non-random ramble

GET it from http://jruby.org/

There is a download page, download and exract the tar file somehwere.

I put it in /System/Library/Frameworks/JRuby.framework/jruby-1.5.1

I then created a symbolic link to jruby_current

ln -s jruby-1.5.1/ jruby_current

And then simply add it to my ~/.bash_profile

$vi ~/.bash_profile
export PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/JRuby.framework/jruby_current/bin:$PATH
#Reload the profile…
$. ~/.bash_profile
#Try out jruby…
$jruby -v
jruby 1.5.1 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249) (2010-06-06 f3a3480) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_17) [x86_64-java]

Now you can add the JRuby SDK to your Java Module in Intellij:

Now you can have ruby and Java in the same project. Awesome.

I find google reader a useful way to aggregate information from many blogs. Particularly convenient is to be able to read these on my iPhone and then mark them as shared. That way I can build up a list of information I am interested in.

This is then conveniently exposed as an RSS feed by google. You can see my shared items at http://www.google.co.uk/reader/shared/jim.barritt for example.

I used to have a sidebar on this site which had a snippet directly from google reader, but it was determined to have its own style. I wanted a wordpress plugin that would do it for me and found “Recommended Reading Google Reader” by C. Murray Consulting

Its the nice “READING” section on my sidebar. Thanks guys! You just saved me from writing my own!

I recently (Friday 14th May 2010) gave the closing Keynote at Agile North, a one day conference held up in Preston.

The talk was loosely based around a metaphor of mountain climbing and playing with the analogy of being a consultant on an agile project being like a mountain guide. The idea is that someone who is a mountain guide has many years of experience climbing and coaching people on the mountain.

The talk I think was well recieved and generated quite a bit of interest from people, I think because we were talking about real experiences on our current project.

I co-presented with Mark Crossfield who is the Tech Lead on the team I am Coaching at our current client, AutoTrader, and I felt it was an interesting balance between my “Guide” view and his experience leading a team into an Agile project for the first time.

We covered five short stories about our experiences on the project.

• Safety First – going beyond CI to pipelines
• The Walking Skeleton as a metaphor for iterative feature delivery
• Evolution of the codebase
• Collective Design
• Telling the story of the code

The Slide deck is up on slideshare and the talk can be viewed here.

At some point they promise to put up the video of the event at which point I will update this post.

Whilst playing around with some code analysis I thought it would be useful to be able to output a hyperlink back to a line of code in the IDE console. As it happens, you can “Trick” IntelliJ to do this with the following log statement:

    @Test
    public void canClickOnAFileInTheConsoleAndGoToTheLineOfCode() {
        log.info(String.format(“Check it at %s. (%s.java:%d)”,
            getClass().getName(), getClass().getSimpleName(), 15));
    }

The pattern it seems to match is something like at {classFullName}.{identifier}({classSimpleName}.java)

classFullName has to be a valid class name.
identifier is usually used for the method name, but it can be anything. The full stop is nescessary. So in the example above, I put a space in there and so it reads like a sentance.

Anyone know a another way to do this?

UPDATE:

Actually it seems that you can get something similar if you output a full path name, e.g.:

    File f = new File(“./src/test/resource/testfiles/level_01/level_01_01/file_01_01_A.txt”);
    log.info(f.getAbsolutePath() + “:” + 34);

This will create a link in the output window to the line of the file. Nice.

Mind mapping, invented by Tony Buzan is a way to get lots of ideas down and relate them together.

MindMeister is a great online Mind Mapping tool. It can be used for free but for $59 for a year you get things like offline access. It is completely written using html and javascript.

Map On!