How irritated customers obey a power law

There are over 4000 open issues about JIRA that people have voted for. The most popular vote has 592 votes but most issues have zero votes. I found a suprisingly good line to fit the data with a correlation coefficient 0.9882, if Excel is to be believed. I'm not sure that I actually believe in predicting what people vote for, but I guess this is one way of measuring your progress is how the coefficients of the predictor change over time. The flatter the line, the better job you are doing of evenly spreading out customers' irritation with your product.

As of July 2010, the coefficient of irriration for JIRA is -0.65.

ASCII art in log files and showing my age

What is that? Well, let me tell you. It's supposed to be some ASCII art that my new-fangled JIRA bug tracker spits out into its log file at start up. It's supposed to serve some useful purpose. It fails (fails, I tell you) because when you view ASCII art that is longer than 80 characters in a terminal (this is a log file, remember) that text art just wraps around and resembles line noise. Yes, line noise like they used to have in the last century.

What's that? You think ASCII art is cool? Well so do I, in it's place. Which isn't my darn log files. What am I going to do about it? I'll tell you, I'll show 'em! Now get off my lawn.

My wife as a sea star

Vacation Bible School ended today with the inimitable Banana Slug String Band. Katherine was their guest Sea Star. It opened up a whole new echinodermic side of her character to me. She certainly was moving around.

Drawing a line in the sand

Joel Spolsky writing on his latest project concludes with

"Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you."

Snark programmer, snark!

GNU license complexity

The compatibility table at the GNU License FAQ makes my head swim. If this were for the different versions of an application, it would be taken out and shot.

I'll not spoil the punchline

Too true.



From Geek and Poke

One Bug, Multiple Branches

I enjoyed presenting and discussing some new ideas about how to use JIRA to track bugs in different branches along with their associated builds. This was all at the April San Francisco Atlassian User Group last night, kindly hosted by Atlassian.

My idea is to create a new issue type named "Build" and then create a new build issue for every build. Ordinary bugs in JIRA can then have regular JIRA links named "Present in Build" and "Absent from Build" connecting them to the specific builds in which they are found or fixed. The interesting part is that if you link the Build issues to other Build issues, you get a tree of related builds such as the diagram above that you can then use to deduce which bugs are present in any given release, and also which releases a given bug is likely to be in. Useful information that is rarely available in current issue trackers.

My presentation is available via Google Docs. Feedback welcome, as are beta testers for the ideas in JIRA.

Verification code for Empire Avenue: EAVB_KMCAYMVSLW

Software Engineering and Academia

Bertrand Meyer has an excellent article about why academic computer science has a smaller impact than other academic disciplines do in their respective fields. As he puts it, "academic research has had its part, honorable but limited."

"Researchers in experimental physics or mechanical engineering employ technicians: often highly qualified personnel who help researchers set up the experiments and process results. In software engineering the equivalent would be programmers, software engineers, testers, technical writers; in the environments that I have seen, getting financing for such positions from a research agency is impossible."

"The only software we can produce, if we limit ourselves to official guidelines, is demo software. ... many of us work around the restrictions ... by spending considerable time away from research on programming and maintenance tasks that would be far more effectively handled by specialized personnel. The question indeed is efficiency."

For me, that's what a software toolsmith does.

How to change your OSX terminal color for ssh sessions

Sometimes I have lots of terminal windows open for ssh sessions to multiple machines. It can all be a bit confusing even if I use the remote machine name in the shell prompt. So I got terminal colorization working for me with help from here and here.
There is a default color for all screens that are using ssh and you can also customize the colors for different remote machines. When you end the ssh session, the terminal returns to black on white.

This is for OS X because it uses the osascript command to change the colors but the rest of the shell script should be just fine for Unix.

