August 2008 Archives

Do you see that picture on the right? I bought Windows XP when it came out. An actual legitimate copy of Windows XP Home Edition. It promised a lot of things that it eventually pretty much delivered after a couple of service packs. It's moved from machine to machine as I've updated hardware. I've gotten rid of basically all of my old PC hardware and now it lives on my Macbook Pro. I've been reasonably happy with it. Except...

With such a long history, I've long-since passed the time when Microsoft accepted my key without question through internet activation. Do you know what happens when you pass that time? Painful crushing phone activation.

Observe:

First, you have to call a number, and enter 9 sets of 6 digits (they're kind enough to let you use the touch-tone phone to do it, instead of braving their voice recognition system). Then, on the 9th set, it always complains that it didn't understand the last set of digits, until you're forced to tell it to forward you to a human without finishing the automated input.

Then, since it didn't actually record all of those numbers you put in, you get to read them again to the call-center person.

Then, they read a string of numbers back to you, that you have to type in, and finally, in true Microsoft fashion, you hit "Next", followed by "Finish", because it wouldn't be Windows without a wizard with a few extra unnecessary clicks. ;)

Have you seen what you have to do to activate a pirated version of of Windows XP? I did a quick Google search out of curiosity. You use a pre-made serial number, and then run a command that will do the activation for you, and one more command to trick Windows Genuine Advantage(TM). Voila!

It's sad that I find it so tempting to pirate something I legally own just because it's so frustrating to activate the damn thing.

The best part is, the only reason I had to re-activate at all was because the logic board went bad in my MacBook Pro, and Windows no longer recognized it as the hardware it was installed on.

Even better, now that it's done, I have to re-activate every time I switch from booting in VMware to booting natively through Boot Camp, or vice-versa.

Alternatively, you know what I had to do to register my copy of Mac OS X when I installed it? Nothing. Imagine that.

In addition to digital downloads through Amazon MP3, iTunes, and a host of other services, my first album, Finally, is now available on CD.

Order now!

So I've been meaning to do a Dev-Jam 2008 summary since we got back last weekend, and I can put it off no longer.

In summary: Dev-Jam 2008 was a huge success!

We loaded up in the Dev-Jam Express and started the drive from North Carolina to the Georgia Tech campus. After plenty of rest stops, food breaks, passing water towers that look like giant spanked butts, and picking up of supplies, we arrived.

We got settled in, got room keys, met with the other folks who had arrived, and recuperated from a long drive.

Tarus started out by welcoming everyone and doing a "State of OpenNMS." Since last year we blew away our goal, "2007: The Year of 4 Releases". Development has increased dramatically, despite the fact that off and on, OpenNMS regulars have been busier than ever with non-OpenNMS projects. Of course, new regulars have joined in the fray. (Does that make us "more regular"?) Anyways, OpenNMS has gotten easier to install, more robust, and just plain better in every way since the last Dev-Jam. Not only that -- we had 17 people come this year. Awesome!

Next, Matt talked about how things have progressed through the different Dev-Jams, and how we learned from each of them.

At Dev-Jam 2006, Spring was introduced, and while it was an educational experience, people spent too much time without really being able to dig their hands into the code, much less have fun with the other jammers.

Conversely, at Dev-Jam 007 (licensed to... er, GPL?), we had a very free-form conference. People hung around and worked on whatever took their fancy. Plenty of coding happened, but a number of things never wrapped up (and are still sitting in the devjam-007 branch waiting to be completed).

This year Matt proposed a hybrid of the two. Things were still free-form, people picked a project they felt like working on, and invited others to help out, but we were asked to spend a little time each morning talking about what we've done and getting input from the other folks. In the end, sometimes it was almost not morning by the time we did it (grin), but I think it helped add a little structure to the '007 style, and we all did better for it.

As for development, people were mostly just getting started.

• Matt had been preparing a RESTful framework so it would be ready (or at least, almost ready) for Dev-Jam.
• I had been meaning to work on cleaning up the remote poller code to not be different across the command-line and GUI interfaces, and to unify the webstart and jar-based versions of the remote poller startup code, so I started in on that.
• DJ and Mike started playing with turning snmp-graph.properties into XML (actually continuing some work DJ did along those lines some time ago).

Things started picking up on Tuesday, as people settled into what they were working on.

• Matt worked on upgrading our Spring code to Spring 2.5.
• Jonathan started the first of many commits finishing up his work on OTRS ticketing integration.
• Craig and DJ both committed some bugfixes and other updates to the 1.6 and trunk branches.
• Alejandro and Matt both worked on the RESTful interfaces some, in a new branch dubbed the Jersey branch.
• Joed started in on a new map based on OpenLaszlo that is shaping up to be pretty sweet! It features RESTful integration as well.
• Paul helped out fixing a bug or two, and also helped out on Debian packaging issues, which he's done a lot of great work on in the past months.
• I got the code pretty much finished on the webstart work, although I continued to hit strange Maven issues with bad plugins and the like.

Lots of commits, but mostly Joed setting up some directories for the OpenLaszlo maps. SourceForge was kind enough to announce Subversion downtime only 5 hours before it was scheduled to happen. Intermittent timeouts and other issues kept most people from doing much before the outage deadline.

• Joed worked on the OpenLaszlo maps.
• Jonathan spent more time on the OTRS integration, approaching completion.
• I continued to fight with Maven, finally getting things to work shortly after SourceForge shut off SVN. =)
• Alejandro did more good work on the RESTful interface, adding REST support for nodes, IP interfaces, SNMP interfaces, and services.

Lots of progress in a number of areas, and with Subversion back up, people could actually... commit things. ;)

• Jonathan worked on wrapping up his OTRS integration.
• I was able to commit my webstart code that I finished on Wednesday. Usage is documented in the wiki. I spent the rest of the day splitting out the trouble ticketing API into it's own module, as well as brainstorming with Matt on what the future "perfect codebase module layout" would be when we've had time to refactor everything. (Hah!)
• Tarus worked on cleaning up bugs, in preparation for trying to get a 1.6 release candidate out the door.
• Jeff played around with something in trunk relating to Windows? I dunno what that's all about. :)

A few new projects were opened, and a few completed. By Friday, commits were chugging along pretty nicely.

• David (along with Walt from Hitachi, and a little help from Matt) spent the day working on a TL1 interface for OpenNMS.
• Craig merged the existing work from the Jersey branch into trunk.
• I spent some time cleaning house and merging useful work done in trunk back to the 1.6 branch.
• Joed continued to fill out the OpenLaszlo map support.
• Alejandro worked on the RESTful interface more, adding a few features and fixing bugs.
• Craig M. also handed Alejandro a keychain as door prize for making the 10,000th commit!

And, officially, Friday ended Dev-Jam. We had a nice dinner and people started traveling. On Saturday, we made our way back to North Carolina.

Thanks to everyone who made Dev-Jam possible. I had a great time, and we got a ton of stuff done!

Edit: It's important to pay more attention to your calendar when reconstructing the dates that things happened. Turns out Dev-Jam started July 27th, not August. ;)