Turn any program into a Windows service

Today, Oisin Mulvihill introduced me to his company's open source product, Service Station. It's very simple, very effective and stunningly useful. I am really surprised that it isn't much better known. With one short shell command, you can install any script or application (headless, command-line or GUI) as a Windows service that can be started, stopped and managed through the Services control panel. As a bonus, Service Station restarts programs that have crashed, cleans up all spawned processes when stopping a service, and provides comprehensive logging via the Windows Event Viewer - it really could not be simpler for the system administrator. It is suitable for every version of Windows from 2000 onwards.

Great Music Venue

Last night my friends and colleagues from the Zuhlke office and I, collectively known as Karma4Sale, enjoyed playing to a packed house at Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club in Denmark Street, London.

Thanks to everyone who came along to listen and encourage us, to drummer Chris Sluman (sorry Chris, this is the best photo I have and you're completely invisible in it!), to the brilliant support act of young musicians from the Brit school, and not least to the incredible Mr Peter Parker, who made the evening possible in the first place and gave hands-on support throughout. I sincerely recommend his excellent club if you fancy a great night out either as a listener or as a performer.

BCS SPA2010 conference

Final day of the conference - it's gone much too quickly as usual. My favourite session to date has been the brief whirlwind tour of agile practices given by Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young of New Bamboo - "the Sword of Integration". This was a highly interactive session that involved everyone standing up and moving about enthusiastically, which despite the cramped room, meant that we all ended up remembering something instantly useful from the session.

By the way, the sword of integration itself is just one example of an instant solution to a pressing problem. The situation was that multiple developers checking in their changes would cause each other to have merge conflicts. The solution: a paper "sword" quickly assembled, which when held conferred on the holder the right to check in - and hit anyone who checked in when they shouldn't. The principle being illustrated is "just try it" - there is no need to get it absolutely right first time. If it doesn't work, we can change it later.

Real-time arrival information for London Buses

... should be arriving some time in 2011 - provided, of course, that there are no unforeseen traffic problems :-)

By the way, the link in that post has become obsolete. Try this one instead.

Meanwhile, some enterprising private individual has connected live running information from various feeds with Google's Map API to create Live Bus - but for the stops I am principally interested in, it has no information feeds as yet.

Ubuntu Desktop 9.10

For a project recently begun, I needed a Linux virtual machine and I downloaded the excellent Chrysaor VMWare appliance pre-built with Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 (karmic koala) and the VMWare Tools (which actually work as specified - you can cut/paste text and even entire files between your host OS and the VM).

NB I was only able to download this using a direct internet connection, because our company firewall blocks BitTorrent. There don't appear to be any FTP or HTTP mirrors of these VMWare images.

There were just a couple of problems with this virtual machine image, for which I have discovered workarounds.

1. Timezone persistently defaults to EST, no matter what I do in the time/date control panel. It turns out that certain system files need editing by hand (change to reflect your actual location and language):
   
   • sudo rm /etc/localtime
   • sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
   • sudo vi /etc/timezone -- set it to Europe/London
   • sudo vi /etc/profile -- add the following line at the end:
     export TZ=/etc/localtime
   • sudo vi /etc/default/locale -- set it as follows:
     LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
2. Login crash: for a while I thought I had broken the system by installing some upgrade or enabling shared folders. The symptom was that when I logged in, the progress bar would be displayed for a few seconds but instead of displaying the desktop, Ubuntu would restart the windowing system and display the login prompt again. I eventually discovered by trial and error that this was due to starting up in full-screen on my second monitor. Provided I always login while the VM is running in a non-maximised window, it seems very reliable. If you're suffering similar problems, look in your vmware.log file for messages similar to the following:
   

   VMXVmdbGuestLaunchMenuCB: buf is null.
   VMXVmdbGuestLaunchMenuCB: failed: ret = VMDB failure
   GuestRpc: Channel 3 reinitialized.

I recommend that the first thing you do is create a new user ID for yourself with admin rights, and log in under that user to do everything else.

I upgraded Mercurial to 1.4.1 and TortoiseHg to 0.9.2 by downloading the following Debian packages and installing them manually using dpkg -i:

1. mercurial_1.4.1-1_i386.deb and mercurial-common_1.4.1-1_all.deb from ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/ubuntu/pool/universe/m/mercurial/
   
2. tortoisehg_0.9.2-1_all.deb and tortoisehg-nautilus_0.9.2-1_all.deb from ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/ubuntu/pool/universe/t/tortoisehg/

Note that Tortoise doesn't work unless you install the python-iniparse package. Version 0.3.1-1 works with Tortoise 0.9.2-1.

I was able to get Eclipse (Galileo) as a Ubuntu package and installed the excellent HgEclipse plugin from http://hge.javaforge.com/hgeclipse using the Eclipse "Install New Software" option.

Craftsmanship for Teams

Very interesting discussion thread on Software Craftsmanship as a team exercise. In response to Cory Foy's posting, Steven Smith makes an interesting analogy with coaching a sports team and says how that is actually carried through in his practice.

Mercurial - managing a repository

Last Autumn, I set up a repository server with Mercurial. While not particularly difficult, it took a while to get all the configuration exactly correct, in particular, to leave no security loopholes. With some assistance from Zuhlke's IT centre, this was satisfactorily completed and the server is in production use.

It takes a little while to get used to the idea that you can't just access files directly from the repository server, as you can with CVS and Subversion. Instead, anyone wishing to get hold of the repository contents has to install a copy of the Mercurial software on their own machine (on Windows PCs, my choice would be TortoiseHg) and "clone" the repository. While this makes it a bit tedious for someone who just needs one or two files out of a big repository, it's great for teams of developers who can each check files in and out of their local workspace before merging a consistent set of changes with the central development branch.

I was quite surprised, however, by the lack of web-based admin facilities. There ought to be a control panel to allow suitably authorised people to create and delete collections of repositories with specified access permissions, set up and delete repository user accounts etc. Currently you have to use the shell commands and in some cases, this involves superuser privileges (e.g. to change ownership of new repositories to www-data so that the Apache FCGI scripts can access them).

Because I was unable to find such a facility either natively or under Webmin, I have embarked on developing some scripts to provide these functions. I have adapted the Python scripts and modules, HTML templates and stylesheets of Mercurial itself for the purpose. Anyone keen to help or to get access to this code is invited to contact me - immo.huneke _a_ zuhlke.com.