$ cat /usr/local/bin/ssh
#!/bin/sh

# Color the OSX Terminal app according the hostname used in ssh
# Assumes you log in with a simple "ssh myuserid@remotehost"
# Place in a directory such as /usr/local/bin that is before the real ssh location

# The value of whatever was after the @ in the command
HOSTNAME=`echo $@ | sed s/.*@//`

set_bg () {
  osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set background color of window 1 to $1"
}

set_text () {
  osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set normal text color of window 1 to $1"
}

# Return to black text on white background
on_exit () {
    # echo exited
  set_bg "{65535,65535,65535}"
  set_text "{0, 0, 0}"
}
trap on_exit EXIT

# My color names
#  green   10000,40000,40000 
#  blue    10000,20000,60000 
#  orange  60000,40000,00000 
#  red     60000,00000,00000 
#  yellow  60000,60000,40000 

case $HOSTNAME in
  fisheye) set_bg "{60000,60000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
  jira|jira2) set_bg "{10000,40000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
# unused colors follow
#   blue) set_bg "{10000,20000,60000}" ; set_text  "{65535,65535,65535}" ;;
#  orange) set_bg "{60000,40000,00000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  red) set_bg "{60000,00000,00000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  yellow) set_bg "{60000,60000,40000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
#  gray) set_bg "{60000,57000,55000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
  *) set_bg "{60000,57000,55000}" ; set_text  "{0,0,0}" ;;
esac

/usr/bin/ssh "$@"

There's a way to do that in emacs

Given a number of lines of text such as

foopy charlie
foo bravo
food alpha

and you want to sort them by their second field so they end up like

food alpha
foo bravo
foopy charlie

the right emacs incantation is:

C-u 2 M-x sort-fields

That's all.

Michelle Shocked concert

Katherine and I went on our yearly pilgrimage to Moe's Alley to see Michelle Shocked last Saturday. Steve Wozniak was there too, quietly enjoying this tiny "Reggae Pub". As ever, Michelle was truly amazing. Her energy, her humility and that soaring voice. Mostly her older songs, but with lots of local guests and backing from a band lead by James Nash who just smoked that guitar!

As Michelle says of herself,

I've been through some dark times but I've experienced joy too. Now that joy can't be suppressed.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Another useful book in the "97 Things" series from O'Reilly has been published, this time for programmers. My contribution is "How To Use A Bug Tracker". There are more details at O'Reilly and Amazon.

This book was created by each person adding their contributions to a Wiki, where it was edited and discussed. The whole process worked really well due to the editor, Kevlin Henney.

p.s. My photo on the cover is four rows down, third from the left, just in case you're looking.

Ambiguity everywhere

I use emacs for writing code, which is considered a bit old-school by many Java programmers. One of them recently commented that "watching someone use emacs is like watching ballet". Was that a compliment or not? "Graceful" and "efficient" come to mind, but maybe he just doesn't like watching ballet.

One of those mornings

6am. Our eldest child woke me from my slumbers with "Daaaad, the toilet's overflowed!". Turns out it had thoroughly clogged itself late last night and then a leaky tank valve had allowed water to gradually drip into the bowl overnight. Ugg. However, the rather questionable design of many American low-flush toilets is not the point of this post. In the process of clearing the clog I realized that this was where an education comes in useful. I asked her to flush another toilet in the house which created a partial vacuum in the sewer line and helped my efforts with the plunger. It worked wonderfully! A discussion of the physics involved ensued, but the best bit was seeing my daughter continue to believe that her Dad could fix anything.

Which letters are never doubled in English words?

There is now a handy website for searching an English dictionary using regular expressions. It appears that the only letters that are never doubled are 'j', 'q', and 'x'. Mind you, you have to go to Uzbekistan to get their unit of currency which is named a "tyyn".

Perhaps I should make up a word such as "sajjaqquixx" to fix the missing ones. I'm not sure what it means yet, and neither is Google. Suggestions welcome.

Happy Christmas,

~Matt

Testing, testing

This log post should also appear on my Facebook page, along with a picture of our house as it was in 1948.

Christmas book ideas

I've recently read two different graphic novels that I've been very impressed by. I recommend both of them for smart teens and older.

Logicomix, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

The story of Bertrand Russell and his mathematical (and other) passions. An entertaining story with enough of the history of logic to make me think. Beautiful art of Athens too.

Grandville, Bryan Talbot

A well-written steampunk detective story using animals. But it's more than that, lots of references to all sorts of interesting things and people. The art is captivating and left me wanting more of it.

