I recently ran across a couple of pretty cool libraries for creating command-line tools: Airline from the Airlift project, and crest from Tomitribe . Having spent the last few years working on administration for GlassFish, this is an area near and dear to my heart, so I thought I'd cobble together a quick example using each to see how usable they are.

If you're like me, you have your source code hosted in a hosted environment (such as Bitbucket ), but you have a local continuous integration server (such as Jenkins ). It would be really nice if you could have Jenkins build your project every time you commit, but without the heavy requirement of polling your repo. In this post, I'll show you how to integrate the two to do just that.

Jason Lee 2014-01-03

I've been getting a number of bug reports from my app Cub Tracker that had me stumped. I was getting NullPointerExceptions where I shouldn't be. After some digging, I think I finally found the culprit: device rotation. While rotating the device does, indeed, trigger the error, it goes deeper than that. My problem is that the app doesn't correctly save the state of the view, which becomes problematic when, for example, the device is rotated. In trying to fix that, I discovered I don't understand the Android lifecycle as well as I should, so I set out to fix that.

As is my custom, I want to thank all of my readers, especially those who have joined the discussion, and wish you all a merry Christmas. In all the hustle of the season, it is my hope and prayer that the joy and peace brought to us in the person of Jesus Christ will be an ever-present blessing in your lives.

Jason Lee 2013-11-22

In trying to come up to speed on Ceylon, I've run into some issues with module import dependencies. I'm pretty sure they're all pilot error, but it was suggested that I import the jars into the Ceylon repository and specify the dependencies between the modules. This would, effectively, be functionally the same as the <dependencies> element in the Maven POM. In classic geek, over-engineer-the-solution fashion, I cobbled together this shell script. It could be more elegant, but it seems to work, and it was much simpler than a Java implementation using the Maven APIs. :)