The IT Blog

Month: November 2011

  • TrafficMining Project goes open source

    Quite some time ago I wrote about a little demo that was published at SIGMOD 2010 and SSTD 2011 (see post1 and post2).

    The TrafficMining project could be described shortly as:

    An academic framework for routing algorithms based on OpenStreetMapdata. Actually this framework is not intended to replace current routing applications but to provide an easy to use GUI for testing and developing new routing algorithms on real OpenStreetMap data.

    Well, what makes this worth a post is the fact that we finally switched development over to GoogleCode with a discussion group at Google Groups.
    GoogleCode has the major advantage of a Mercurial repository, an issue tracker, easy code reviews and an miproved possibility to contribute code. If you just want to follow the development, just join the google group or keep a bookmark to the project’s update feed.

    By the way: the PAROS and MARiO downloads can be found there in the downloads section.

  • Sometimes AntiVirus Scanners just suck

    Due to some very strange and non reproducible bugs I deleted my NetBeans profile to get back to a fresh post-install state. This mainly hat two very different results: A positive one and the one why I am writing this post. The positive one is/was that the mystery-bug disappeared.

    After deleting the profile, NetBeans wants to update all its modules to the latest releases – which is okay.
    The problem however was that NB never managed to download all the modules and just got stuck randomly between 0% and 100%. NB just said “downloading …” but the task manager showed 0 bytes/sec traffic. First I thought that the download/update servers might be overloaded. After 3 days of repeatedly trying –  I was very douptful about that first guess. Finally I sent an email to the NetBeans mailinglist, if s.o else also experienced such a problem.

    The first answer came in just 70min after my question saying “I had this problem and found that if I turn off AVG I could get the plugins.”.
    Uhoh – I didn’t mention my AV scanner in my post – yet I am using AVG, too. And – surprise – after disabling resident shield, mail-scanner, link-scanner and identity protection – NB suddenly was able to update to the latest version. Unfortunately AVG never said that it was doing something of that kind!

    So the lesson learned: If some really weird stuff is happening, try to disable the AV scanner – but don’t forget to re-enable it!

    Update: same happens with Eclipse when downloading/installing plug-ins. – At least AVG is consistent with blocking Java-IDEs.

  • Linking API and Sources to your IDE’s JARs (Part 2)

    I tend to upload my complete project into version control. This includes the sources, tests, Jars and also the nbproject directory where NetBeans stores the project configuration. By doing so, I can check out the project on a different machine and start quickly without having to configure the project.

    Sources and API Docs of external libraries are not commited as they’re are not requried for compiling. I usually keep sources and docs in a separate place outside my project (let’s say <userdir>javaLibs...).

    When I check out the project on a different machine I can do coding but I do have neither the sources nor the API docs. Even worse: as I’ve commited the whole project including the configuration, I have also commited the nbproject/project.properties file which stores the pathes to the source and docs. Which is not a problem if the pathes on all the machines are the same. But when a new contributer wants to join in, (s)he either has to use the same directory structure (and possibly the same OS) or he has to overwrite the settings. Both not very desirable.

    (more…)