Edit: So this was attempt 2 of this post. Thank goodness for Google cache! Don’t start a migration to a new server whilst still updating your site

So after having my WordPress install nag at me to update for ages, I finally got round to it. Also took the opportunity to clean up my FTP directory which has had bits and pieces lying around for years.

With this update, we now have a new theme, some nice random header images and Archives! I took a quick look at it and realised I’ve been blogging off and on for the last decade! I remember starting back on Blogger back in the day and then migrating to WordPress. Those blog posts from back then didn’t migrate that well, hence the numbers as post titles. And I also think I’m possibly missing a few weeks or months of the very start of my blogging foray… 

From WordPress was the migration to Drupal where I blogged periodically for a number of years and then the painful migration back. It’s just a little bit crazy to know I’ve still basically got 10 years of posts intact! There’s a couple of years in between where the posting is sporadic, but hopefully I’ll keep this guy more up to date with my ramblings, musings and thoughts.

The first time, thrown into the middle of an intense project, was a crash course in the intricacies of the language and IDE. And being mainly a Java front end dev back then with very limited C experience was interesting to say the least.

But I’m glad to say that alot has changed since then, and for the better. After giving some documentation a once over and playing around with things, lots of the oddities that I saw coming to the language as a Java developer have now been improved.

The biggest things for me (so far) I think were:

• Automatic synthesizing of properties.
• Automatic reference counting (ARC). It puzzled me that writing code for the OS had memory management, but you had to manually manage for iOS.
• Setting up your project with unit tests is a breeze.

There are other things, and if you haven’t looked at it in a while you might be pleasantly surprised.

One of the tools we use is Jenkins and whilst we get emails and check the Jenkins Dashboard to see if a build has failed,  developers often have a tendency to not check their emails or check Jenkins to see what the state of the build is… As a result it may be hours or even a few days before someone realises the build is not passing…

So it seemed fitting to write some code to get a LED light to blink if the build is failing. To do this you’ll need the following:

• Jenkins with the build you want to monitor setup
• Arduino (I’m using an Uno)
• A LED (though for test purposes if you’re using an Uno pin 13 has a LED built in which should be sufficient)

1. Wire up your LED to one of the pins or do what I did and use the built in LED on pin 13.
2. Write some code in your language of choice to grab the build status from Jenkins and send it serially to the Arduino. I chose to grab the status as JSON, but there are other options available. I used Java and the Spring Framework to schedule a process to run every 5 seconds to grab the Jenkins status and send it across to the Arduino with the main grunt work being the code below:

   package com.delineneo.processor;
   
   import com.delineneo.communication.SerialCommunicator;
   import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
   import org.springframework.scheduling.annotation.Scheduled;
   import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
   import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
   
   import java.io.IOException;
   
   import static org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils.contains;
   
   /**
    * Created by IntelliJ IDEA.
    * User: deline
    * Date: 2/03/12
    * Time: 8:33 PM
    */
   @Component
   public class JenkinsStatusProcessor {
       private static final String JENKINS_URL = "http://localhost:8080/job/JenkinsStatus/api/json" ;
       private static final String SUCCESS_BUILD_COLOR = "blue";
       public static final char BUILD_FAIL = '0';
       public static final char BUILD_SUCCESS = '1';
   
       private RestTemplate restTemplate;
       private SerialCommunicator serialCommunicator;
   
       @Scheduled(fixedDelay=5000)
       public void process() {
   
           String jsonString = restTemplate.getForObject(JENKINS_URL, String.class);
   
           boolean buildSuccess = isBuildSuccessful(jsonString);
           try {
               serialCommunicator.send(buildSuccess ? BUILD_SUCCESS : BUILD_FAIL);
           } catch (IOException e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
           }
       }
   
       private boolean isBuildSuccessful(String jsonString) {
           if (contains(jsonString, SUCCESS_BUILD_COLOR)) {
               return true;
           }
           return false;
       }
   
       @Autowired
       public void setRestTemplate(RestTemplate restTemplate) {
           this.restTemplate = restTemplate;
       }
   
       @Autowired
       public void setSerialCommunicator(SerialCommunicator serialCommunicator) {
           this.serialCommunicator = serialCommunicator;
       }
   }
   

   In the process method we grab the status as JSON using Spring’s RestTemplate then search for the build status colours in the string. Blue represents success and I treat any other colour (yellow and red are the other ones) as a failure. We then send either a ’0′ or ’1′ for fail or success respectively.

   You might wonder why we send a char instead of a boolean… Serial write to the Arduino is as an int or byte array, and on the Arduino side read is done either as an int or a char. For example sending ‘A’ will be received via the Arduino as either the char ‘A’ or the int value 65 (the ascii value). This post on bildr gives you a bit more info on why one might choose to read values as and int instead of a char.

3. Write some code for the Arduino to process the received data and set the LED to flashing if the build has failed. The code below listens on the serial port:

   /* JenkinsStatus will turn the LED at pin 13 on/off depending
    * on the value serially read.
    */
   const int BUILD_SUCCESS = 49;
   int inByte;
   int currentPinValue = 0;
   
   void setup() {
       Serial.begin(9600);
       pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
   }
   
   void loop() {
       if (Serial.available() > 0) {
           inByte = Serial.read();
           if (inByte == BUILD_SUCCESS) {
               digitalWrite(13, LOW);
           } else{
               digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
           }
       } else {
           currentPinValue = digitalRead(13);
           if (currentPinValue == HIGH) {
               delay(1000);
               digitalWrite(13, LOW);
               delay(1000);
               digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
           }
       }
   }
   

   In the loop if there’s data to be read we read it then determine if what state the LED on pin 13 needs to be in. The pin needs to be LOW (i.e. off) if the build is passing and HIGH (on) otherwise. Additionally, if there is no data to be read we want to keep the LED in a flashing state if it was set to HIGH (last read indicated build had failed).

