My Weight Loss Story

Yes you do, inquisitive baby.

It has been an interesting project, these last couple months. A project to better my health and test my will power. After all this time and progress I am happy to say that I consider all of my effort and weight loss a success. My health has improved ten-fold and I am happier and more fit than I have been in years. Back to high school weight and athletic level.

I have been asked by friends, family, and coworkers how I accomplished this so I have written out my regimen in hopes that other people can pull in a tip here or there to help push them towards their own health goals.

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Source Code Visualization

There are a couple cool projects out there for visualizing code commit history. Just for my own memory’s sake I am listing them here so I can check them out later for any larger projects I may take on:

• http://www.michaelogawa.com/code_swarm/
• https://code.google.com/p/gource/

Example of minimal Apache CXF2 web services deployment

We had a requirement to add a web service to allow our partners to upload their events to our Calendar. Rather than spin up an entirely new application to handle this, we wanted to embed a very simple web service into the existing application. We wanted this to be very light weight and easy to implement.

I had used Apache Axis in the past so I decided to look into that first. To get a sample Axis2 application working (http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/community/tutorials/BottomUpAxis2WebService/bu_tutorial.html) with one simple class representing a single web service operation it created an 11MB package, dirty folder structure, admin pages to add more services, etc. Essentially a full blown web service server with admin options. I did NOT need this and it seems a little bulky. I tried to delete some of the /WEB-INF/lib JAR files but it was not obvious what was required and what wasn’t. I tried deleting the /axis2-web folder but that made it unusable. Not to mention all the config files required/generated. Let’s try something else…

TFS (2010) to SVN using a modified tfs2svn

UPDATE Jul 15 2012: I have linked my changes at the bottom of the post so you can either grab the bin or the changed files.

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Last year I wrote on how our org used tfs2svn to get us out of some jams when our TFS / SvnBridge / ReviewBoard solution was returning errors (Migrate TFS to SVN). We had been using that solution merrily while TFS 2008 Server was in play. Disaster struck when the infrastructure guys upgraded last week to TFS 2010 taking full advantage of the  new TFS 2010 Collections paradigm. What the new Collections does is alter the URL so that part of the path after the domain is the collection and part is the repository path (ex: http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/collection/myProject/trunk where the “http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/collection/” part is the server and collection declaration and the “/myProject/trunk” part is the TFS repository path “$/myProject/trunk”.

Trac and Agilo on Windows Server for Agile project management

We are going to start using Agile development for some of our new projects so I was asked to get an project management tool set up. I had used Trac in the past and heard of the Agile42 Agilo plugin for it. I had also used VersionOne professionally but that is a paid app. I eventually decided to give Trac + Agilo a go on our Windows Server 2003 virtual image server called “myserver”. Our project will be called “myproject”.

Migrate TFS to SVN

We have been quite happy running our ReviewBoard / TFS server at work however every once and a while we would get errors during review creation. It turned out that some times the files would get corrupt during the TFS to SVNBridge to SVN diff. This would manifest when the “post-review” command would fail during the SVN diff procedure with logged errors such as:
'svn: XML data was not well-formedn', 'svn: Error reading spooled REPORT request responsen'

Sweet sweet Minecraft

So Minecraft has been getting a stupid amount of buzz, and the developer (Notch aka Markus Persson – developer of WURM Online) has been getting a stupid amount of cash…for a pre-beta game?!?!

For 10 Euros (bout $15 CDN) you get to buy this unfinished, pre-beta, blocky 8 bit’esque game. Who in their right mind would pay for that? Well….a butt load of people including myself.

Taking the Ubuntu plunge

I finally got around to installing Ubuntu 10.04 onto my laptop (Toshiba Satellite L300D PSLC8C-04401R). Not dual-boot or VM’d…we are talking full format (bye-bye Vista) and clean install of Ubuntu.

10 Free Windows Applications

The Register has a list of 10 free Windows application to make you productive and safe:

http://www.reghardware.com/2010/04/22/ten_essential_freeware_windows_apps/

Code review goodness with ReviewBoard

The City of Ottawa’s Web group required a code inspection tool to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) section 6.6 “Code Review”. I investigated a couple of solutions, both open source and commercial, that fit our need for a fast, Web 2.0, side-by-side diff, inline comments, LDAP supported, and feature rich tool. It seems that Atlassian’s Crucible (purchase), Smartbear’s CodeCollaborator (purchase), and ReviewBoard (open source MIT license) were the pack leaders. I had used Crucible at Nortel and I really liked that product, but it was costly. Since I ❤ open source alternatives rather to paying for license fees, I opted to try ReviewBoard first. There was one problem though, the City is a Microsoft shop and we use Team Foundation Server (TFS) <grumble> as our source control repository but ReviewBoard didn’t list TFS in its supported repositories. Hrm…