wmbest.com

Android Coverage and Hudson/Jenkins

Bill — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:32:00 +0000

Recently we set up a Hudson continuous integration server at work. We are developing android apps and when I found out that Hudson had an Emma plugin I got excited. I found out about emma and android’s coverage reports. There was however one problem. Android’s ant coverage build will only output an html report. The hudson plugin requires an xml report.

To fix this I created a new build action in my build.xml. This is actually word for word what is in the coverage target with one minor change.


        
        
            
            
            
        
        
        Downloading coverage file into project directory...
        
            
            
            
            
        
        Extracting coverage report...
        
            
                
                
                    
                    
                
                
                
            
        
        Cleaning up temporary files...
        
        
        
        Saving the report file in ${basedir}/coverage/coverage.xml

Here you can see the only real change to the target is this line:

as opposed to this

. Now we can output our coverage report to our workspace and feed it to the Hudson Emma plugin.

Business Objects 3.1 and Active Directory 2008 R2

Bill — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 19:02:03 +0000

I know that its been a little while since Ive posted anything about anything on this site. Im hoping that this little tidbit of information can help some of you overcome obstacles when attempting to use kerberos login with AD 2008 and BO 3.1.

We recently upgraded our two domain controllers to Windows Server 2008 R2. The actual server upgrade went off with out a hitch (well, aside from some space issues). Where we ran into problems was logging into Business Objects. We received a cryptic error message that the “plugin could not log you in to Active Directory at this time”.

After digging around for a few hours on the web, trying just about every possible “fix” out there, we stumbled upon a simple fix that solved our problems in seconds. As it turns out Microsoft turned off encryption for use with kerberos. So the first step is to setup your SPN in active directory. To do this I followed these instructions: http://neverknewthat.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/kerberos/

I came up with this command on the domain controller
SETSPN.exe -A BOBJCentralMS/BOEServer CMSUser

After the SPN is setup, all that is left to do is go into Active Directory Users and Computers. Find the CMSUser account and go into Properties. Click the Account tab and scroll down in the scroll box to the checkbox “Use Kerberos DES encryption types for this account.” Un-check the checkbox and all your problems should be solved.

That should be it. Hopefully know all that you need to do is reset your Server Intelligence Agent and Tomcat server.

Site downtime

Bill — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:03:41 +0000

So I woke up this morning earlier than usual with an ambitious plan. Well, OK, maybe it wasn’t all that ambitious and I would hardly call 6 AM early. What I ended up finding was that my site was inaccessible and I was unable to jump on my blog and post something. This put a kink in the works as I had intended on telling the world about the android app thats been making my week so much better. The app I am referring to is called “Gentle Alarm”. It costs about $2 and has a few interesting features Id like to talk about.

Gentle alarm

One of my problems is that I enjoy staying up extremely late. With friends in Chicago, Tennessee, and Alaska, I have a tendency to be up til the wee hours of the morning playing Left 4 Dead 2. I also have a full time job and have to be up early enough to drive the 40 minutes to get there. This is a recipe for disaster and I have been getting hit pretty hard lately not wanting to get out of bed. Gentle Alarm changed this.

Gentle alarm has a built in pre-alarm that plays an alarm 10 minutes before your normal alarm by default. By playing this alarm set at a low volume, the idea is that it will wake your body out of its deep sleep. I was skeptical at first so I downloaded the trial (which has a humorous limitation of not playing on Wednesdays.) So far everyday this week Ive had no problem getting out of bed in the morning. Another really cool feature it has is the ability play a random song from an artist or an album. I have found that listening to the same alarm over and over makes my body quickly learn to ignore it and continue sleeping; therefore, this should help immensely. Finally I will say that the UI is a bit lacking. It is not the most aesthetically pleasing interface but for something that I primarily use while sleeping I think I can live with that.

Pythons and Pandas

Bill — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:02:59 +0000

I had always wanted to write my own video game and never took the time to do it. There were two big reasons that I never finished a game. One was time, I had very little of it with school work and a part time job. The second reason was art. I wanted to be able to see the fruits of my labor but due to the fact that I had limited 3d modeling experience I would quickly disband any attempt at an actual game. Therefore the first thing I made extremely clear to myself was that this project was going to be more about me learning the art aspect than anything.

In order to accomplish this I made the decision that rather than try to come up with a project on my own I would attempt to clone a game that I had enjoyed many years ago. That game was Crash Bandicoot. This decision made designing the game more of a focus on technical skills rather than artistic creativity. Before I would look at this as a way of giving up, not doing the entire thing by myself but I believe now that this allows someone who is not very experience in the field to make a fun game while building their abilities for future projects.

Build the first model of the game seems to be coming along just fine. In fact the only real hurdle I have had so far is now that it is finished an animated when I export the model the animation gets squirrelly. This could be an issue with my mesh but I will continue to play and see if I cant find something that works. Here are some of the first pictures of my model in blender:

The next step was picking a 3d game engine. For this I ended up going with Panda3d thanks to the suggestion of a friend of mine who is also a developer. He was mostly interested in using the python interface; however, I decided that I wanted to do it in c++. This would have been fine until I found out that the gnu compiler is not supported by the library and I would have to do some major hacking to get it to where it would compile. Instead I decided that this would provide me with the perfect opportunity to learn python. This makes life extremely easy with code as simples as:

for loading a model.

Over the next few weeks I hope to have a running demo so keep your eyes peeled.

Wmbest.com and future development

Bill — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:45:51 +0000

It has been a while since I have had the time to sit down and blog about something. Recently I made the purchase of Wmbest.com and Wmbest.org. Both of these urls lead to this page. I had originally intended to create a custom website that I could use to keep my skills their freshest. I’ve realized that I currently lack the time to put my time into something that has already been so skillfully created. Instead I have a few other projects that Ive been wanting to accomplish for quite some time.

One of the biggest projects that I have wanted to dedicate my time to since the time I started programming was a game. Gaming was something Ive done my entire life and most likely one of my first memories. Because of this, Ive always wanted to make a game. I lack any 3d modelling skills and or time to spend sitting down and writing an entire game. Recently Ive decided that I would make time. Not only because I want to make a game but also because Id like to keep my skills in application development in tip top shape. More will come from the game but currently it is in the early stages of development which I will save for another post.

Please feel free to keep an eye on this blog as I am hoping to provide recent news on any programming projects Im working on and also tidbits that Ive found useful at my place of work.