Moving to a New Domain: ScotttPhillips.com!

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The blog is moving to a new domain: scottphillips.com! The previous owner let the domain expire and I had a chance to snap it up. I learned a lot about how the domain expiration process works, I’ll write up more about that on my next post. For now I wanted to let everyone know about the new domain. The current scott.phillips.name domain will last for the foreseeable future, at least a few years. Read more →

OS X Terminal slow to bring up a prompt?

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Today I was in the middle of some tasks and needed a bash shell. Naturally, I fired up the Terminal.app from OS X and waited….. and waited…. The window popped up but the bash prompt did not come up, it just stayed there with one character blinking at me. It took forever for the prompt to appear, it seemed like a few minutes but was probably more like 20 seconds. You know how time scales depending on how busy you are. Read more →

WordCamp Austin, 2010

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I was able to attend WordCamp Austin this past weekend. It was the first time I’d been to a WordPress conference so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. It turned out to be small but very well run conference with several interesting topics. For this post I am going to review my notes from the conference and highlight the items or topics that I thought were interesting. WordCamps are typically small 1-day conferences held all over the world focusing on WordPress related topics. Read more →

Buying a Domain from HugeDomains.com

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I recently found my self in a position of negotiating the purchase of a domain from a domain reseller (or “domainers” as they are commonly referred to as). It is one of those outfits that buys up domains in bulk to resell them at a huge markup. Before I contacted HugeDomains I googled around and could not find much in the way of specifics on how to negotiate with them. Read more →

Make Tellurium / Selenium work with Firefox and Snow Leopard

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TDL’s been playing around with Tellerium / Selenium for functional web-based tests for a little while now. Unfortunately everyone who’s been messing around with it has been running them on Ubuntu and the others of us on the team have OS X. When you run the Tellerium tests on a Mac with Snow Leopard they fail to start Firefox with the following output from the Selenium server: Preparing Firefox profile. Read more →

In-place SVN Import

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I discovered an SVN trick today: how to do an in-place import into SVN. Normally when you run “svn import” it will leave the file system alone creating a copy on the repository. Then you have to do an “svn checkout” to pull the files back down under version control. The import/checkout process normally this is a pain. However there are a few instances where it’s a really big pain such as Unix’s etc/ directory. Read more →

Maven vs Grails

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We have a Grails 1.1 which uses ant + Ivy as its build mechanism. The Ivy configuration has always been wonky, I wasn’t the person who set it up so I’m not exactly sure why it is that way. You would have to run this special ant target, “copy-jars”, which movies the libraries downloaded with Ivy around because some grails command would delete them. When it came time to upgrade to the latest version, Grails 1. Read more →

Adding OAI-ORE Support to Repository Platforms

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Our presentation at Open Repositories 2009 has been published in the Journal of Digital Information. Congratulations Alexey. Alexey Maslov, James Creel, Adam Mikeal, Scott Phillips, John Leggett, Mark McFarland. Adding OAI­-ORE Support to Repository Platforms. Journal of Digital Information, Volume 11, Number 1. Available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/749 Read more →

DSpace Functional Tests?

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The Texas Digital Library has been focusing on testability for our projects. Since DSpace is related too or part of most of our projects we’ve been looking for a way to increase DSpace’s testability. Traditionally this would mean adding unit tests and integration tests. However as DSpace currently stands is hard to break it up into individual components that can be tested in isolation. You’ll quickly find that writing tests for DSpace pull in the entire system, plus databases, and a file system. Read more →

How to Setup Eclipse, Tomcat, and DSpace for Development

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This is an updated guide describing how I configure Eclipse, Tomcat, and DSpace for my development. A previous version of this guide was written for Eclipse 3.4 and this version has been updated for the latest versions of both Eclipse and DSpace. One of my motivations forcing my move to the newer version of Eclipse is the ability to handle Java 1.6. Apple has decided to stop shipping both 32bit and 64bit versions, instead they are only providing 64bit Java binaries. Read more →