Red Leopard

I’ve added this latest rendition of Blue Smoke to illustrate a point: The quantity and quality of non-video music is greater than that of video music. Okay. So it’s anecdotal. But this isn’t about science. It’s about sensation. In my world, the grooveshark player found every track but one: Helpless by Needle. But I’ll take Neil Young’s unplugged version. Not as good but does have a nice base coat of maudlin piano. And I prefer the Paul Weller’s Portishead remix of Wildwood.

One of the niftiest aspects of the grooveshark player is that it if you change (add, delete, modify) tracks in the playlist on grooveshark /after/ you embed the playlist, those changes propagate to the embedded player. That way, if I find Needle’s version, I can swap out the track. And like magic, my playlist just gets better.

One last thing. The garish colors are mine. In fact, when you create a widget, there are color wheels to adjust color on /everything/. I suggest you get a palette of coordinated colors before you start building the widget. I didn’t and in the end, my widget looks like a three year old colored it.

Yet another version of blue smoke using the embedr.com player. No one has the video of Needle‘s cover of Neil Young’s Helpless. Shame. Needle has, in my opinion, the quintessential rendition. Anyway, Helpless didn’t make it it.

Another adaptation of blue smoke, this time using Yahoo Video as the source. Some of the videos were not found (Lenny, Helpless, Until the Morning).

Lenny and Fade Into You are the lynchpins of Blue Smoke and my substitutions make this something I call “an interpretive playlist”. However, I like the Paul Weller cover. Raw, courageous, authentic. Best of luck, Dylan.

An alternate view of the pensive playlist.

I’ve been pensive of late and frankly the weather is just too damn nice for that. Still, there is something gained by wrapping up from time to time in a blanket of introspection. I’m sharing here my pensive playlist.

You’d think in this day and age that modern operating systems, especially OS X, would be set for UTF8 handling by default. Not so. My previous post, centos l10n problem, showed that CentOS defaults to set its locale LANG as POSIX rather than UTF8.

Mac takes the lunacy one step further. Or should I say one step backwards in time.

I use maven2 as my build manager. Normally, I ignore the stream of info at the beginning of a build, Either it succeeds (yeah) or it fails. Either way, I’ve been more interested in seeing the end result; You know, those last few lines rather than the first few lines.

One day, I started tracking down all the warnings and errors which popped up during maven builds and tomcat startups. I noticed this one.

$ mvn -Pdevelopment clean compile package war:inplace
[INFO] Scanning for projects...

    <!-- snip -->

[WARNING] Using platform encoding (MacRoman actually) to copy↩
filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!

    <!-- snip -->

[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 8 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Apr 07 23:40:06 PDT 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 26M/63M
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------

If you’ve ever had to trace down all the UTF8 failure points in a system then you know this maxim: “Suffer not a UTF8 Failure to Live.” Once you have a failure point, Latin1 (or worse in this case–MacRoman) will leak into your database and rot your data like a cancer.

I really should hunt down the BSD system configuration equivalents to Linux but here’s a solution that is quick and easy: add a project.build.sourceEncoding element and a project.reporting.outputEncoding to your pom.xml.

<project
  xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 ↩
http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">

  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>mywebapp</artifactId>
  <packaging>war</packaging>
  <version>1.21</version>
  <name>mywebapp</name>

  <properties>

    <project.build.sourceEncoding>
      UTF-8
    </project.build.sourceEncoding>

    <project.reporting.outputEncoding>
      UTF-8
    </project.reporting.outputEncoding>

  </properties>

    <!-- snip -->

</project>

Run maven again to verify the fix.

$ mvn -Pdevelopment clean compile package war:inplace
[INFO] Scanning for projects...

    <!-- snip -->

[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.

    <!-- snip -->

[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 7 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Apr 07 23:48:17 PDT 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 25M/60M
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------

I really do want to understand the vagaries of OS X (relative to Linux) but I’m eternally short on time. I suspect that is our lot, all of us.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

                       --Robert Frost

[update 2010-08-08] I had not yet tried moving the sourceEncoding property from pom.xml to settings.xml but Gabriele’s comment motivated me to look.

I removed the properties from pom.xml and added the following to my settings.xml file.

<settings>

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>profile-x</id>
      <properties>

        <project.build.sourceEncoding>
          UTF-8
        </project.build.sourceEncoding>

        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>
          UTF-8
        </project.reporting.outputEncoding>

      </properties>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>profile-x</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>

</settings>

I’m sure there are many ways to configure settings.xml and welcome suggestions. My settings.xml was originally written for me in 2006 by Aaron at a time when I was just learning java. I’ve honestly avoided messing with it since it wasn’t broken and the documentation back then was horrendous. The docs are no longer horrendous but I still find maven complicated. Essential but complicated.

Ref: maven documentation here and here.