Introducing: indicator-jenkins

For my day job I've been monitoring a jenkins instance (specifically, the public Ubuntu QA jenkins instance) using my web browser. This is obviously suboptimal - I'd like to be able to see the state of the jenkins jobs I'm interested at a glance, without having to open my web browser.

I couldn't find a solution to my problem, so I created one: indicator-jenkins is a panel indicator for your desktop manager of choice. It allows you to select one or more jobs from a jenkins server, and follow the job state without having to open your browser.

The project is hosted on launchpad, and is built daily into my PPA. To install it (I'm assuming you're running Ubuntu):

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomir/indicator-jenkins

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install indicator-jenkins

Once it's installed you can launch it in a couple of different ways:

• From a terminal - jut run indicator-jenkins. If you run it on the terminal you'll get a lot of debugging output (useful if you want to submit a patch, or figure out why it's not working).
• From the unity dash - open the dash, and search for 'jenkins' - it's probably going to be the first link.
  
  

Once it's running you should see the jenkins icon in your panel. To set it up, click the icon to open the settings dialog, enter the URL of the jenkins instance you want to look at, hit the refresh button, and pick the job(s) you want to monitor. Click OK and you're done! It's simpler than it sounds - see for yourself:

Right now it's pretty rough-and-ready - there are many features I'd like to add:

• Integrate desktop notifications, so you can be alerted when a job state changes.
• Customise panel icon based on job state (i.e.- show a red icon if any of the monitored jobs are failing).
• Allow user to customise refresh period.
• Allow user to monitor jobs from more than one jenkins server.
• Show more information about a jenkins job. For a start, show stability as well as current status, and maybe in the future show unity test pass/failure rates for projects that have that information.

How it's Made:

The entire application is written in python. We make use of several python modules:

• The python-appindicator package gives us the ability to create an icon on the menu, and the python gtk2 bindings are used to create the menu and settings dialog.
• The python 'multiprocessing' module is used to spin up worker processes to fetch the data from jenkins. Initially the application used threads for this, but python's threading support isn't great, and it was taking too long. 
• The python 'json' module is used to save and load settings.
• The python-jenkins package is used to communicate with the jenkins server.

This is a great example of python's "batteries included" approach to programming. All you have to do is provide the glue between already-existing python modules.

KiwiPyCon Sloecode Talk

It's about time I posted my Kiwi PyCon talk from last August! I spent an enjoyable 30 minutes talking about what Sloecode is, how we built it, and the problems encountered along the way. As per my usual approach to public speaking, I tried to keep things light-hearted and entertaining. Anyway, the slides and audio are available here:

Introducing Sloecode: a python-powered, installable code-forge.

View another webinar from ThomiRichards

Dear Journalists: Bits and Bytes

Dear Journalist type person,

There's something we must discuss. You see, you've been making a very basic mistake in many of your articles when it comes to writing about the Internet, and specifically Internet speeds. Let's take a look at a small quote:

...unless you have an internet connection of impossible speeds. (Mine is nominally 10MB, by the way, which in practice means maximum download speeds of 1.4 megabytes per second).

(source: Rock-Paper-Shotgun).

Can you spot the problem here? Internet speeds are measured in megabits per second. The symbol for 'bits' is a lower-case 'b', so an Internet connection that's 10 Megabits per second could be written as "10 Mbps". I guess if you're feeling lazy you could leave off the "ps", and end up with "10 Mb" (although it's a really sloppy thing to do), but NEVER "10 MB" - that means something else entirely.

Modern PCs use bytes that contain 8 bits. The correct symbol for a byte is an upper-case 'B'. so "10 MB" means "ten mega-bytes", not mega-bits, which is probably what you meant when you were describing the speed of your Internet connection.

Back to our Internet connection that runs at 10Mbps. It's unfortunate that speeds are measured in bits, because a much more useful measure is bytes per second, since that's how we deal with data sizes. We know that a CD ISO image is likely to be around 700 MB, an MP3 file around 3 MB, and an image from a digital camera to be around 1 MB. To convert our 10Mbps connection speed to megabytes per second, we divide by 8, and get 1.25MBps. However, this is the theoretical maximum speed, and there's a lot of overhead in any network connection, so in practise it's unlikely you will experience anything close to this maximum speed.

If your eyes glazed over, or perheps you felt light-headed reading that, here are a few take-home points to make it easier for you:

• Connection speeds are measured in megabits-per-second. The correct unit symbol for this is "Mbps".
• Files are measured in Megabytes.
• A Byte has 8 bits. So to turn your connection speed into something useful, divide the number by 8 and make the unit symbol "MBps".

I would be honoured if you'd consider this small point next time you go to write online. Some of us are acutely sensitive to these matters, and you really don't want to upset the geeks of this world.

Kind Regards,

KiwiPyCon 2012 will be in Dunedin

It is a great honour and privilege to be involved in bringing the New Zealand Python developers conference (KiwiPyCon) to Dunedin in 2012. I intend to blog regularly with details of next year's conference as they emerge, so watch this space for more information over time!

Finally, a huge "Thank You" to Tim McNamara for organising the best KiwiPyCon to date. I have a huge task ahead of me, and he's raised the bar very high indeed.

Have any good ideas for next year? Please let us know!

Sloecode 1.1 - get your bugreports in now!

I'm at KiwiPyCon in Wellington, New Zealand. It turns out, being surrounded by geeks is great inspiration & motivation. Because of this, I've created a Sloecode 1.1 milestone in launchpad. If you have any bugreports or feature reuests, now's the time to get them in!

...I can't believe I'm asking people for bug-reports. This feels wrong...

Sloecode: now with 100% more website

Sloecode now has a real website! It's a rather minimalist affair at present, but it's better than nothing!

Since I last blogged, the setup instructions for the Sloecode server have changed a lot. The new instructions are available on the new site.

Representin' the home-boys!

That's *exactly* the kind of blog title that's liable to get me in trouble down the road. Faux street swagger doesn't age well.

In other news, I'm presenting a talk at this years NZ Python conference KiwiPyCon. Their website does not have the schedule visible yet, but there is a list of talks available.

I'm looking forward to meeting other python developers, and maybe getting some help with Sloecode!