Alex Fishlock's Blog

I've always been a fan of the Vanquish S, after driving two of p1's Vanquish S cars 18 months ago.

Youtube is stuffed full of Vanquish Videos, but this Korean one caught my eye, as the sound recording is fairly good. The start of the clip is not so good, but at this (3:47) point onwards, its pretty amazing

Yesterday I went to the Goodwood race circuit. I went as part of a trackday organised by CKL. I took the D-type and drove it myself. Since I have never driven any of my own cars on a circuit, or ever driven at Goodwood, I took advantage of the the on-hand driving instructors, all of whom drove these sorts of cars professionally. I had 5 sessions, each session was a few laps. I think my longest session was 9 laps, and I took a 3 lap session with the video camera. I also drove as a passenger on a full CKL race prepared XK. Rather interesting, as I only had a lap belt, and only touched the seat with one one bum cheek, as the roll cage cuts across the passenger seat. All rather fun though.

So, my first proper track day... Very much a success. Great weather too. Some more pictures

Here is a rather fantastic video of a French chap making vacuum tubes. Dave found it here http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/01/make_your_own_vaccum_tube.html . And I nicked it. Glorious craftsmanship. And he is French.

I finally surcumbed to buying myself a very silly car. I pushed the boat out and bought a Lynx Jaguar D-type

For those of us in our mid thirties, who were into 'geeky' and 'nerdy' computers when we were young, will remember the ZX Spectrum. Well today is the 25th anniversary of its launch.

For those of you who are curious or want to relive your fantasies of playing spectrum classic games, like Manic Miner, a java emulator of the entire machine, including most interupts, like keyboard and sound. Hence you can play  Manic Miner or other games in java applets on the web.

Well, for a long time, I have been telling people that Tory is the way to go in the UK.

My reasons had ultimately lead to one overriding uber-reason: that of:

"All governments will do stupid things, and generally annoy the population. The tax take in the UK has been steadily rising under Blair, and that in particular is very annoying. But public spending will be less under the Tories, and even if they make a slightly targeted spend than his Tonyness, then service quality will be at least as good.".

In short: "They are all useless, but it will be cheaper under the Tories"

So, people have tried to shoot me down on transport, health and the like, but can anyone honestly say that something has improved.

Added to this is the remarkably brilliant Open source Politics manifesto message that Nic told me about.

Now, next step is IR35 reversal

Continuous Integration

Well, it all all seems pretty obvious now.. back in the days when ant was seen as pretty decent, and pursuading people to use it over make or even, heaven forbid, your IDE. The idea of CI was all just a twinkle in the eye. If you have no idea what I am on about see http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html. But to be honest, if you dont do CI now on your project you are probably an idiot.

For the last few years I have mostly used Cruise Control, witha bit of anthill. Now don't get me wrong about this: cruisecontrol isn't bad. It's just that in an enterprise; setting it up as a resource for anyone to use is a total dog. By this I mean.. creating a new project without having to resort to ANY command line tools, and everything being available to the project builders via the web interface,

So, I read at great length the article here http://damagecontrol.codehaus.org/Continuous+Integration+Server+Feature+Matrix and played with the opensource ones a fair bit, and came to the conclusion Luntbuild is the one for me in a world where the following are required:

• Security
  • I want all usernames, email addresses and groups to be delagated to LDAP
  • I want to be able to CRUD the projects and their owners, email distros etc
  • I want to be able to lock down the build machine so only the people I know about are making changes, but still allow anonyomous reads, if I care, to the builds
• Builds
  • I want to be able to automatically support maven2 and ant, and I dont want to have to configure the damn thing from the command line, but if I chose to then I still could.
  • I want the builds to be tagged back into the VCS on a successful build
  • I want to see the build reports as made by the tools for every version of the build
• App server
  • I want to run the thing on any app server. I like jetty, but others like weblogic,tomcat,jboss or whatever.I want a default install to just work without any messing about.

Now Luntbuild has a few pains to get over:

• You cannot modify the smtp port for sending emails.. not a big one.. but a pain none the less.
• If you want some "proper" security you need to write an acegi adaptor. That's a trivial excersise though. but the default one just about works in an standard openldap world.

Commercial Ones

Now, CI is pretty important stuff and in the enterprise there is often a good case to be made for standardising the build process, AND the continuous intergration environment. So can you get better if you pay for it?

Well the answer is yes. There are a few I like to look of greatly. they are:

TeamCity http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ Just look at the UI, and the quality of their slam-dunk IDE called IDEA, and you know this has got to be good.

Bamboo http://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo/, from Atlassian, who make confluence and jira. They do indeed know how to make things easy to use.

Gauntlett http://www.borland.com/us/products/silk/gauntlet/index.html. I have yet to have a play wih this, as Borland are being slow in integrating the company they just bought into their product line. But the groundwork looks good

Pictures of the Ferrari Crash I had in 2006

Comparing Jetty 6.1rc3, tomcat 6 and Weblogic 9.2. I reckon Jetty is the better product.

Power dns is an opensource DNS server whcih can use sql or LDAP as its backend

It uses ACEGI, Spring, hibernate/annotations and authenticates with LDAP. This is pretty trivial to do, and who knows I might make the source available if there is any demand. This then runs inside jetty.

What I also did was to use fileschanged which is part of a modern base install linux distro to monitor files, and when they change call scripts. So I wrote a simple perl script which creates SQL updates/inserts when DHCP assigns an address and poke the updates into the pdns database. Works a charm.

Nic Ferrier helped out, as he often does, and suggested:

Using pdns with postgres is quite a simple install, and I acheived this in a few hours. Here at racingjag I set this up for internal and external dns management. However to manage the SQL tables I couldnt find a reasonably well written webapp to mod the entries so I wrote one.

Properly opensourcing the webapp

Using http://www.dhcp.org/javadhcp/ as the dhcp server and wrap the whole lot up as a basic java webapp