Category Archives: Software

Jira vs Google Doc importXML

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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!

Visual Impact Priority (VIP)

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My job includes the weekly iteration kick off for a development team. We look at the tasks for the week and prioritize them. Some tasks are front-end and some are back-end. Some are look’n’feel and some are more technical. And the end of the week, we demo it for everybody in the company.

I’ve long had a feeling that, at the end of the week, the more visual aspects of the tasks at hand had had less “love” then they warrant. Lets say we add a new page – all the new fields will be there, the new needed functionality will be implemented, but the visual glue, that’s supposed to pull it all together is somehow missing. It gets pushed to next week, where the same thing happens.

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Android User Experience: Listviews

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I’ve had my Nexus One for over a month now. Normally I would have blogged something about it by now, but for some reason I haven’t really had a need. Maybe it’s because it just works. I haven’t really had anything to complain about – yes, it took some getting used to not having to constantly tweak the Wi-Fi/3G connection (like I had to on my WinMo phone), but I’ve learned to leave it alone now.

I do want to talk a bit about some of the user experiences, different applications have given to me. I’ve a few hopes and suggestions that I would like to share with you.

Most of it is aimed at developers, but maybe some users might want to add their own comments to this.

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Two weeks of Ubuntu 7.10

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The on-board soundcard on my wifes old machine stopped working and I used it as an excuse to make a new box for her.

Her needs are rather limited. Work processing, mail and web-browsing. She does have an IPod, but detests iTunes.

Currently she’s running Word 97 on Windows 2000.

So she gets the retired web-server. A bit noisy, but I can switch the low-noise PSU from the old one when I get the time.

I’ve moved her domain to google apps, and I simply setup a IMAP account and copy all her old mail to googles server.

Copy all her documents to a usb stick, where she will keep them, as she also needs to edit them on the labtop and office PC.

Ask if she wants to keep bookmarks. Answer is no.

Install Ubuntu 7.10, on the old one. No problems.

Add the essentials like flash and stuff (so that the kid can play online games on it)

Insert USB stick to check that it works. Works and auto-mounts.

Add IMAP account to thunderbird.

Show her around, explain about the lag of drive-letters, give short OpenOffice.org demo.

Wait….

Two weeks later her only complaints are about the clipboard. You have to middle click on the mouse when copy/pasting from firefox to OpenOffice. If you open a document in OOo, copy something, close the document, create new document and … the content on the clipboard is gone.

There simply isn’t an excuse good enough, that this hasn’t been fixed years ago. Add a unified clipboard to X or something.

153 days of Windows 2000

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I’ve a home server. It’s running windows 2000, it’s that old. I just checked – it’s 153 days since it was re-booted last. And the reason I rebooted was to move some hard drive around, not because it crashed.

Not bad.

It will be replaced through. It can only take 384MB of ram and it’s a 566Mhz Celeron processer and it’s starting to run a bit short. It’s mostly feeding my music collection to a SqueezeBox, but as the collection grows it’s getting a bit slow.

I’ll probably install server Ubuntu on one the retired desktop machines.

But that’s for another day. For now I’ll just reboot the old one, just to clean it up a little…

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

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I’ve been trying out the last few Ubuntu releases. Ubuntu 7.10 looks even better and the installation was really easy.

Observations:

  • I’ve some kind of keyboard issue. Sometimes it seems lazy (1-2 seconds delay), other times it gave me 3-5 repeats of the typed character (old logitech PS/2 keyboard).
  • It couldn’t find my second monitor. Detection of the primary monitor, a Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC, (including resolution and refresh rate) worked great. The new live resolution changes stuff, is great. Welcome to windows 2000! 😉
  • Detection of any but the basic buttons on the mouse where, still, not detected (like “back”). Amazing. This is such basic functionality…
  • My main applications is Adobe Lightroom. It’s a windows application, and Wine has had some bad issue with it. With this release it has gotten a lot better. It’s actually possible to start Lightroom, it just can’t load an existing image database (needs to be on a local drive, and I think it sees the wine mapped drives a network drives), and can’t display images when they have been imported. And it take a year to start – you can actually see it draw the GUI elements, it’s so slow.
  • Disc partition tool takes 3-4 minutes to detect the two hard drives in my machine. Actually crashed once.
  • Compiz Fusion looks nice, but seems rather useless, and all the window flip-flopping becomes tiring really fast.
  • Hardware on my desk that’s useless under linux: Creative Web-Cam, Huey Pro screen calibration, Dell x51v PDA.
  • NTFS R/W support works great!
  • Looks good. Starting stuff like firefox etc. was fast.
  • I had to open a shell terminal once – when I edited the grub boot managers menu, to changed the default item to windows. Didn’t edit xorg.conf once.
  • Migration of windows users is a really cool idea. Could be taken further… (option; “share setting with windows”, or “copy from windows”. Use these setting in Wine for drive mappings, and for firefox/thunderbird settings including add-ons).

All in all, it looks good. I’m sure the minor issues could be solved. To bad about the “deal breaker” with Lightroom.

The Baloo Software Developement Method

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I’ve been thinking about the, much ignored and rather unglamorous, state software ends in, when it’s about to be replaced by a newly developed version. It may be an old maintained branch, or it may have been or be about to be replaced, with a new version that’s based on a new code base.

While thinking about this I heard the song The Bare Necessities from Disneys The Jungle Book. Here Baloo sings:

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
That’s why a bear can rest at ease
With just the bare necessities of life

The Bare Necessities, by Phil Harris, Bruce Reitherman

I decided to name the method used for this kind of development after Baloo.
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Firefox I love you!

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I’ve started to use google sync, to syncronize my bookmarks between my machines (Desktop XP, Desktop Ubuntu, Notebook, Work XP, Work Vista). When I installed GSync on the new Ubuntu installation it … crapped all over my bookmarks and everything from my “bar”, where I keep the most important things, was gone.

Luckily Firefox keeps series of backups of the bookmarks in a sub-directory below your profile directory. Look for around for c:\documents and settings\yourusername\application data\mozilla\firefox\profile\default.xyz\bookmarkbackups – note that the “Application data” directory is hidden, so you have to have “show hidden files” turned on, in the explorer settings.

Just open the bookmark organizer in Firefox, and import an old file. Find the old “ToolBar” root and select “edit->Set as bookmarks toolbar folder” in the menu.