From the QWANtify Blogs
Every day at around 11:30 the developers in my area are faced with the most difficult question of the morning: where to go to lunch? To help move things along, I decided to create an IRC Bot for our developer channel. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel. After 30 seconds of Googling, I found a very capable framework: http://www.jibble.org/pircbot.php. Just extend the PircBot class, and in minutes you’ll have a functional IRC Bot!
import org.jibble.pircbot.PircBot;
public class LunchBot extends PircBot {
public static String[] lunchSpots = {
"Copp's",
"Chipotle",
"Chin's",
"Quizno's",
"Casa Bianca",
"Panera",
"Cousin's",
"Milio's",
"Subway",
"Boston's",
"JT Whitney's",
"Takara",
"Laredo's",
"Quaker Steak & Lube",
"TGI Fridays",
"PF Chang's",
"the Hubbard Ave Diner",
"McDonald's",
"the West Towne Mall Food Court",
"the first floor",
"the fridge in the break room and steal a brownbag"
};
public LunchBot() {
super();
setName("LunchBot");
}
public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login, String hostname, String message) {
if (message.equalsIgnoreCase("lunch")) {
sendMessage(channel, sender + ": you should go to " + lunchSpots[(int) (Math.random()*lunchSpots.length)] );
}
}
}
If anyone types “lunch” in our channel, they’ll get a random item from the list. It took more time to think of the lunch options than it did to do the research and coding!
Filed in: Team Member Blog
One of our team members came up with a great idea and wonderful new program for educating middle-school girls about different information technology opportunities available to students graduating from college with a Management Computer Systems (MCS) degree. The program is called GET IT, which stands for Girls Educating Themselves about Information Technology.
We believe this program is a very important step in furthering the discussion about the many exciting information technology career opportunities available today and well into the future.
Filed in: Company Insight
This is our second year sponsoring a family, for the holidays, through our local Salvation Army. This year’s family, a single mother with one and four-year old daughters, was so much fun to work with. QWANtify team members provided socks, boots, gloves, scarves, hats, snowsuits, a pre-lit tree, pajamas, sweaters, grocery and book-store certificates, and food (vegetables, fruits, mile, stuffing, turkey, bread, eggs, soups, butter, cereal, etc.) and many more essential items along with some toys.
This is one of the most gratifying programs I’ve been involved with. The hope, joy, and gratefulness of those involved is something everyone should experience. In a world where there is so much excess, I’ve found something as simple as giving to those less fortunate is very rewarding.
Hope you can join us and others next year in an effort to ensure more families have a Happy Holiday!!
Filed in: Company Insight
I have to admit that I’m more than a little excited about the current news revolving around large solid state drives. With BitMicro prepping a 832GB solid state drive following Sony’s first NAND based laptop and rumors of a harddiskless portable from Apple being announced at the Macworld expo, it appears that the death of computers with moving parts may be on the horizon. These drives have higher transfer rates, lower power consumption and higher reliability; this would be a positive move on all fronts. I also believe it will open the door for more interesting and creative hardware design, which is always a plus as long as hardware makers remember to be sure their creations are practical. It’s amazing how often they miss that piece of the puzzle.
On a semi-related note, some are claiming that the HD format war is over, and Sony has won with Blu-ray. After getting a taste of Netflix.com’s Watch Instantly feature, it’s obvious that physical discs are becoming less relevant. The current music market is a great example of this, as I can’t even buy physical copies of many of the albums I’m interested in. Will the true HD format war simply use proprietary codecs with a client/server model? I would love to be a part of a team that designs and builds a system of that magnitude!
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I recently had a few minutes to write myself a program to convert a directory of FLAC files to MP3 format. Read the article to see how I did it.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 5ruby, 5flactomp3
The BarCampMadison2 planning meeting was held yesterday. We had a good crowd of 14 people there. This was split between Madison and Milwaukee residents. We had a great discussion about what we need to do to get the BarCamp together and I think that we all did a great job. The notes from the meeting are available on the main BarCamp website at http://barcamp.org/BarcampMadison2. The main BarCampMadison2 website should be up soon. I’ll post the link when that happens.
The BarCamp has a tentative date of April 19 and 20. We have many things to get done before then and more help is always appreciated. If you’d like to help out, be sure to sign up to the BarCampMadison Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/barcampmadison. Holding with BarCamp philosophy, planning of the BarCamp is an open and community-driven task. Everything will be discussed and will be on the website. If you have suggestions or would like to pitch in and get something done, just let us know.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 6planning, 6barcampmadison2, 62008, 6barcamp
Eclipse 3.3 doesn’t come with plugins to support the svn+ssh protocol right out of the box.
An easy way to install new plugins for Eclipse: Help / Software Updates / Find and Install… / Search for new features to install / New Remote Site… and enter an update site URL.
1) Install the Subclipse plugin with http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x
When using Subclipse with the JavaHL libraries (these use JNI) I would consistently get a “malformed network data” exception every time I committed to the repository. While the files seem to have been committed, they produced conflicts on the next synchronize. To fix this, I installed SVNKit.
2) Install SVNKit with http://svnkit.com/
SVNKit is a pure Java Subversion client library. Open the Eclipse preferences, and change the SVN interface SVNKit as I have below.
From here, you’ll be able to open the Subclipse perspective and define a repository that uses svn+ssh, and successfully perform any command.
SVNKit will also work with the Subversive plugin.
For more information on these plugins visit:
http://www.svnkit.com/
http://subclipse.tigris.org/
http://www.polarion.org/index.php?page=download&project=subversive
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I have put together an article about my experiences at BarCampMilwaukee2. I wrote it because I wanted to be able to point people to something that can describe what a BarCamp is like. It’s one thing to give out the description of “unconference, no preset schedule, etc.”, but it’s another thing to actually be at the BarCamp participating. I really enjoyed BarCampMilwaukee2 as I have previously posted and I’m getting excited about the possibilities ahead of us for BarCampMadison2.
The article can be found at http://tech.fradkin.com/articles/barcampmilwaukee2.html.
I’ve also created a handy RSS feed for tech.fradkin.com that can be pulled into your favorite feed reader: http://tech.fradkin.com/rssfeed.xml. Updates tend to be infrequent, but at least you would be notified that I’ve updated something.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 8barcampmilwaukee2, 8article, 8whatisbarcamp?