_1)
        mf = ModifiedValue(old_application, new_application)
        cf.updateValue(fli, issue, mf, DefaultIssueChangeHolder())
        logging.debug("set issue " + issue.getKey() + " cf " + cf.getName() + " setting " + parent + "/" + child)
        return True
    else:
        logging.error("invalid parent/child option: " + parent + "/" + child)
        return None

Example function calls from within a validation hook:

cfm = ComponentManager.getInstance().getCustomFieldManager()
 
application_cf = cfm.getCustomFieldObjectByName("Beverages")
 
# good
set_cascading_select(application_cf, issue, "Hard Drinks", "Whiskey")
# bad child
set_cascading_select(application_cf, issue, "Hard Drinks", "Coke")
# bad parent
set_cascading_select(application_cf, issue, "Soft Drinks", "Whiskey")
# total crap
set_cascading_select(application_cf, issue, "Illicit Drugs", "Bath Salts")

The logging stuff is useful for debugging, if you have that set up, else just remove those bits.

So, here is some explanation I just sent to the NOC and copied to the Sales team of a “Colocation Provider” who keeps sending me messages from something called “Collocation Status Report”:

Dear NOC:

A collocation is a statistic used by linguists to determine the
frequency with which words and phrases are found together.

On your contact information page, there is an option to contact Sales
about “Colocation”

Assuming that you are indeed in the business of Colocation, and not
actually updating us on the status of word frequencies, please fix the
name in your outgoing envelope from “Collocation Status Reports” to
“Colocation Status Reports”

Thanks,
-danny

Yup. That’s all I have to say about that.

However, I was just browsing Amazon.com for a resin adirondack chair, where I saw:

Twenty six bucks!? Sounds good . . . not eligible for Prime, so let’s check the shipping . . .

Whiskey . . . Tango . . . Foxtrot . . . $192 shipping you say?!! Something is fishy here . . .

So, I surf on over to True Value’s web site, where the chairs are $20, and they’ll ship to the local store.

Which makes me wonder if this is a case of “reverse showrooming” . . . I go to Amazon.com because I can probably find what I am looking for, then I am led to a local retailer to save money. Very clever . . .

So, we start with something like this:

		<h1>Yadda Yadda</h1>
 
		<ul class="columns">
			<li>BLAH blah blah one</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah two</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah three</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah four</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah five</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah six</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah seven</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah eight really long example</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah nine</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah ten</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah eleven</li>
			<li>BLAH blah blah twelve</li>
		</ul>
 
		<h1>Yappa Yappa</h1>

Which renders as:

Yadda Yadda

• BLAH blah blah one
• BLAH blah blah two
• BLAH blah blah three
• BLAH blah blah four
• BLAH blah blah five
• BLAH blah blah six
• BLAH blah blah seven
• BLAH blah blah eight really long example
• BLAH blah blah nine
• BLAH blah blah ten
• BLAH blah blah eleven
• BLAH blah blah twelve

Yappa Yappa

Okay. So, multiple columns? That is what TABLE is for, but we are dealing with UL. But I have my old friend the float attribute, so I define a style sheet:

			ul.columns li {
				list-style: none;
				float: left;
				width: 30%;
			}
			h1 { clear: left; }

Now we render as three columns:

Yadda Yadda

• BLAH blah blah one
• BLAH blah blah two
• BLAH blah blah three
• BLAH blah blah four
• BLAH blah blah five
• BLAH blah blah six
• BLAH blah blah seven
• BLAH blah blah eight really long example
• BLAH blah blah nine
• BLAH blah blah ten
• BLAH blah blah eleven
• BLAH blah blah twelve

Yappa Yappa

Two columns? Four? Just tune the width attribute:

			ul.columns li {
				list-style: none;
				float: left;
				width: 45%;
			}
			h1 { clear: left; }

And you get:

• BLAH blah blah one
• BLAH blah blah two
• BLAH blah blah three
• BLAH blah blah four
• BLAH blah blah five
• BLAH blah blah six
• BLAH blah blah seven
• BLAH blah blah eight really long example
• BLAH blah blah nine
• BLAH blah blah ten
• BLAH blah blah eleven
• BLAH blah blah twelve

It is not perfect. The content renders left-to-right, so strictly speaking, these aren’t columns.

