Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Total gratuitous video clip of Kylie Minogue riding electronic bull in lingerie. [thnx BluaP!] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] It's not development-related but god bless you Adam... 10:07:40 PM

One of the things which can be very, very frustrating in Ant is having something not work in a default task, mainly because *I think* the code is trying to be too platform-independent. For example, the code I was writing today needed to copy over a .tar.gz I created. I was getting tons of errors when trying to unpack the file so at first I figured it was something in the packing code but it wasn't. The problem is somewhere in the copy task. So, as a hacky workaround, I just called the Exec task and did a system cp instead. Everything is working just fine now.. 4:04:24 PM

When I first started at CollabNet a couple of years ago, I wrote an Ant task which handled the creation of RPM's. I did this mainly because I was lazy but by working in Ant, it allowed me to be a bit more organized. Fast forward to the present day and I'm once again writing an Ant task to handle RPM's but this time, it handles more of the initial setup internally by calling other Ant tasks in the code as opposed to explicitly stating them in your build.xml file. The downside of this approach is that when there is an error, it points to the wrapper task in the build.xml file instead of being able to show exactly which task had the problem. For all of the possible shortcomings in using XML as the format for a build file, the nice thing is that by being so verbose and having to state each target individually, you can very easily figure out problems and how a build will happen. That won't be the case for the Task I'm writing and it will force people to go into the code.. 9:27:08 AM

Dave Winer says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems obvious that that's slavery." Heh. Freedom is slavery. Go figure. Put another way, is coercing programmers to work for $100,000 freedom or slavery? Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for six figures either, Dave. David goes on to talk about the raising of the usable bar in many of today's open projects.. Definitely a good read. 8:34:30 AM

© Copyright 2002 josh lucas. Last update: 8/1/02; 9:15:50 AM.