Yearly Archives: 2012

Backing up Redmine with PowerShell

So you’ve set up Redmine and your team is actually using it, congratulations! But what if that server went down, melted, or caught fire? The good news is that Redmine is just comprised really of two (or three) parts: its

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Posted in PowerShell, Redmine

Convert OVF VM to VMWare Fusion with OVFTool

Sometimes it won’t work. VM hardware might not be recognized, etc. You can still convert it using the ovftool. Just specify the undocumented –lax option which turns errors into warnings.

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Posted in Virtualization

Executing Commands as Custom Actions in WiX

The two Custom Actions work together to execute an arbitrary command. The first Custom Action sets the actual thing you want to execute as a property and the second executes it. You need to follow this pattern if your command

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Posted in WiX

Simulating Slow Network on Virtual Machines

We needed to simulate that our data frameworks will work over a slow network link. There is a VMWare configuration option to limit a virtual NIC to a certain bandwidth. Just edit the VM’s .vmx file and enter the speed

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Posted in Virtualization

Java Active Directory Authentication

I had to quickly add some AD authentication to one of our applications and it was becoming cumbersome at best using the built in Java LDAP libraries.  Most things had to have FQDNs, nested groups weren’t supported, the host name

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Posted in Active Directory, Java

Generate Installer Product IDs Automatically

I had installed some scripting in Jenkins to generate a random guid on each build of our installers and inject it through maven into the WiX source files.  It turns out WiX supports that natively by just placing a ‘*’

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Posted in WiX

A Better Grocery List

I’d like to get more into mobile development and what better way than to just do it.  I was trying to figure out a decent idea that in the end could actually end up in an app store.  A game

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Posted in iPhone

Automating WiX Installer Builds with Maven: Actual Automation

Alright, now for how we actually automate the installer build!  Everything mentioned here lives in the ‘installer’ profile.  This allows your developers to still run the package command without invoking a lengthy installer build. Required Properties There is a set

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Posted in Java, Jenkins, Maven, WiX

Automating WiX Installer Builds with Maven: Windows Installer Xml

The next step in creating an installer after assembling the application is generating the actual msi.  There are a couple issues that need to be addressed when setting up the framework though. The installer may include jars that do not

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Posted in Java, Jenkins, Maven, WiX

Automating WiX Installer Builds with Maven: Assembling Your Application

The Concept The first step in getting an installer built is to be able to construct what will roughly be the folder structure of your application.  Out of trial and error, or maybe out of a Java convention I don’t know

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Posted in Java, Jenkins, Maven