:: CoffMan WebLog ::

On the last days i joined the JLibrary team to try to help a bit on the development of this excelent program.
The project has the Goal of creating a JSR-170 compatible driver. Jlibrary uses the filesystem to store all corporate (or personal) documentation, it also tracks versions maden to the documents on the repository.

The interface is build around Eclipse Rich Client Platform, so its easy to use and has a nice look.

You can download the project or look at the tutorials at the projects page here
Thats a short feature list:

• Local and remote repository of documents.
• Inline editing of documents.
• Document Categories
• Metadata management on every document added
• Security based on roles, groups and users.
• friendly look and feel
• i18n
• lock of documents while any user are editing it

Well, thats a short list of features , look at the web page for more info.

On the last months i start the development of another program, Its codename is JAdminUsers.

JAdminUsers is a Java program that uses SWT as a look and feel framework. Its main goal is administer and maintain LDAP users and groups on a distributed system.This days I am administering a large corporate where all users are maintained at hand . We started to migrate all systems (Solaris, Digital Unix and Linux) to use a central LDAP repository, but we need a tool to add/delete and modify users. The few applciations we can find on the web are useless. Thats the main reason i start the development of JAdminUsers.

Yo can view the project at his wiki There are a few screenshots too.
Current version is 0.3 and Webstartable.

Los chicos de Google acaban de sacar el google desktop search, herramienta cojonuda donde las haya para indexar nuestro disco duro (mientras no hacemos nada) para luego poder buscar palabras en nuestros correos, mensajes de ICQ o archivos del disco duro.

Vamos que es lo que estabamos esperando (al menos yo).


Otra cosa interesante es el GMAIL, supongo que todo el mundo tiene una cuenta ya, pues lo interesante es el sistema de archivos para GMAIL (GmailFS
) que nos permite escribir en la unidad y aparece instantaneamente en nuestro correo de gmail, pudiendo usar el 1GB de espacio disponible para backups o para lo que queramos.

Asi mismo tambien hay utilidades para linux como el gmcp
para hacer copias remotas entre el espacio de gmail y nuestro disco duro.

Otra utilidad interesantisima es la API PERL para comunicarnos con GMAIL, se llama Mail::Webmail::Gmail y la podeis instalar desde CPAN directamente.
Es sencillisimo adaptar alguno de los scripts que ya trae para hacer una copia automatica de vuestros datos a la cuenta remota de gmail. El script que yo uso de backup hacia mi cuenta de gmail lo podeis encontrar en mi wiki: Perl Scripts

I develop another extremely simple (but cool) extension to mediawiki, it works like the Graphviz extension, and it uses Batik from Apache as an SVG to png render. The extension is about sharing UML graphs or Images on a developers team. With this you can use Your favorite UML modeller (Together, Argo, Omondo, ...) and export the format to SVG, them you can put on the wiki and at least another developer/analist can modify the XML on the wiki, and show results online.


You can view this plugin in action at my wiki
Yo can download and test it on the project information page of the wiki.

All comments and suggestions are welcome

I recently created the Graphviz extension to mediawiki, its a simple extension written in php to let users and editor create graphs online with a simple language, the script uses graphviz available for free on graphviz site


With this plugin you can do things like the ones listed on this site


You can download the extension from Graphviz wickle CVS


Instructions on installing and using tis plugin are available on my wiki here

For a long time i am looking at a great interface to a bug tracker, the best bug tracker i know is bugzilla, but it have a terrible ugly interface, so i keep looking for another bug tracking systems, on this work i found a lot of systems :


mantis bug tracker
flyspray (the best interface of all)

and a lot more ...



but this ones are all of inferior quality of bugzilla, so i try to make a template to bugzilla, with no success.


So when i am going to forget it, i look at mediazilla, bugzilla interface of mediawiki(the wiki of wikipedia), and i like it very much ... so i talk at irc with TimStarling (thanks man) who send me the template of it .

I put the template to download here.
you can view it in action at my bugtracking page.

I recently discover the many uses and features of WIKIs and I started my own WIKI to maintain documentation on my own projects and to share ideas with other projects developers, so anibody can share and help my projects .

The address is /wikis

The new tool from Maven takes me a headeache and a few days of configuration and learning about it, but in the end i think its a valuable tool and will be simplify my java developments. You can view my new JDiary home generated enterely with maven at the same time that I generate the JNLP to distribute.

What is Maven:
Maven is a Framework for ant. Its POM (project object model) based and with a couple of files you can build the application, generate test reports, and an entire site for the application.

Overview:

All round about one file : project.xml here we define the name of the application, the jars it depends on, where are the CVS, and more information. see sample at the end of the POST.
The sencond important file is project.properties. It store information about plugins properties for maven (as JNLP, SSH deployment, etc ...) again i post my sample file at the end.
The last file is maven.xml (rarely you must modify or create it) but on this case it store ant scripts we need (because maven does not do all ) and goals (on the ant style) to build the application with our own rules.

Read more »

Page of the project

The problem I find at my work was the next :

The problem:

When you maintain and update a large number of unix (or windows) machines you must review if all machines are UP, and in case of failure you must do something (well it depends on admin ;) ), also you would like to review if all goes well before a weekend ( admins tends to me very vagues).

The solution:

The architecture of the application is simple:

you must rely on a machine (the central server or backup server) here you install NAGIOS (http://www.nagios.org/download/), this is a program in C that monitors the health of each server. You must configure a lot of archives (it takes a half day or so but its nice) in which indicate what servers to monitor and wich service offers each server, the alerts, the methos of communication and so on ...
Ths next step (when you install nagios and test it) is to install sendJabber ( only on CVS at the moment) configure it with a valid account on a jabber server and tell him the user/users to send alerts.

The next is configure again Nagios to send alerts throw sendJabber its so simpe sa adding a line to misccommands.cfg , then you must restart Nagios and all is OK.
Just sit in front your computer and if something fails you must receive an alert on your Jabber client (I recommend GAIM )


I will post a more extense howto on the next days.

TODO:

On future releases onf sendJabber you can intereact with NAGIOS server, send commands and receive status about servers.

and more ...

Unicraft is a new project from sourceforge in wich i get involved as developer. Is a pleasure to join this developers group that make use of java technology to port Warcraft 3 to Java environment.
Its a great idea.

The project are in a planning phase , and this is good becaouse is now when all people must contribute to this project, to make a better WarCraft 3 FREE and that runs on all operating systems.


Visit project web page at : http://unicraft.tk/