Unified DIFF from perforce changelist spec

Because this snippet is very useful when dealing with Perforce, I thought I'd share it real quick.

Ever wondered how to obtains a DIFF of a specific changelist spec? Try this.

($1 is the P4CLIENT name and $2 is the changeset spec)

P4CLIENT=$1 p4 opened -c $2 | sed -e 's/#.*$//' | P4CLIENT=$1 p4 -x - diff

Robot 02

Last month, I built my second robot, which I cleverly nicknamed Robot 02. Its name stands for... well the name says it all, really.

Pictured above, Robot 02 is my second attempt at building an autonomous robot capable of navigating around a room. I wanted it to go around obstacles and detect when it gets stuck so that it can act accordingly.

A tale of Mondrian and real time analytics

Back in April 2008, Julian Hyde, founder of Mondrian, extends a basic API to control the contents of member caches within the Mondrian OLAP engine. Its name, quite unsurprisingly, is CacheControl.There is a basic implementation available, yet that feature remains mostly unknown to most of the community.

Jump to December 2010. We are brainstorming on Mondrian 3.3 (today this feels like ages ago). We come up with those crazy ideas about enterprise integration, real time analytics and cool APIs / SPIs. One of these crazy ideas is: Wouldn't it be sweet to update Mondrian's member cache and do real time OLAP?

That's when we remember the old CacheControl API.

olap4j 1.0 is here

Dear olap4j community,

It is with immense pride that we deliver to you today version 1.0 of olap4j. Yup. And you should be proud as well. Thanks to you and to the concerted efforts of countless collaborators, advisers, testers, integrators and developers worldwide, we were able to reach this historic milestone.

If you would allow me to exagerate blatantly for a second, olap4j 1.0 is what I believe the greatest and bestest (yes, you've read it right, bestest) version to have ever been granted to humanity.

At this point, I encourage you to go read the official press release instead of reading my futile efforts at proper journalism. Our fine folks really know how to best express what olap4j represents, why it is important and why it *might* be the bestest thing on Earth. I've also resisted the urge to copy / paste their fabulous text. That said, I'll do my part and get into the more technical details.

You will first notice that the distribution files have changed. The XML/A driver is now separated from the core API. This is a good thing for the project, as it will allow us to fix issues and release more often. Those of you who are using the JDK 1.4 compatible distribution will still get the XML/A driver in the same library. The four binary libraries are available on our Maven repository and Sourceforge project.

Among other changes, the top levels of the connection's metadata have also received some upgrades. A new metadata element was introduced at the top; the Database. We have also removed everything that was marked for deprecation as of 1.0. We therefore encourage people to test carefully while upgrading.

The reference implementation, Mondrian, is compatible with olap4j 1.0, but only for version 3.3.0.14192 and upwards. This means that if you are using both Mondrian and olap4j, the only compatible build is not certified nor tested anymore than any regular CI release. On production systems, you should abstain from upgrading to Mondrian 3.3.X or risk the consequences, although the 3.3.X series are very similar to what we released with the 3.2.X cousin. Anyhow, bottom line is:

• If you're only using olap4j and the XML/A driver, upgrade at will! 
• If you're using Mondrian too, we suggest waiting for Mondrian 3.3 official.
• If you like to live on the edge, grab olap4j 1.0.0.445 and Mondrian 3.3.0.14192. They are both available in our Maven repository.

That's it for now. As usual, drop by our forums or mailing list if there is anything we can help with. And again, congratulations to everyone for the hard work.

olap4j's  maven repository cheat sheet
url:
    http://repository.pentaho.org/artifactory/
group:
    org.olap4j
artifacts:
    olap4j
    olap4j-xmla
    olap4j-jdk14
    olap4j-tck

Welcome!

I was searching the internet for some technical documents and stumbled on this website where the documents were behind a password prompt. What struck me is the weird password prompt, which was not the standard Firefox BASIC authentication prompt. Using curl, I discovered this gem

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">
<!--hide
var password;
var pass="[redacted]";

password=prompt('Enter password:',' ');

if (password==pass)
  alert('Welcome!');
else
  window.location="errorframe.asp";
   
//-->
</SCRIPT>

Welcome indeed.