Another note to myself:

Currently I have three books going at once. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth all recommended to me by Tom the Architect and all really interesting books — as a matter of fact, probably the most interesting stuff I’ve read this year.

The problem is, I’m over extending myself again on the reading and really need to get my act together and get to audible.com (also recommended by Tom the Architect) and get me some audio books for the iPod, since I have over an hour commute to work. A friend said he got through the audio book of The Innovator’s Dilemma pretty quickly using audio books. It took me a couple weeks of on and off reading.

So I’m going to try it out — eventually — and see if it increases the velocity of information getting into my head. Maybe I can clean up the reading queue and get some more books from my amazon wish list out of the queue as well.

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There is a new project (currently in .01 status) called The Dojo Toolkit. From their site, the goal is to “create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers”.

There is also an Introduction to Dojo on the site that explains what they are trying to accomplish.

The project is in it’s really early stages, but it looks interesting.

Also interesting is that this is another project using Trac for their project management software, something I had written a note to myself about previously (3 months ago to be exact), but still haven’t made the time to get it installed.

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Lasse Koskela has implemented a CruiseControl Publisher that supports the Weblog API.

This is an interesting concept. Managing your build system through weblog software. I’m interested in seeing how this would work and what effect blogging software could have on the productivity / mind sharing activities in a development team. This might be something I need to prototype somewhere.

We already use Wiki software as a documentation tool, and home grown build management software for the rest of the system, however I’m kind of interested in how Wordpress could be used in the same environment. Using “prepackaged” open source software for the activities surrounding a build / development team could cut out a lot of cost in software maintenance related to internal systems.

Some additional benefits I see from using this type of software as the central development hub “intranet”:

• Ability to post system notifications for hardware / patch maintenance
• One place to go for build notifications (get them out of email!)
• Ability to automagically post system upgrades or software deployments to the central site
• Ability for individual developers to post ideas or links to proof of concept software prototypes
• … I know there are more, but I have to dwell on it some more

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As a note to myself, I found a reference to Cobertura this morning as I was reading through the CruiseControl mailing list. Cobertura is a tool to calculate the percentage of code accessed by tests (test coverage).

According to the FAQ, this is a fork of the jcoverage tool, with “prettier reports” and a more open development process.

A sample report is also provided on their web site. It does look pretty cool, and would be a nice addition to an automated build system.

As an aside, a developer from the project has also developed a PHP based reporting front end for CruiseControl. The developer states that the “ugly” source code can be found in his CVS repository in the web module.

Whether the code is ugly or not, it’s definitely a start on integrating PHP based build management systems like SourceForge with CruiseControl.

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I found an article on Dougal Campbells weblog about how Ruby On Rails now has built in Ajax support.

While we’re on the subject, there is also the Simple Ajax Toolkit for PHP that deserves a look as well.

These are two things I definitely need carve out some time to look at, and are hereby assigned to my ‘Notes to Myself’ category.

Update 3/25/2005
A friend shot me this System Login Demo written using AJAX. This is also worth taking a few minutes to look at.

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For a while I have wanted to be able to build RSS feeds off of the commit activity in a Subversion repository in order to publish the latest commits to an internal intranet site. I found a blog article called Base-Art / Bringing RSS to SVN this morning that makes this possible.

This is yet another note to myself to check it out and see if it fits what was in my head. It may also be an indirect note to Keith to check it out for me.

From what the site says, this allows you to build the RSS feed in a post commit hook, in addition to building a separate HTML file for browsing independently from RSS, and does it all incrementally.

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As a note to myself, I have to look at JavaSVN when I get a chance. Its a pure Java implementation of a Subversion client.

Some things I have to research:

• What would it take to integrate this into CruiseControl to eliminate the need for the Subversion client being installed on the box?
• What would it take to integrate this into Apache Ant for the reason listed above.
• Finally, has anyone actually already done the above two things?

I’ll post the answers back here when I find out.

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This post is more a reminder to myself than anything else. As I was browsing the wordpress plugin repository I saw they are using version 0.8 of a product called Trac that integrates with Subversion and provides basic project management and defect tracking.

The site says the software does the following:

• An integrated system for managing software projects
• An enhanced wiki
• A flexible web-based issue tracker
• An interface to the Subversion revision control system

This looks really interesting and I need to remember to check it out. I tried to download it this morning, but it seems the download area of their site is down.

Update: Edgewall.com is not down. For some reason, FireFox was giving me zero reply error. When I went to a Windows machine with IE, I was able to download the software.

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