If you narrow enough to cause wrapping you get some odd gaps.

Due to margins and the like, you can’t just say three columns is 33%, two columns is 50% . . . if you narrow this page enough you’ll see a graceful degradation from more columns to fewer.

Here’s a more dynamic example, where wider pages will get more columns:

			ul.columns li {
				list-style: none;
				float: left;
				width: 15em;
			}
			h1 { clear: left; }

Renders as:

• BLAH blah blah one
• BLAH blah blah two
• BLAH blah blah three
• BLAH blah blah four
• BLAH blah blah five
• BLAH blah blah six
• BLAH blah blah seven
• BLAH blah blah eight really long example
• BLAH blah blah nine
• BLAH blah blah ten
• BLAH blah blah eleven
• BLAH blah blah twelve

The block following your UL will need to clear the floated content, hence the clear: left on the H1, above.

See also:

• http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/li-column.html — my “scratch pad” for this specific question.
• http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/columns.html — some related experimentation I did in 2003.

JIRA 4.2, YMMV.

Validate User Time Tracking

Somewhat elaborate: enforce that time worked has been logged, except under certain circumstances. See original post.

import com.atlassian.jira.issue.worklog.Worklog
from com.atlassian.jira import ComponentManager
 
# Time Already Logged
timespent = issue.getTimeSpent()
# Time Logged via current screen
try:
    timelogged = dict(issue.getModifiedFields())['worklog']
except:
    timelogged = False
 
# Duplicate Issue?  It is as good as logged!
resolution = issue.getResolution()
if resolution['name'] == "Duplicate":
    timelogged = True
if resolution['name'] == "Self Corrected":
    timelogged = True
 
# Nagios likes to close tickets, but doesn't get paid
user = ComponentManager.getInstance().getJiraAuthenticationContext().getUser()
if user.getName() == "nagios":
    timelogged = True
 
if timespent < = 0 and timelogged == False:
    result = False
    description = "Please log the time you spent on this ticket."

Assign Unassigned Issue to User

This helps make sure tickets get assigned.

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
from com.atlassian.jira import ComponentManager
 
assignee = issue.getAssignee()
user = ComponentManager.getInstance().getJiraAuthenticationContext().getUser()
 
if not issue.getAssignee():
    issue.setAssignee(ComponentManager.getInstance().getJiraAuthenticationContext().getUser())

Validate Custom Field Value

We have a particular custom field which can be set UNKNOWN by the Reporter, but which should be cleaned up by the Assignee.

from com.atlassian.jira import ComponentManager
 
cfm = ComponentManager.getInstance().getCustomFieldManager()
product = issue.getCustomFieldValue(cfm.getCustomFieldObject('customfield_12345'))
 
if product == 'UNKNOWN':
    result = False
    description = "Please set CUSTOM_FIELD value appropriately."

Kubuntu is Ubuntu with a nicely set-up KDE environment. They try to get you to use their own home-grown web browser, and the file manager takes some getting used to, but you can pretty quickly get under the hood, set up all your little window manager preferences, and get back to jamming. (Focus Follows Mouse in my house!)

The only thing that was missing is the fonts were rendering . . . not as pretty as regular Ubuntu. Kubuntu is set up to use the Ubuntu font, but in KDE things render kind of pixelly looking, like I was still in the 90s. A bit of searching and they seem to look nicer:

System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts
Use anti-aliasing: Enabled
Configure…
Use sub-pixel rendering: RGB
Hinting style: Slight

Now things feel a little more 21st century.