So that’s pretty much the long short of it, the full code is available on my Git repo – https://github.com/deline/JenkinsStatus

Some thoughts on how JenkinsStatus could be improved:

• Allow config of Jenkins details via properties files
• Allow more than one Jenkins job to be monitored
• Put in more LEDs for other states

• House going under contract the night before were to check it out
• Number 1′s still left in the kids potty in the bathroom
• House’s that were in a terrible state – carpet that was frayed and separated, walls that were separating, paint jobs that looked like the person wasn’t even trying (it looked like outdoor paint too!)

Let’s say it’s easily noticeable whether a property being sold is a rental or an owner occupied…

Until yesterday… and woah behold when I came home in the evening no internet. Just the same flashing light sequence I’m more than familiar with. Usual tricks didn’t work and I was dreading having to call Optus tech support… Have you even been asked if you’ve power cycled you’re modem 3 times after you’ve already said yes twice? Not to mention the stuff arounds last time as mentioned above. So when it still didn’t work this morning, it was time to take to Twitter as I knew Optus have an account they they respond to.

Posted on the way to work, and got a reply within a few hours, and after providing a bit more info a guy from the social media team rang me – yes a real person! Turns out there were some issues which they knew about but with no ETA (odd that there network status page didn’t say anything). Anyways he said he’d try to keep my in the loop either via Twitter or ring me, and I got a phone call with an update in the afternoon that the issue had been fixed but there was someone else on my street experiencing the same issue so if it wasn’t fixed when I got home to get in touch. As I don’t get home till after the social media team finish for the day the guy updated the account notes with details in case I had to ring tech support for further help (tech support is offshore). Got home and lucky for me the internet was working again. Was it heat related? Don’t know the real answer but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. The cables running from the house have to tap to the main line, so extreme heat could cause connector issues with expansion and all of joins.

That all aside, I was very happy with the customer service and give a +1 to Optus for embracing social media. The internet has reinvented the way people work, communicate and share. Businesses need to recognise and embrace these changes/technologies as they’re not going to go away. Operating models change over time and Optus is proving that they can address customer service in ways different from traditional means. Will customer service/support by social media become mainstream? Probably not, but it’s a market they have to catch as increasingly more people turn to the web for their needs (e.g. the whole online shopping debacle).

• There will be no harm in asking
• If you put little effort in a task you can expect very little success
• You will be singled out for promotion
  

So here I present a simple solution in Groovy that uses RegEx and Closures to captalise the first letter of each word in a string. I’ll also show you an even neater solution after….

First up:

String testString = 'the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'
String regex = /\b\w*\s?\b/

testString.eachMatch(regex) { match ->
    print match.capitalize()
}

Lines 1 and 2 should be pretty self explanatory. We’ve based our regex of the basis that a word consists of word characters only, may have a space after the last word character and has a word boundary on either side.

Lines 4-6 is where the cool stuff happens, as for each word match we make we want to upper case the first letter and print it out. The method eachMatch takes two arguments a String regex and a closure. From the Groovy docs – ‘A Groovy Closure is like a “code block” or a method pointer. It is a piece of code that is defined and then executed at a later point.’ In the example above we have defined the closure inline with one parameter match – parameters are listed before the ->. The closure calls capitalize on the match and prints it out.

We could have easily defined the closure separatley and provided it to eachMethod as such:

Closure capitalize = { match -> print match.capitalize() }
testString.eachMatch(regex, capitalize)

Seems pretty easy right? Not many lines of code and quite succinct about what is happening. Well as is often the case, I did a little Google and here’s an even easier solution:

String testString = 'the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'
print testString.split(' ').collect{ it.capitalize() }.join(' ')

In the end my solution was a first attempt into using Groovy to solve a problem without having much exposure to the language whilst at the same time trying not to use my Java mindset. After seeing the alternative solution on the Internet it kind of shows that if you know what to use Groovy can make things even simpler as it’s definitely cleaner without using the RegEx.

The first step though was to get Groovy installed on my Mac. So I thought I’d put a post up mainly for anyone new to developing on a Mac. Whilst I’ve had my Mac for a year or so, I hadn’t really had it setup for anything other than Java until recently, and there were definitely some things that were a little different to what I was used to on Windows as well from my prior limited stint in Ubuntu land.

These instructions are based on a setup for OS X. I’d imagine the setup may be similar on any other version?

1. Java should already be installed on your machine. Confirm this by opening up a Terminal and typing in ‘java -version‘.
2. Download the binary Zip release of Groovy from the Groovy site.
3. Extract the contents into /usr/local – e.g. my install location is /usr/local/groovy-1.7.6/. You will probably need to need to use the sudo command for the extract as you will need to be superuser to write to the location.
4. Check if a file called environment.plist exists in the following location /Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/.MacOSX. If it doesn’t create it.
5. Open environment.plist in the Property List Editor
6. Add an entry for JAVA_HOME if not present, ensure the value is the location of your Java installation. This should be /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
7. Add an entry for GROOVY_HOME if not present and ensure the value is the location Groovy is installed. E.g. /usr/local/groovy-1.7.6
8. Add an entry for PATH if not present, and ensure the Groovy bin and Java bin directories are present by adding  $JAVA_HOME:$GROOVY_HOME/bin
9. Log out and re log back in for the changes to take effect.
10. Check that everything is all setup correctly by opening a Terminal and running groovy -version which should show you which version of Groovy is installed.