Category Archives: Misc

Jira vs Google Doc importXML

If you ever need to import data – live – from Jira to a google spreadsheet, this might help you.

You’ll need:

  • The Url of your Jira server (I’ve only tested with ondemand)
  • Username and password to an account with rights to export xml
  • This list of jira fieldnames (not the same as jql)

 

Now open a spreadsheet or create a new one.

Now insert something like this.

=ImportXML(“https://yourserver.atlassian.net/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-xml/temp/SearchRequest.xml?

jqlQuery=project+in+%28%22Projectname%22%29+ORDER+BY+Rank+ASC&

tempMax=1000

&field=summary&field=timeoriginalestimate&field=timespent

&os_username=alice&os_password=bob“, “//item”)

You need to change the text in red to something that will work for you. And make it all one line – I just broke it down to make it easier to read.

As you can see I’ve listed the fields I need – you don’t need to do this if you don’t mind getting a lot of data. Remember to use the fieldliste above – not all fieldsnames match their jql names.

The last part of the statement – the xpath – tells google doc, which xml elements to extract. It’s actually a bit to simple her, as the timeoriginalestimate and timespent fields have a “seconds” attribute, that may be easier to work with the the text “2.54h” text returned by the field it self.

Change the xpath to something like “//item | //item/timespent/@seconds | //item/timeoriginalestimate/@seconds” to get the attributes (which is a bit useless for what I want as google places them on separate rows and only does it if there actually is an attribute – which makes it hard to know which value was returned if only one fo them exist in the xml – I’ll note it here what I end up with). The alternativ is something =if(C9<>””, value(left(C9,LEN(C9)-1)), “”) on the hour columns.

Have fun!

I’m not a non-believer

Sorry about the strange title – a explanation will follow.

As my more vocal  Atheist friends haven’t neglected to make absolutely clear to me, the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention is this week-end. I’m a big fan of James Randi and would really  like to see him. But I’m not going, because I’m not an atheist. And I’m frankly beginning to be a bit tired with them – paying a small fortune for a week-end with a couple of hundred of them, isn’t my idea of fun.

But lets first take a look at what Atheist means (Wikipedia):

Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.

So Atheism, is the negated form of “the belief that at least one deity exists”. I don’t think I want to define my self with a negative, if I can avoid it. The only place for such a definition is when, there’s a conflict with the positive form. But as I don’t have a problem with theists, I don’t need to define my self against them.

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Complexity

I’ve been thinking about complexity vs. simplicity, and I’ve decide that the general issue can be described with these two statements:

1. No issue is so complex, that it can’t be reduced to a meaningless yes/no question

2. No issue is so simple, that it can’t be made to complex to decide on.

Not totally happy with the phrasing, so suggestions are welcome….

“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

It’s in the middle of the night and we are getting ready to go to the hospital to have our second son delivered. I have the phrase “what we need now is coffee – lots of coffee!” stuck in my head. Strangely the first part of that sentence is only found two places in the web. Both copies of “fear and loathing in Las Vegas” by  Hunter S. Thompson. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of, so I guess that not everything can be found on the net. Not sure where it comes from, but I thinking Lucky Luke…

Orwells 1984 – are we there yet?

I’ve just finished this book (in it’s audio version – something to do in the car). I can’t remember if I’ve read it before, but I do remember seeing the movie. If I’ve read it it was before seeing the movie. Anyway. All I could remember from the movie was the Rats, Big Brother and the prisoner who crosses his arms.

My first thought about this book, is that it’s as scary as it’s relevant. Which is very scary and very relevant, if you should be in doubt. Now, books has a tendency to get a life of their own in other books and other media. 1984 is one of these books – in most cases it just boiled down to a mention of Big Brother, probably in connection to something about privacy and surveillance. You’ll hear people say things like “we are living in a Big Brother society” when the talk comes around the the ever present video camera. But, what strikes me the most about this is that the surveillance part of 1984 is the least of it. The least scary part.

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Hippie Jokes – Google Search

I don’t like hippies. Truely I don’t.

I found this crude and yet somehow funny joke:

Q: What has long hair and looks good in red?
A: A hippie on fire!

So, I decide to try for a few more and go to my favorite search engine:

Hippie Jokes – Google Search

And what do I find? The same two jokes on a bazillion different pages. The one about the Nun, Hippie and Busdriver and the one about George Bush (or who-ever it is that we do not like) mistaking a hippies backpack for a parachute. Again and again. And those joke are not really about hippies. You could easily replace the hippie in the first one with say a shoe-salesman, and the second one only features a hippie because the joke is so old, that it’s from a time backpacks where associated with hippies.

Even browsing around on some of the larger joke sites, I find no hippie jokes. I find the sentence “enough with the hippie jokes” a couple of times on message boards, but no jokes…

Either my google-fu is really bad today, or something strange is going on…

Destroying the Earth

Found this interesting article at Sam’s Archive, where Sam works through a set of methods for destroying Earth:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy
the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next
nuclear war or
cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities
of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last.

He then goes on to describe a series of possible solutions to the
problem, giving a feasibility rating and time estimates on
implementation. Rather silly but also rather fun.

Ties in rather well on my small article on Impact Calculation.