BitBake and reusing existing ipkg files

I've spent a few days helping a customer with BitBake, a python-based build tool for embedded systems. One of the distributions that uses BitBake is OpenEmbedded, a "build-every-single-thing-from-source" Linux distro.

The customer had a number of existing ipkg packages and wanted to add them to the BitBake'd image. That turns out to be an undocumented use case, so here's the information to save other people the time we spent.

For a target architecture of armv5te, the recipe file for a package with an ipkg file named mypackage-1.2.0.3-1_armv5te.ipk looks like the code below.

DESCRIPTION = "My Package"
DEPENDS = ""
LICENSE = "GPL"

PN = "mypackage"
PV = "1.2.0.3"
PR = "1"
PACKAGES = "${PN}"

# Just fetch and place the ipkg in the correct place to build the rootfs.

# As used in openembedded/classes/image.bbclass via rootfs_ipk.bbclass
PACKAGE_INSTALL_append = ${DEPLOY_DIR_IPK}/armv5te/${P}_armv5te.ipk

SRC_URI = "\
  http://ipkg-repository.example.com/subdir/${P}_armv5te.ipk \
  "

do_unpack() {
  echo "Null unpack method"
}

do_patch() {
  echo "Null patch method"
}

do_configure() {
  echo "Null configure method"
}

do_compile() {
  echo "Null compile method"
}

do_stage() {
  echo "Null stage method"
}

do_install() {
  oenote Creating directory ${WORKDIR}/install/${PN}
  # A directory is needed for each member of PACKAGES
  mkdir -p ${WORKDIR}/install/${PN}
}

do_package() {
  echo "Null package method"
}

do_package_stage() {
  echo "Null package_stage method"
}

do_distribute_sources() {
  echo "Null distribute_sources method"
}

do_package_write() {
  oenote Copying the downloaded ipkg package from ${DL_DIR} to\
 ${DEPLOY_DIR_IPK}/armv5te
  install ${DL_DIR}/${P}_armv5te.ipk ${DEPLOY_DIR_IPK}/armv5te
}

Version: BitBake 1.8.3

It doesn't look like much by itself, but the work behind it was, er, significant. BitBake and OpenEmbedded have a good number of layers, moderate documentation and great power.


Other tips:

Don't execute BitBake in a subdirectory or it will rebuild the world in a new tmp directory there.

OpenEmbedded apparently doesn't check the return code from the ipkg install commands, so if your files aren't appearing in your image (rootfs) directory, then check their dependencies or run the explicit ipkg command that can be found in the relevant run* command file.

If ipkg asks for user input about overwriting a configuration file, then the OpenEmbedded do_rootfs() function will hang and you will need to kill both the ipkg and bitbake commands manually.

See http://bec-systems.com/web/content/view/79/9/ for more information about adding new packages to images.

There's no such thing as a unique name

Reading an old post by James Clark about Thai personal names, I wondered how many different names I am addressed by. Surprisingly, I came up with eight.

John Matthew Simon Doar (birth certificate)
Matthew Doar (school name, birth family usage)
Matt Doar (work name)
Matthew Baginski Doar (family name after marriage)
Matthew B. Doar (shortened family name used for publications)
Matthew Baginski (used by systems that can't handle two words in a family name)
J. Matthew Doar (occasional form letters)

and strangest of all is the U.S. Immigration Service who refer to me as "John M. Doar" and once forced me to make up a signature for it on the spot! All I really want these days is to be unique enough for Google.

Handling large numbers of JIRA projects

Once you have a large number of projects in JIRA creating an issue can become a bit tedious, scrolling through the long list of projects to choose just the right one. JIRA (Enterprise edition) already provides Project Categories that you can group projects into, so without further ado, here's a JSP hack to reduce the size of that list of projects by letting you select a project category first.

Installation

The modified file for JIRA 3.13 is createissue-start.jsp and replaces the file of the same name in your JIRA instance. There should be no need to restart JIRA. The usual disclaimers apply, drink responsibly, don't drive and derive etc.