After a couple of days of running into dead ends, I am finally able to drive JIRA via its SOAP interfacesanely from something other than Java in an effort to automate small, repetitive tasks that are best left to tools. Without going into the details of what is it that I needed to get accomplished (which is not the key point of this post), I wanted to share a bit of the experience before I close shop for the day.
First, check out Igor Sereda’s presentation on JIRA Client, which offers many insights on general client-side JIRA programming. Second, have the JiraSoapService javadoc handy. Given the usual needs I deal with, I use Python quite a bit, which has served me very well for nearly the last 10 years, and it’s the workhorse of my tool development. But in this case, I ran into problems at almost every turn: SOAPpy cannot deal with dates, and ZSI ran into some issues as well. So I went to Ruby and jira4r (navigator, source). Amazingly elegant, it hides all the SOAP stuff from view, producing ridiculously compact code, and so far, working flawlessly.
Martin always knew I would end up diving into Ruby
I have no idea how I came across this (the whole concept sort of turned my brain to mush momentarily):Ars Technica reports on some global homelyWindows launch party event where folks host Windows 7 launch parties at their house (I picked the Ars article because they’re a talented crew, but there are many more out there). Like Dave Rosenberg, I’m still not sure about the “reality measurement” associated with all this, particularly given the introductory hosting video (there are others for each of the related fun activities proposed for the party). In the spirit of full disclosure, having recently read Naomi Klein’s No Logo, being a Mac/Solaris/Linux user, and failing to understand the logic behind the Windows so-called interface (yep, I have tried Windows 7 on a virtual machine) my perception is admittedly probably biased. Yet I cannot fathom the thought of pimping Windows on my friends and acquaintances, much less in the setting depicted in the videos (“hey, to wrap up, let’s burn a music CD!”). Redmond strikes again, and words escape me to describe the concept and execution.
So you’ve got your trusty laptop warmed up with a fresh copy of Windows 7, decked the halls with balloons and streamers, and sent invitations to an exhaustively multicultural clutch of friends for a single night of red-hot OS release revelry.
I’ve been a liteDropbox user for some time (since I first read about them via Rands) and while I do use it more these days for more typical file sharing tasks, one of the most interesting uses I have for it has been that of sharing application state. Cloud and all, I am very much a desktop user, and while some of the applications I use do have cloudish counterparts, I find that have a tendency to enjoy my local apps far more than their cloud counterparts. Take ecto, a fantastic blog editor for the Mac. I find myself starting blog posts often, leaving them for “later” from time to time. Given I share time between my desktop and my laptop, it hasn’t always been easy to match available time slot with in-progress blogs.
and my wherever-whenever-ecto-blogging is a go (something that, by the way, did not work with iDisk, which seemingly failed to sync more ofthen than I was willing to accept). I suspect instant switching from one system to the other might probably confuse ecto, but I never do that anyway, and I can probably add some glue before the app starts to check on Dropbox’s status.
